We're Building the Future of Work
ZenPM is on a mission to make project management feel effortless through AI that understands natural language — built specifically for creative studios, agencies, and freelancers who value speed over bureaucracy.
Making Project Management Human Again
Creative teams deserve better than enterprise software designed for Fortune 500 companies. The tools that dominate the market today — Asana, ClickUp, Monday.com — were built for corporate workflows with rigid hierarchies, mandatory fields, and dashboards that take a week to configure. They slow down the very people who need to move fastest.
ZenPM exists because creative studios, digital agencies, and freelancers need a project management tool that matches the way they actually work. No one on a design team wants to fill out a 12-field form to log a task. They want to type "Call Hannah tomorrow at 9am" and have it just happen. That's the experience we built.
We call it the Universal Input — a single text field powered by AI that understands natural language and routes your intent to the right action automatically. Create tasks, schedule follow-ups, assign work, add notes — all from one place, in plain English. No forms, no dropdowns, no friction.
We're the spiritual successor to Highrise CRM, but with a brain. Person-centric, AI-powered, and designed for teams who believe relationships matter more than ticket numbers.
Kevin Champlin
Founder & Developer
Built by Someone Who Actually Uses It
ZenPM was built by Kevin Champlin, a SaaS founder and full-stack developer with over seven years of experience building digital products. Kevin runs 815 Media, a creative studio where he experienced firsthand the frustration of managing client projects with tools that weren't built for creative work.
After years of switching between Basecamp, Asana, and ClickUp — and never finding one that fit — Kevin decided to build the tool he actually wanted. Something that didn't force teams into rigid workflows or drown them in configuration. Something that understood "Follow up with Sarah next Tuesday" without making you click through five screens to create a reminder.
The result is ZenPM: a project management tool that adapts to how creative teams actually work, not the other way around. Every feature is informed by real-world experience running client projects, juggling deadlines, and keeping stakeholders in the loop — without the overhead of enterprise PM software.
By the Numbers
Real commitment, real results
Our Values
The principles that guide everything we build
AI-First
We don't bolt AI onto old software. We reimagine workflows from scratch with AI at the foundation. Every feature in ZenPM is designed around the question: "How would this work if the user could just say what they want?" The result is a tool that feels more like talking to an assistant than clicking through a database.
People-Centric
Following the Highrise philosophy: people are the center of the universe, not deals or tickets. In ZenPM, every project, task, and conversation is connected to real people. You see the full history of your relationship with a client in one place — not scattered across spreadsheets, email threads, and Slack channels.
Complexity on Demand
Start simple. Features reveal themselves only when you need them. No overwhelming dashboards, no 30-minute onboarding tutorials, no settings pages with 200 toggles. ZenPM grows with your team. Need advanced reporting? It's there when you ask for it. Running a solo freelance practice? It stays out of your way.
AI That's Actually Integrated, Not Bolted On
ZenPM is built with Next.js and TypeScript — a modern, production-grade foundation that delivers fast page loads, server-side rendering for SEO, and a responsive experience on every device. But the real differentiator is how we use AI.
Powered by Google Gemini, our AI layer is deeply woven into every workflow. This is not a chatbot sidebar or a "generate with AI" button tacked onto a form. The AI powers our Universal Input, automatically parsing your natural language into structured actions — creating tasks, scheduling events, linking people, and inferring relationships between entities.
It also handles smart autocomplete, bulk task import from pasted text, email-to-task parsing, and entity extraction. The goal is simple: you think in sentences, and ZenPM turns those sentences into organized project data without you lifting a finger.
Next.js
App Router
TypeScript
End to End
Gemini AI
Deep Integration
Secure
JWT Sessions
The Story
ZenPM was born out of frustration with project management tools that require more clicking than actual work. After cycling through Basecamp, Asana, ClickUp, and a half-dozen others, the pattern became clear: these tools were designed for project managers, not for the people doing the work. They optimized for reporting and oversight, not for speed and simplicity.
We missed the simplicity of Highrise — the CRM that proved you could manage complex relationships with a clean, minimal interface. Highrise understood that people are the atomic unit of business, not tickets or sprints. We wanted to bring that same philosophy to project management, but supercharge it with modern AI.
So we built ZenPM: a tool where you type naturally and AI does the rest. Need to create a task? Just say it. Need to schedule a follow-up with a client? Type it like you'd tell a coworker. The AI parses your intent, creates the right entities, links them to the right people, and gets out of the way. No forms, no friction, no complexity unless you need it.
ZenPM is built for teams who believe that the best tool is the one you barely notice — because it just works.
Join Us on This Journey
We're just getting started. Try ZenPM free for 14 days — no credit card required — and see how project management should feel.