Shelf for consultants
Carry what you learned from one client to the next.
Every engagement produces material. Research, diagnostics, slides, frameworks, benchmarks, notes from a room, the one chart that finally landed.
Then the project ends, the folder closes, and six months later you rebuild something you already made.
Last spring
Retail client
- Pricing diagnostic
- The one chart that landed
- Benchmark set
- An objection you didn't expect
Kept once, used twice
The diagnostic structure
Sector-neutral
The chart that made it obvious
New numbers, same shape
Your answer to that objection
Written once, in April
Now
Manufacturing client
- Different sector
- Same pricing question
- Same objection, new words
The problem
Your value is cumulative. Your filing usually isn't.
Client work is organised by client, which is right for delivery and wrong for memory. The pattern you spotted in one sector is filed where you'll never look for it.
Shelf lets material sit in a client folder and still be findable by what it's about.
A new brief that rhymes with an old one.
Shelf surfaces the earlier engagement when the current one starts to resemble it.
- The same question you answered last spring
- “Our costs are different”, said in the kickoff
- Margin waterfall by segment
- Your written answer to the same objection
Find the artefact, not the folder.
Shelf reads the text inside decks, PDFs and screenshots on your Mac, so a slide from an old engagement stays findable.
What you remember
A waterfall. Margin by segment. It ended the argument in the room.
Clues Shelf can use
- Visual characteristics: a waterfall chart, few colours
- Text read in the slide: “margin by segment”
- Context: the retail engagement
- Visual similarity
- A waterfall shape with sparse colour.
- Text inside the slide
- The axis label is readable.
- Related project
- Kept with that engagement's diagnostic.
Kept nearby
- Pricing diagnostic · Same engagement
- Benchmark set · Same subject
What makes this work.
Client confidentiality isn't negotiable.
Your memory holds material you are contractually obliged to protect: client data, unpublished findings, commercial terms.
Shelf reads and indexes it on your Mac. There is no upload step to make search work, and your material is never used to train a model. Optional features that call an external model are clearly marked and off by default, so you can leave them off entirely.
Experience only compounds if you can find it.
Stop rebuilding what you already worked out.
Keep your frameworks, charts and findings findable across every engagement.
Keep exploring
Shelf V3 is out now
Shelf V3 is the current build. Shelf does not use automatic updates, so download the latest build here and install it over your current version.
This is intentional. Shelf is built around a local-first, privacy-focused philosophy. An automatic updater requires additional background processes, network connections, update infrastructure, and another system with permission to modify the app. We prefer to keep Shelf’s network footprint and background activity as small as possible.
Manual updates keep the process explicit: Shelf only checks the internet when a feature actually needs it, and you decide when a new version is downloaded and installed.