Co-founder & Product Engineer
2+ years building productivity and automation tools at Automate Associates
Before Mursa, Murali spent two years working with internal teams at Automate Associates, building productivity and automation tools for companies that were drowning in their own workflows. The work ranged from Slack bots that triaged customer support tickets to AI-powered systems that extracted action items from meeting transcripts and assigned them automatically.
That experience taught him something that shaped everything he has built since: the tools companies build for teams almost never work for the individual. A project management platform designed for a 50-person engineering org does not help a solo founder figure out what to work on this morning. The gap between enterprise productivity infrastructure and personal workflow tools was enormous — and it was the individual who paid the price.
He co-founded Mursa to close that gap. The idea was simple: one calm workspace where your Slack messages, emails, tasks, focus sessions, and daily planning all live together. No tab-switching, no copy-pasting between apps, no recreating context every time you sit down to work. He designed the product around the principle that a productivity tool should feel like an extension of your thinking, not another thing to manage.
Murali writes about systems thinking behind personal productivity — why certain tools fail after three days, how the design of a checkbox can change whether someone finishes their work, and what it actually takes to build software that people keep opening. His posts tend to sit at the intersection of product design, behavioral psychology, and the daily reality of trying to get things done with a brain that does not always cooperate.
A tool should disappear into the background of your day. If you are spending time organizing your productivity system, the system has already failed.
— Murali
Co-founded Mursa — unified productivity workspace used by 2K+ users
Built Slack automation bots processing 10K+ messages/day at Automate Associates
Designed AI meeting-to-action-item pipeline for internal teams
124 published articles on productivity, focus, and task management
A founder's honest look at 8 ClickUp alternatives for US solopreneurs and 1-5 person agencies who want fewer features, less setup, and a stack that actually ships work
Seven tools where each output feeds the next — not twelve subscriptions that fight each other for attention and dollars
A working IR35 checker for UK contractors and consultants that maps to case law, the 2026 off-payroll rules, and the three tests HMRC actually uses
A consultant-first comparison of Notion and Airtable across client tracking, deliverables, knowledge base, pricing, and the archetypes each platform actually serves
A US-specific freelance hourly rate calculator with self-employment tax, 50-state income tax, health insurance, retirement gap, and W-2 equivalent comparison built in
A free Google Sheet that pulls Income Tax, Class 2/4 NI, dividend tax, IR35 status and MTD quarterly summaries into one editable calculator for sole traders and Ltd company directors
One calm workspace for tasks, focus, and daily planning. Free forever.