How long should switching studio tools take?
Farside moved off a hacked-together stack in an afternoon, by letting an assistant do the moving. Here is why we left, and how it went.
Rob Nichols2 min read
Everyone who has run a studio has a story about a tool switch that never finished. Weeks of setup, half the data in the new thing and half in the old, and in the end everyone quietly goes back. So it is a fair question to ask before moving anywhere.
What we left behind
Before Millstone, Farside ran on tons of tools, all hacked together. The heart of it was a Notion system I built for running the studio, and I was always a bit embarrassed by it.
The problem was sharing. I could not give a client a portal and be confident they would not stumble into something else. Same for contractors: there was never a proper space where they could work on our stuff without me worrying about what they could see. And honestly, sending a client a Notion page is just not very professional. It looks like a Notion page, not like your studio, and I was never proud of sending it.
Now each person who works with us gets their own room, with our name on it, and onboarding a contractor is a link rather than a worry.
How the move went
Moving was pretty simple, because of the MCP. We connected Claude to Millstone and to our existing tools, and had it bring everything across. It knew where things belonged, hooked them up to each other, and there was very little tweaking at the end.
If your old tool can export a file, Millstone can usually read it. It recognises exports from Harvest, Xero, HubSpot, Pipedrive, Notion, Airtable and Google Contacts, and any spreadsheet with one record per row. Your assistant walks you through getting the file out, and nothing goes in until you have seen it and said yes.
So how long?
For us, a couple of hours. As long as you are comfortable connecting your assistant to your other tools, and you trust the one you are using, a couple of hours should be about right for you too.
What should you leave behind?
Nothing, really. Bring it all in. The assistant brings across what is relevant and puts it where it belongs.
You will not be on your own
Every studio is onboarded personally. If anything trips you up on the way in, we are there for it, and what we learn goes back into the tools so the next studio has an easier time.