Est. 2018 · Lyon
Treeline is an operations workspace for teams who run the unglamorous middle of a business: orders, handoffs, approvals, the work between the work. It started in a Lyon apartment with a script and a notebook. The product has been rewritten four times; the reason for it hasn't.
No board seat sold · No growth targets
The timeline
Five moments that changed the shape of the company — told with the photographs we still have, and the placeholders for the ones we don't.
2020 · Archive
Rue des Capucins, Lyon
2020 · Rue des Capucins, Lyon
The script became a product, and the product needed somewhere to live. They rented the back room of a print shop: one space, two tall windows, four second-hand desks and a kettle that took eleven minutes and still produced lukewarm tea.
The first designer joined in March. The first support hire followed six months later — two years before the first sales hire. It was the first sign of the shape the company would keep.
“The first hire was a designer. Everyone told us to hire sales. They were wrong.”
2022 · Archive
Lisbon · remote across 6 countries
2022 · Lisbon · remote across 6 countries
By 2022 the team was spread across six countries and the studio was mostly a mailing address. They wrote the handbook before writing the job posts, so nobody had to guess how decisions were made or who owned the unglamorous parts.
Async became a requirement rather than a benefit. Every meeting leaves a written trace, every disagreement gets a page instead of a thread, and the work is judged by what shipped — not by who was online at 21:00.
“Remote wasn't a perk. It was the only way to hire the people we actually wanted.”
2024 · Archive
Lyon · Lisbon
2024 · Lyon · Lisbon
The original data model had been stretched past its limit for a year. Rebuilding it meant nine months without a single feature announcement, a lot of quiet conversations with customers, and a team that had to trust the plan before it could show any of it.
Nobody churned. The rewrite shipped in October with the same URLs, the same exports and the same habits. For a product company, that was the most ambitious thing we could have done.
“Nine months with nothing new to show. The hardest and best decision we've made.”
2026 · Archive
Lyon · Lisbon · everywhere
2026 · Lyon · Lisbon · everywhere
Treeline is profitable, privately held and small enough that everyone still knows who cleans the kitchen. 2,300 operations teams now run their middle-of-the-business work on it, across 41 countries.
The product has changed shape four times. The reason it exists hasn't: make the unglamorous middle of a business visible, then get out of the way.
“Growing slowly is still growing. We just get to choose which problems we take on.”
What didn't change
They began as a list on the studio wall. They're now the only document every new hire signs on day one — not because they're elegant, but because they've survived every hard call since.
A decision that only lives in a meeting isn't a decision. Every product call gets a one-page brief with the trade-offs included, and anyone can challenge it in writing.
In practiceThe brief ships with the feature, forever.
The exciting feature is rarely the one customers stay for. We fix the slow export, the confusing error and the flaky sync before we add another surface to maintain.
In practiceEvery incident gets a public postmortem within 48 hours.
We grow when the work demands it, not when a spreadsheet says we should. Staying independent means we can say no to the wrong customer, the wrong hire and the wrong quarter.
In practiceNo sales team. No growth targets. Profitable since 2024.
The interface is where the promise gets tested. If a screen needs a manual, the screen is wrong. We write the empty state, the error state and the keyboard path before we ship.
In practiceNo feature ships without a first-run and an empty state.
The next chapter is being written in public — releases, incidents and the occasional correction included.
Signed
The 14 people at Treeline