I Built This Because Nothing Else Worked
We tried Google Docs. We tried Notion. We tried Process Street. None of them could answer a simple question: was this process actually followed, and how long did it take?
So we built our own. And now 150+ people across the Pearl Lemon Group use it every day.
"
— Deepak Shukla, Founder of Pearl Lemon Group & LemPlates
Deepak Shukla
I'm from Hounslow, West London. Studied at Warwick, did some time at Deloitte, but honestly — I never quite fit the corporate mould. In 2016, I started Pearl Lemon from my bedroom with no funding and no clients. Just a laptop and a lot of cold emails.
It wasn't some grand masterplan. It was just me trying to figure things out. Over time, the agency grew — slowly at first, then faster as we found our rhythm. Today the Pearl Lemon Group has 150+ team members and 200+ clients, which still surprises me honestly. We cover SEO, leads, PR, and now software through Lem Studio.
With that many people and that many moving parts, I started noticing the same problems over and over: processes getting lost, checklists going stale, new hires following outdated docs. I tried every tool I could find. None of them quite worked for how we operate.
So I thought — why not just build what we actually need? That's LemPlates. Nothing revolutionary, just a tool that solves the problems we kept running into.
33+ Marathons Run
Persistence is kind of his thing. Helps when building software too.
2 Ironman Triathlons
Stubborn enough to swim, bike, and run for 17 hours straight.
150+ Team Members
All using LemPlates daily. We use what we build.
Lem Studio
LemPlates is the first product — more to come.
Featured In
From "It's Fine" to "We Need to Build This"
The journey wasn't planned. It was forced by years of frustration.
Pearl Lemon is born
2016Deepak starts the agency from a bedroom in Hounslow, London. Every process lives in a Google Doc. It works — for now.
Team grows past 50
2018Docs start going stale. Someone follows an old version. A client onboarding gets botched. "Who changed this?" becomes a weekly question nobody can answer.
We try Process Street
2020Compliance forms, safety checklists, approval chains — it felt like it was built for a warehouse, not a marketing agency. We cancel after 3 months.
Team hits 150+
2022The Notion + Google Docs combo officially breaks. Processes go stale within weeks. New hires follow ghost versions. Nobody knows who's stuck or why.
We start building LemPlates
2024Fed up, Deepak greenlights an internal tool. Dynamic checklists with time tracking, version control, and real visibility. Built for how we actually work.
We open it to the public
2025If it can handle 150+ people across dozens of workflows — onboarding, SEO audits, ad launches, hiring pipelines — it can handle yours.
Four Problems We Couldn't Solve With Existing Tools
Tap any card to see how we solved it.
The docs always go stale
Someone adds a new step to the workflow. Maybe we switch from one tool to another, or an approval process changes slightly. But the Google Doc? Nobody updates it. Three months later, half the team is following a version that doesn't match reality anymore.
LemPlates templates are living documents. Update once, and every future run uses the latest version. No more ghost processes.
We had zero time visibility
One person finishes a client onboarding in 45 minutes. Another takes 3 hours. Same process. We had no idea why — because there was no clock on each step, no way to see where people were spending time or getting stuck.
Every step tracks estimated vs. actual time. You can see exactly where bottlenecks happen and why one person takes 4x longer than another.
"Did you follow the checklist?"
This became the most-asked question in our Slack. Every single day. Because there was literally no way to check. No dashboard, no progress view, no way to see if someone skipped step 4 or got stuck on step 7.
Real-time progress tracking. See every run, every step, every person — who's done, who's stuck, who skipped something. No more asking.
Every new hire reinvents the wheel
New person joins → someone digs up the onboarding doc → it's 6 months out of date → they follow it perfectly → three days of work that doesn't match current standards → redo from scratch.
Create the template once. Run it for every new hire, every new client, every new project. Variables auto-fill. The process stays current.
Why Process Street Wasn't the Answer
We wanted to love it. Honestly. But it felt like a tool built for factories and compliance teams — not a fast-moving agency with 150 people who need to move quickly.
Built for compliance, not speed
Everything felt like filling out a government form. Our team needed quick, flexible checklists — not regulatory workflows.
No visual overview
You couldn't see the full process at a glance. Just one step after another, with no sense of the bigger picture.
Per-user pricing punishes growth
The more people you add, the more you pay. That's backwards when you're trying to get your whole team on the same page.
Rigid when you need to iterate
A small change to a live process was painful. We needed something we could tweak on the fly without breaking running checklists.
No time tracking at all
Couldn't measure how long each step actually took. The whole point was understanding where time goes — and it just... didn't do that.
Took weeks to set up
By the time we'd configured everything, the team had already moved on to a new workflow that needed documenting.
Here's what we realised
Google Docs and Notion are great at storing information. They're terrible at tracking whether that information was acted on. Process Street does tracking, but it's built for a world of regulatory compliance — not the messy, fast-changing reality of running an agency. We needed something in between. Something dynamic. Something that could evolve as fast as our workflows do.
A Typical Day at Pearl Lemon
Toggle to see what actually changed.
The Moments That Convinced Us
These aren't hypotheticals. These happened to us.
The 3-Hour Onboarding That Should Have Taken 45 Minutes
Two team members ran the exact same client onboarding. One finished in 45 minutes. The other took over 3 hours. We had no clue why — there was nothing tracking individual steps. Turns out the slower person was following a Google Doc that hadn't been updated in months. It had 8 extra steps we'd removed. They did all of them. Perfectly. And none of it was needed anymore.
Step-level time tracking + auto-versioned templates. Never follow a ghost process again.
The £2,000 Ad Campaign Nobody QA'd
A Google Ads campaign went live without the final QA checklist. The person running it assumed the review step was optional — because in a Google Doc, everything looks optional. Misconfigured targeting burned through £2,000 before anyone noticed.
Approval gates that literally block the next step until complete. You can't skip what's enforced.
The New Hire Who Did 3 Days of Work for Nothing
A new team member was given a link to the "SEO Audit Process" document. They followed it to the letter — every step, exactly as written. The problem? That doc was 6 months out of date. Our standards had changed, our tools had changed, even the deliverable format had changed. Three full days of work. All redone from scratch.
One template, always current. When you update it, every future run reflects the change automatically.
Pearl Lemon Group
LemPlates isn't a side project. It's built by a company that's been running processes at scale since 2016 — and uses this tool internally every single day.
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