About
What Legwork is
Legwork is a publishing imprint. We write operational guides for people who run something alone — a shop, a kitchen, a household — and who are doing ten jobs badly because there is nobody to hand the other nine to.
The name is the method. Most writing on these subjects is assembled from other writing on the same subjects, which is why so much of it is confidently wrong about pricing, and why so much of it is out of date in a way nothing on the page admits. We would rather follow one operator for a year and print what actually happened, including the parts that make the advice look worse.
That approach has an obvious weakness, and we would rather name it than have you find it. One store is one store. A pattern we saw across twelve months on a single account is evidence, not proof, and the books say which is which on every figure.
How we source
Every figure we print carries one of four labels. The label is not decoration; it tells you how much weight the number will bear.
- Measured
- Taken from a bill, an export or a log we have direct access to. The figure and the period it covers are both stated.
- Vendor-published
- From the vendor’s own pricing page or documentation, with the date we read it. These move, and we date them so you can tell when ours is stale.
- Self-reported
- Someone told us. Useful, weaker than a log, and labelled as such. Time savings are usually this.
- Estimate
- We did the arithmetic from things we do know. The method is shown so you can disagree with it.
Four rules we hold ourselves to
- 01
Date every price. A price without a date is a claim with a hidden expiry. Ours say when we checked.
- 02
Correct in public. When we get something wrong, the piece gets a dated correction note. We do not quietly edit and move on.
- 03
No affiliate links. Not one, anywhere, including inside the books. If we recommend a tool it is because it worked, and if we recommend against one you can be sure of the same.
- 04
Say when we do not know. Three of the ten roles in the first book are not recommended, and the chapter says why rather than filling the gap with adjectives.
What we publish
One vertical at a time. A vertical is a kind of operator, not a topic — the research is done by following people who do that job, so the books can only be written in that order.
-
available
Shopify stores
One person, one store, and the operational work of a team of ten. The first title covers what to hand to a model, what to keep, and what each handover actually costs.
-
in progress
Independent restaurants
Scheduling, ordering, and the reservation stack. Research in progress; no publication date yet.
-
planned
Parents running a household
The unpaid operations job. Planned, not started — listed here so you know where this goes.
Getting in touch
Write to legwork.guide@gmail.com. A person reads it. We are particularly interested in invoices that contradict ours — that is how the pricing chapters get better.
We do not take sponsored placements, guest posts or link exchanges, so there is no need to ask.
Get told when the next title lands
We publish slowly. Roughly two emails a month: what we are researching, what a tool actually charged us this month, and a note when a new title is out.
This form is not connected yet. Set
PUBLIC_EMAIL_ENDPOINT
in the build environment and redeploy.
Until then the field is disabled rather than quietly dropping addresses.