TemplatePoint is a solo project — built, designed, and maintained by Marius Solheim.
Where it started
The idea started at IKEA, where Marius worked customer support. IKEA's systems could automatically text customers when things went smoothly, but the moment a case needed a human — a delayed order, a claim, a deviation — there was no good tool for it, because every case was different.
What existed was sticky notes: text templates with XXX standing in for a customer's name, an order number, a case number.
Dear XXX,
We've tried to contact you regarding your case, XXX.
Best regards,
IKEA customer support
It worked, in the way sticky notes work, until you had to double-click into the middle of a sentence to swap out XXX without breaking anything around it. IKEA had a templating tool for this. Nobody used it — it didn't have inline placeholders, so it wasn't actually faster than sticky notes.
Inspiration for the design
That gap became the prototype: cards of text where a placeholder symbol renders as a real input field, not a string to search-and-replace. When you were done editing a card, those input fields let you fill in a name, a case number, an order number, without ever double-clicking to overwrite text by hand.
Using it for customer chat — a job where five concurrent conversations is normal and both speed and consistency are measured — the difference was immediate. It became noticeably faster and more consistent to write, and easier to keep every interaction on the same footing.
From prototype to product
That prototype is what grew into TemplatePoint. It's changed shape a lot since: what started as "a tool for reusable text templates" turned into something closer to a proper workspace for structured documents — placeholders, rich text, AI-assisted drafting, version history, shared workspaces for teams instead of a single sticky-note pad.
It's also had a real gap in the timeline: development mostly paused between December 2024 and mid-2026 while Marius started a full-time developer job. The project didn't die, it just moved to the back of the queue for a while — and came back with a large batch of changes (rich documents, AI-assisted authoring, version history) built with AI tools doing a lot of the implementation heavy lifting, while the product direction stayed a human call. AI can execute a direction fast once you've picked one, but it can't pick the direction for you — a fast implementation of the wrong idea is still the wrong idea, just delivered sooner.
There's no company behind TemplatePoint yet — it's a one-person, bootstrapped product, kept running on the cheapest hosting that works and built mostly during evenings and weekends.