Pilots, not production
A demo that works once isn't a system your ops team can trust at 7am on a Monday. We build for the Monday — error handling, retries, and the boring edge cases included.
AI implementation studio · operations-focused · independent
Your team bought AI. Nobody made it work. We do.
You have the licenses, the pilots, the Slack channel full of ideas — and your team is still doing the work by hand. We’re an implementation studio for operations-heavy companies between $5M and $100M. We take one painful manual workflow and automate it end-to-end: scoped, shipped to production, and monitored. Not a deck. Not a pilot that dies in committee.
Practiced in Anthropic Claude · OpenAI · Vercel AI SDKBuilt on Next.js · Supabase · pgvectorSolo-built, production-shipped
§ 01 · The Gap
Most AI spend never reaches the P&L.
MIT’s NANDA initiative studied enterprise GenAI in 2025 and found roughly 95% of pilots never produce a measurable return — only about 1 in 20 reaches the P&L. The technology works. What’s missing is the unglamorous part: scoping the real workflow, wiring it into the tools you already run, handling the edge cases, and operating it after launch. That’s the whole job. We don’t sell you on AI — you’ve already bought it. We make it do the work.
Tools that don't talk
The value is in the seams — your CRM, your scheduler, your inbox, your spreadsheets. We automate across them, not inside one vendor's box.
Nobody owns it after launch
Most “AI projects” ship and rot. We monitor what's live, catch the failures before you do, and keep it working.
Source: MIT NANDA, The GenAI Divide: State of AI in Business, 2025.
§ 02 · The Offer
Three ways in. Every one ends in a working system.
We price the work, not the hour. Start with the audit — it's credited toward your build if you proceed, so you're never paying twice. No free tier.
Operations Audit
$1.5–2.5k1 week
A prioritized automation roadmap. We map where your team loses hours and attach an ROI estimate to each opportunity.
- We rank opportunities by effort vs. payback
- ROI estimate attached to every one
- A plan you could hand to anyone — including us
- Credited toward a Build Sprint if you proceed
Build Sprint
$8–15kfixed · 2–3 wks
One workflow, automated end-to-end and deployed to production — wired into your real tools, edge cases handled.
- One workflow, end-to-end, in production
- Fixed price, fixed scope — no surprises
- Your team trained on it before we leave
- You own the code
Ops Retainer
$3–8k/ month
We keep automating. New workflows on a monthly cadence, plus monitoring and tuning on everything already live.
- New workflows every month
- Monitoring + tuning so nothing degrades quietly
- Your standing implementation team, no headcount
- Cancel anytime
No free tier. The audit is paid because it produces something valuable on day one — a plan with numbers — and credited because we’d rather you spend it building. If we find nothing worth automating, the audit is free.
§ 03 · Proof
We build and operate production systems. Not slide decks.
Three ways to check the claim before you spend a dollar: what's shipped, how we work, and who's doing the work. Every product below was designed, built, and shipped solo, to production — no agency, no subcontractors.
Live · App StoreMOTUS ↗
Motus
An AI fitness OS for hybrid athletes — the intelligence layer above HealthKit, Strava, Garmin, Oura, and Whoop. Adaptive programming and biomarker review that re-plans the week around recovery. Shipped to the App Store.
Stack iOS · watchOS · Supabase · HealthKitProof Public on the App Store
Live · SEO growthIRON-PASSPORT
Iron Passport
A travel-day gym finder. SEO-first, city-by-city — structured data, FAQ schema, and programmatic landing pages built to rank for the moment you land in a new city.
Stack Next.js · Supabase · VercelFocus Organic search
Live · daily driverRUHROHHALP ↗
ruhrohhalp
A working operations system that ingests Gmail, calendar, and voice memos into a pgvector store and runs scheduled jobs. It's also the engine behind this studio's own pipeline — we run our operations on the same kind of system we'd build for you.
Stack Next.js · pgvector · WhisperMode Automation · briefings
§ 03.1 · The method
Scope the workflow before the model
Most AI fails because nobody mapped the process it lives inside. We start there, not with the model.
Build across your existing tools
The automation lives in the seams between your systems — not inside a single vendor's box.
Ship with monitoring and guardrails
Every system we deploy surfaces its own failures instead of hiding them. You find out before your customers do.
You own everything, day one
Source, prompts, configuration — yours from the moment we ship. No hostage-ware. Fire us and it keeps running.
§ 03.2 · The operator
“Most AI work fails not because the model is wrong, but because nobody scoped the workflow it lives inside. We scope, ship, and stay.”
Tyler Young · founder · BearDuckHornEmpire
Before BearDuckHornEmpire, Tyler spent years as a senior operations leader at a major online marketplace — running the kind of high-volume, process-heavy operations our clients live in.
That’s the lens: we’ve sat in the seat where manual work piles up, and we build for the person who has to clear it. The one who scopes your workflow is the one who writes the code.
§ 04 · How it works
Audit first. Build second.
Audit first. Build second. Operate from there. We deliberately scope one workflow at a time, so you see a result before the next commitment.
i
Audit
You tell us the workflow that's bleeding hours. In a week we map it, rank the automation opportunities, and put an ROI estimate on each. You get a prioritized roadmap — yours to keep, credited if you build.
ii
Scope the sprint
We pick the highest-payback workflow from the roadmap and lock a fixed price and fixed scope. No open-ended hours, no surprise invoices.
iii
Build & ship
In 2–3 weeks we automate it end-to-end, wire it into your real tools, handle the edge cases, and deploy to production. Your team is trained on it before we leave.
iv
Operate
Optional retainer: we monitor what's live, tune it, and add the next workflow on a monthly cadence — so the system keeps earning instead of rotting.
§ 05 · Straight answers
The skeptic’s questions.
Why not just hire someone to do this in-house?
A full-time AI engineer is a $180K+ commitment and a 3-month hiring cycle, and you still have to know what to point them at. We deliver the scoped roadmap in a week and the first working system in weeks — and the retainer is a fraction of a headcount. When you've got enough live systems to justify a hire, you'll hand them documentation and code we built to be owned, not a black box.
Why can't we just use ChatGPT or Copilot ourselves?
You can, and you should — for drafting and Q&A. But a chat window doesn't read your scheduler, reconcile your invoices, or follow up with a customer at 7am without anyone clicking a button. The value isn't the model; it's the plumbing between your tools, the edge-case handling, and the monitoring. That's the work that turns a pilot into a system your ops team can trust — and it's exactly the part MIT found 95% of companies never finish.
What if the audit finds nothing worth automating?
Then we tell you, and we refund the audit — money back. We'd rather lose the fee than sell you a build that won't pay for itself. In practice, ops-heavy companies always have at least one workflow worth automating, but the guarantee is real.
What's the scope and timeline, really?
Audit: 1 week. Build Sprint: one workflow, end-to-end, in 2–3 weeks, fixed scope and fixed price. Retainer: month-to-month, cancel anytime. We deliberately scope one workflow at a time so you see a result before the next commitment.
Who owns what we build?
You do — source code, prompts, configuration, all of it, from day one. If you fire us tomorrow, the system keeps running.
How do you price?
Fixed, not hourly. Audit $1,500–$2,500 (credited toward a build). Build Sprint $8K–$15K. Ops Retainer $3K–$8K/mo. You always know the number before we start.
§ 06 · Book your audit
Tell us the workflow that’s bleeding hours.
Four questions. We read every one personally and reply within one business day with whether it’s a fit and what the audit would cover.
Audit$1,500–$2,500 · credited toward your build
GuaranteeNothing worth automating? It’s free.
ResponseWithin 1 business day