Why me, and why now.

Why me

I'm a software engineer who builds things that have to work.

In Python and Go, I've built the kind of systems that run quietly underneath software used by millions of people: the machinery that ships new code safely, the backbone behind millions of background jobs, a service that catches malware. Load-bearing work, not demos.

The other half of the craft is keeping it all running for years, as everything underneath it changes. Plenty of people can build something that works in a meeting. Far fewer can build something you can truly depend on, then keep it that way. Doing both is the whole job here.

So "I handle everything behind it" isn't a hope. Building your assistant, wiring it into the tools you use, automating the busywork, then keeping it all running: that's the kind of work I've done for years.

How this started

The first one already runs a real business.

Before any of this had a name, I built a working assistant for one company and watched it carry real weight. That company is Sumhouse, a fast-growing social media studio handling mostly restaurants around Southern California. It's co-owned by Kaitlyn, my partner and the reason I started any of this. (Yes: kaitlian is Kaitlyn and Ian.)

For Sumhouse, the daily friction lived in the footage and the posting. Every restaurant video sat on a pile of SSD drives, edited in isolation, with no backup and no real organization, so just finding the right clip was its own chore. And every post meant logging into each social account one at a time and typing the same details over again.

I didn't walk in with a plan. I just asked a lot of honest questions about how their days actually went, and the fit was clear to me almost right away, which is exactly how I'd come at your business too. Now the assistant has every video from the moment it's uploaded, the raw footage and the finished edits both, all in one place and easy to find. When they want something posted, they ask, and it goes out across whatever social accounts they choose, no logging in and no retyping.

Three months in, that's given each person there about three hours of their day back, and it's still climbing. It genuinely changed how the studio works, and the part that stays with me is how plainly it happened.

Watching it run is where the bigger point landed. None of what makes it valuable is specific to social media. Almost any small business buried in the same kind of work can have the same relief.

So we started with the people Kaitlyn knows best: the owners and restaurants she works with every day. There's a good chance that's how this reached you. What you're being offered isn't a pitch or a maybe. It's the same thing already working for us, ready for you, and only the beginning of what it can do.

I keep the list short on purpose, because I run each one myself for the long haul. That's the kind of person you want behind something yours comes to depend on.

— Ian