I build custom tools for small and mid-size companies.
Work that used to take half a day now takes fifteen minutes.
You’re running a business — you don’t have time to fix the form that gets filled out fifty times a month, or rebuild the weekly report from scratch, or untangle the handoff between two systems that only one person knows how to do. There’s a category of workflow pain that’s too small to justify hiring a development firm, but too real to keep ignoring. That’s where I come in — building custom tools that solve real problems at a price that makes sense for a small or mid-size business.
That’s my work. I build tools that take that kind of work off people’s plates — only after we both agree it’s worth building. AI makes this fast and affordable in a way it simply wasn’t a couple of years ago, and I’ve built a practice around that shift.
We start with a discovery conversation. I write up what I’d build, what it’d cost, and how long it’d take. You decide from there.
Beyond fixing what’s broken
A lot of this work starts with a clear piece of pain — the form, the report, the handoff. That’s the obvious win. The less obvious one shows up a few weeks later: once that manual work is gone, you start seeing things you couldn’t see before. The customers you haven’t followed up with. The patterns in your own data. The proactive outreach you always meant to do.
That’s often where the real work is.
How I work
Every engagement starts with a free 45-minute conversation. No pitch, no deck — just a chance to talk through what’s slowing your team down and figure out together where I could be useful.
If it’s a fit, we move into a proper engagement in three phases, with fixed pricing confirmed up front — so you’ll know exactly what you’re committing to before any real work begins.
Phase 1 — Discovery (1–2 weeks, fixed price)
We start with focused conversations to pinpoint where friction lives across your workflows and what good solutions would look like. Sometimes that’s one long meeting; sometimes it’s several shorter ones with different people on your team. Remote works fine. You get a written spec: what I’d build, how, what it would cost, and what it would save. The spec is yours whether you build with me or not.
Phase 2 — Build & Test (3–6 weeks, fixed price)
I build the tool and test it alongside your team — and that back-and-forth is a feature, not a bug. Your team’s input shapes the tool as it’s being built, so what you end up with actually fits how you work. You’re as involved as you want to be. Includes two weeks of post-launch fixes.
Phase 3 — Ongoing support (optional, monthly)
Retainers are available once there’s enough ongoing work to justify one — whether that’s supporting tools already built, small improvements, or new projects as they come up.
How each engagement ends is a conversation. Some clients want me to stay involved, some want a clean handoff with the code and documentation. Both are fine.
About
I came to this work by an unusual path. I spent many years as a classroom teacher, mostly upper elementary, plus a couple of years teaching ESOL in middle school. Before that and alongside it, I spent years as a music producer and songwriter, co-writing and producing records with projects like Martinez & Guthrie and Riverland Collective that ended up on TV shows, in films, and in commercials. I’m not someone who typed their first line of code last year and called it a career — I’m someone who spent two decades learning how to understand what people actually need and how to build something real with a team.
That’s most of what this work is. I don’t write the code myself; AI does, and my job is to know exactly what needs to be built, ask the right questions of the people who’ll use it, and guide the work until it’s right. It turns out to be a lot like producing a song. I didn’t sing, and I wasn’t the best player on every track — but I knew what the song wanted to sound like, and I worked with the musicians and singers who could get it there. This is the same instinct applied to software. AI is the collaborator I couldn’t have had five years ago, and it’s what makes this viable as a practice.
I’m based in Northern Virginia and work with clients wherever they are.
Get in touch
If there’s a process eating your team’s time, a moment in your week you dread because of the same manual work every time, or just a sense that there’s probably a better way — let’s talk about it. The first conversation is free and runs about 45 minutes — no pressure, no pitch, just a real chance to see whether a custom solution makes sense for your business.