01What it is, and what it isn’t
The free prototype is a clickable model of one process in your business, built around the tools you already use. You can click through a day of it: how a request comes in, what happens on its own, where a person decides, and what you’d see each morning.
It isn’t the system. Nothing in it is connected to your accounts, and nothing reaches your customers. That’s deliberate: it’s there so you can see how the work would run, and so we can both see whether we’ve covered everything, before anyone builds or pays for anything.
A prototype shows the process. It doesn’t prove the numbers; the first month of the real build does, and we measure it.
02What it asks of you
About an hour in total, spread over a week:
- A 30-minute call. Where your week goes, which process is worth fixing first, and the last time it happened, step by step.
- Five minutes with our agent, before or after you book, so the call skips the basics.
- Three to five real examples: an enquiry, a quote, an invoice, a call. Anonymise anything you like.
- Half an hour with the prototype, to click through it and tell us what’s wrong.
Access to your tools, if we need it, is by invitation as a read-only user, never by password, and you can remove us at any time.
03What you get, and keep
- Within a day: a brief of what we heard, for you to correct.
- Within two to four days: the clickable prototype, and a map of the process with the hours and money on each part.
- With it: a proposal of where to start, a plan, a fixed price and your return, worked out on your own numbers.
The brief, the map and the proposal are yours to keep, whatever you decide. The prototype stays open at its link for 30 days after the proposal, so you can show it to whoever decides with you. Plenty of owners take the map and fix the process themselves. That’s a fine outcome.
If your own numbers don’t show it paying for itself within a year, we won’t propose it.
04Why it’s free
Three honest reasons. It’s how we find out whether there is something worth building, and we would rather show you than pitch you. It costs us a day or two, not weeks, because most processes are made of parts we’ve built before. And a business that has clicked through its own process makes a better decision, faster, either way.
The catch, if there is one: you’ll know exactly what it would take, and what it’s worth. Some people find that harder to ignore than a sales call.
05If you go ahead
Go ahead within those 30 days and the build starts from your prototype, so nothing you saw is thrown away and the first build starts ahead. The prototype stays free either way.
- Two to six weeks for a first build, on a fixed price agreed before we start.
- From $5,000 for a first build, paid on milestones, nothing before the first.
- Yours: the code, the data and the accounts are in your name.
- The first 30 days of fixes are free. After that, care from $600 a month if you want it, or run it yourself.
Common questions
- Is there a catch?
- You give us an hour and some real examples. If the numbers work, we’ll propose a build; if they don’t, we’ll say so, and you keep the brief, the map and the proposal either way.
- Do I need to prepare anything?
- No. Think of the last time the process happened; that’s all the preparation it needs. The agent asks the basics before the call.
- Who sees our data?
- Only the people working on your prototype. Your examples can be anonymised, are deletable by you, and are deleted at the end unless you ask us to keep them.
- What if the prototype shows it isn’t worth it?
- Then we’ve saved you a build. We say so in the proposal, and suggest what we’d do instead, which is sometimes nothing.
Sources
Our agent has read this note. Ask it whether the free prototype makes sense for you.