A software studio I founded and ran in the Philippines, registered with the Bureau of Internal Revenue in June 2024 and trading under the name from December 2023 until September 2026. AI-assisted custom builds and project rescue for small businesses. It ran seasonally alongside my full-time engineering role.

What I did here was the whole of it. One person carried an engagement from the enquiry to the invoice: the discovery conversation that worked the business problem rather than taking a spec, the quotation and scope of work, the technical decisions handed to the developers as a design and a set of standards, the Kanban board I authored, estimated in weeks, prioritised and moved through acceptance, and the invoicing and payment reminders at the other end. I was the only person who spoke to the client, so requirements came in through me and reached the developers as work.

About ten developers were paid across the years, five to eight at a time, spanning software, web, mobile, embedded and AI or machine learning. Hiring, ending an engagement, setting a rate, raising it and refusing a raise were my decisions alone. The workspace was a Discord server I built out into core, project, service and dev teams, with contract and money conversations kept in their own channels away from delivery, a set of channels per project, learning channels, and a reference library so the developers worked to a standard.

One engagement worth naming: a fixed-price AI build closed end to end in 21 days, from first artefact to a signed follow-on agreement. Model trained, application built, and source, weights and training artefacts handed over under a contract clause requiring source-code transfer on completion.