Andrew Kaiser · Minneapolis
You'll have something working before I leave.
I build software for small and mid-size businesses, and I start by spending half a day inside yours — because I don't quote work I haven't seen. You get a written plan you own outright, at least one thing already fixed, and no obligation to build any of it with me.
Not everything is an AI problem.
A great deal of what gets sold as AI is a data problem or a process problem wearing a costume. A model is a good writer and a bad accountant — so the first question I ask isn't which one to use. It's whether the thing in front of me needs software at all, and if it does, how much of it can be made boring and predictable before any AI gets near it.
That ordering is the whole job. Anyone can generate code now. Knowing what shape a problem actually is — and being able to build the answer once you know — is the part that didn't get automated.
The first thing I told a manufacturer was that their fix was free.
They wanted to know what it would cost to stop losing their daily standup notes. It cost nothing. They were overwriting the same spreadsheet every morning and just needed to copy it instead. I hadn't walked through the door yet — and it's the reason they kept talking to me.
Where this starts
You don't have to know what to ask for.
Almost everyone I talk to knows something is wrong and can't name it. That's normal, and naming it isn't your job. These are the questions I'd ask standing in your business:
- 01 What do you do every week that you hate?
- 02 Who does everyone have to interrupt to get an answer?
- 03 What lives in one person's head that nobody else can get to?
- 04 Where does somebody retype something that already exists somewhere else?
- 05 What falls apart when one particular person is on vacation?
- 06 What do you know is happening but can't actually see?
If you had an answer to even one of those, you have enough to start. You don't need the vocabulary — that half is mine.
I'm not a specialist in your industry. That's the advantage.
Not knowing your jargon forces the real explanation, and the real explanation is where the problem actually lives. Then the useful part: I've probably watched your problem get solved somewhere you'd never think to look.
A restaurant group's review rhythm is a salon's reputation program. A manufacturer's quote translation is anyone's quoting process. Moving a solved pattern across an industry line is most of what I do.
- Manufacturing
- Incoming RFPs translated against their own catalog, in seconds instead of an afternoon.
- Restaurant groups
- Reviews across every location aggregated into briefings that arrive on a rhythm.
- Field services
- The layer between a phone call and a signed job, for businesses that live on the phone.
- Finance
- Hundreds of transactions coded automatically, with the odd ones flagged rather than guessed at.
- Local services
- A company nobody could find online, made findable — which grew into a product.
Clients are described by industry and situation, never by name. Numbers appear only where the business confirmed them.
Things I've built that are running right now.
Most people selling AI advice have never shipped any. This is the hardest part of a website to fake, which makes it the part worth reading. Each of these started as a real problem in a real business — and each new engagement runs on machinery the last one already beat on.
Surfaced
Keeps a business showing up in Google, on Maps, and in AI answers. The owner approves; everything else runs.
RunningForgeField
Lead capture and estimating for field services. Agent-drafted, owner-approved, one deployment per business.
RunningMisen
Dining discovery an AI assistant can actually query — real menus and prices instead of guesses.
RunningSimplyEngaging
Event booking for beauty professionals, from first inquiry to the morning of the event.
In developmentopr8r
One business number for answering, missed-call text-back, and check-ins — over a real consent ledger.
In developmentFlare
A "report an issue" button that files the state of the system along with the complaint.
Why this isn't a six-month project
Those aren't separate products.
They all run on the same thing — an agent runtime called Forge that I've been building since April. Surfaced and ForgeField are both on it in production today, and the rest are moving onto it. That's what I mean when I say you don't start from zero: most of the machinery already exists, and it's already been beaten on by the business that used it before you.
It's also the part worth asking me about. Every agent running in it is declared up front — which model it uses, what it's allowed to spend, and an explicit list of the tools it's permitted to touch. It cannot do anything outside that list. Every scheduled job leaves a record, so a job that didn't run is a visible fact rather than a silence.
Your approval is part of the software, not a promise I'm making.
The gates where a human has to say yes are built into the runtime itself, which is why nothing reaches a customer, a live site, or a Google listing without someone deciding it should. On the visibility work, the stretch from an owner approving a page to that page being live runs a couple of minutes — because the only slow part was ever the deciding.
Forge is built and owned by Angstrom. It isn't sold on its own; it's the floor everything else is built on.
The way in
The Walkthrough
Half a day in your business, with the people actually doing the work — not a presentation, and I don't arrive with the diagnosis. Afterwards you get a written document: what's already different, what I saw, what turned out not to be true, what's worth doing, what isn't, and where I'd start.
Then nothing, unless you want something. It's the first step of a build, not a sales call with an invoice attached.
Four hours on site · written document within five business days · a call to walk through it
Take what I deliver and shop it around. It's written so anyone competent can execute from it. Hand it to your IT provider, an agency, or a developer you already trust — it'll work for them. That's what you're paying for, and it's the whole product.
Latest writing
All postsSeptember 21, 2026
Stranger Danger for My Own Agents: Wiring im-in-danger into Forge's Web Tool
I published a prompt-injection filter built on TypeSafe's Jev model, then went looking for where it belonged in my own agent runtime. The honest answer: one part ships now, the rest waits for a deployment that needs it. Here is the one seam it fits, what the runtime would have to build, and the bug I found on the way.
Read itApril 13, 2026
AI for Small Business: A Practical Guide
A practical guide to AI for small business — what it actually delivers, how to tell a builder from a slide deck, real use cases, and the questions to ask before you hire anyone.
Read itTalk to me before you buy anything.
Forty-five minutes, free, no scope and no deck. It's allowed to end with "you don't need me" or "that isn't a technology problem" — it regularly does, and that's a good outcome.
Start a conversation