Lathe Labs

The job that’s too small to hire for. And too big to keep doing yourself.

No one builds a product for a job that size, so you end up with software that nearly does it and you finish the rest by hand. We build the missing part, for your business, usually inside a few weeks. We built these for our own companies first, and we still run them there.

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Four different jobs. Nothing goes out until you say so.

busify.com.au Strong Circles
The friction

You already know which job it is.

✆ Missed callWhile you were with a customer. No message left. 19:42
✉ Quote still in draftsTuesday's quote, still not sent. It is Thursday. day 3
⧉ Same details, third systemCalendar, spreadsheet, invoice. Typed three times. again
⌗ The 2015 templateThe spreadsheet nobody dares to touch. 11 yrs

Every owner has their own version of this list, and it refills every week.

Fixing it got cheap. Most owners haven’t noticed yet.

The part most people miss

Custom tools used to be an enterprise luxury. Not any more.

Fixing this kind of friction properly used to mean a dev agency, a six-figure budget and a six-month wait. AI-assisted development has changed the maths: our first builds usually cost in the low thousands, not the low hundreds of thousands.

What a custom tool costs
$200k+
a dev agency, then
low thousands
with AI, now
How long it takes
thenmost of a year
nowweeks
each tick, one month
Before
  • An agency, a big budget, a long contract.
  • Months of specification before you saw anything.
  • If it missed the mark, you paid anyway.
Now
  • You get a working prototype in the first week.
  • You try it on your real work before committing to more.
  • Deployed into your business, then improved as you use it.
How we work with you
STEP 01

Name the job

A free audit. You bring the job that has been bugging you. We work out whether it is worth building, and what it would cost.

STEP 02

Propose the fix

A plain proposal: what we would build, what it costs, what it saves. You decide.

STEP 03

Prototype in days

You see it working on your real cases before you commit to more.

STEP 04

Deploy

We ship it and wire it into the tools you already use. You stay in control throughout.

STEP 05

Then we stay

Not a handover: we train your team, watch it run, and keep tuning as the business changes. You message the people who built it.

Works with your tools

Built around what you already run.

We don’t replace your setup. We build the missing piece to fit it.

GmailOutlookExcelGoogle SheetsGoogle DriveGoogle CalendarGoogle BusinessWhatsAppInstagramFacebookXeroMYOBQuickBooksSquareStripePayPalShopifyWooCommerceWordPressWixSquarespaceCanvaMailchimpDropboxCalendlyServiceM8SlackTeams

Don’t see yours? We build the connection, even to that booking system from 2009.

Why us

We don't just advise on AI. We run our businesses on it.

Two of us. One has spent years running companies, doing the bookings and the invoices himself. The other has spent years building AI systems for large clients. Our own companies were the proving ground, and the person you talk to is the person who builds your tool.

Case studies

Three systems, running live.

Each one runs in a real business today. Each one takes a few minutes and you click through it yourself.

01 Inbox Sales Assistant Drafts every enquiry reply in the business’s own voice, from its own records. About 1,800 hours a year, handed back. about 2 minutes Walk through it → 02 AI Phone System Picks up the calls nobody got to, answers what it can, and books the callback. talk to it yourself Walk through it → 03 AI Managed SEO and Ads Eight systems to check every day, replaced by one agent that reads them overnight and proposes the work. about 3 minutes Walk through it →
See our work in motion →

All of it costs you money.Let’s work out how much.

Five minutes here, a lost call there, an evening of quoting. The free audit puts a figure on what it costs you, and what a fix would earn.

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free · no obligation