Neil van Zyl ยท Deckhand AI

I kept meeting the same business.

Good at the actual work. Full order book. And completely capped. Not because the demand ran out, but because the owner is the only one who can do the admin.

Photo goes here

A real one of you, outdoors, at work. Not a studio headshot. This is the page where a stranger decides whether to trust you with their invoicing.

There are only so many evenings in a week. I have watched more than one good operator hit a ceiling that had nothing to do with skill, or demand, or ambition. They simply ran out of hours, and every hour that was left went on paperwork.

What I also kept seeing, in my day job, is that most of that admin is genuinely solvable now. Not in a research-lab, five-years-away way. In an it-works-today way. The technology is not the gap.

The gap is that nobody running a busy business has time to work out where to start, and most of the people selling AI to them are selling a subscription and walking away. That is where I come in.

You bring the workflows. I bring the expertise.

Nobody knows your business better than you do. You should not have to become a technical person to get the benefit of this.

For five years my job has been to go into somebody else's business, work out how their operation actually runs, build software that survives contact with it, and then stay while it beds in. In large companies that role is called forward-deployed engineering. It is the least glamorous and most useful engineering job there is, because it is the one where you have to be right about the real world rather than the diagram.

This is the same job, at a size the big firms will not get out of bed for.

The background, without the polish

What I've actually done.

5+ yrs Forward-deployed engineering Building video platforms used by broadcasters. Embedded with the customer, not shipping features from a distance.
2 yrs Building with AI specifically Which is not long in most fields. In this one it is about as long as anybody has been doing it seriously, and I would be sceptical of anyone claiming much more.
Multiple Systems running today Supervised, approved from a phone, and still running. Happy to talk through them in detail. I just don't put clients' names on a website without asking first.

A computer engineering background. The degree matters less than the five years of walking into operations that were nothing like the last one and having to be useful by Friday.

So you know what you are getting

What this isn't.

Not an agency

You get me, start to finish

No account manager between us, and no junior building it while somebody senior takes the meetings. The person who sits with you for the free hour is the person who writes it and the person who answers when it misbehaves.

Not a platform

Nothing to migrate onto

I am not reselling somebody's software with my name on it. It is built on the tools you already pay for, using standard parts, so you are never locked to me by anything other than being happy with the work.

Not scaling fast

A limited number of clients

This is deliberate. The model only works if I am close enough to your operation to understand it, and that does not survive taking on forty businesses at once.

Not a salesman

I'll tell you when it isn't worth it

Some businesses are not ready, and some admin is not worth automating. You should hear that from me in the first hour rather than find out after you have paid for it. It has happened, and it will happen again.

Worth an hour to find out?

No charge, no pitch. I ask how the work moves through your business and tell you straight whether there is anything here worth doing.

Book the free hour