Offers / Data Foundation Build
[ DATA FOUNDATION ]The flagship build

Your AI is only as useful as the data it can reach.

I connect your apps, pull the data into one clean place in your own cloud, and make it usable by your AI, your reports, and your whole team. Most builds: 4–6 weeks, from $15K.

from $15K4–6 weeksQuote fixed at kickoff100% yours
What you get
  • 3 priority systems connected & flowing by week 2
  • Up to ~10 sources, 5 reports/dashboards
  • 1 production-grade workflow (AI assistant, ops automation, or leadership report)
  • Source code, schemas & docs in a Git repo you control
  • Runs in your own AWS account: you own storage, credentials, access
[ 01 ]Why it matters

AI is the car. Your data is the roads.

A brand-new car is useless if it can only drive on a handful of pre-paved highways. That's what off-the-shelf AI gives you: twenty supported connectors, maybe thirty, and nothing for the system of record that runs your business.

A pipeline is the road network: from your apps, databases, spreadsheets, and internal tools into one place you own. Now the car can go anywhere, and you're not at the mercy of whether ChatGPT or Claude decides to support your stack next quarter.

Off-the-shelf AI · a few connectors
GmailSlackDriveAIYour ERPOrders DBInternal tool

A few pre-paved highways.

Your foundation · the whole map
CRMOrdersTicketsAdsBillingSpreadsheetsInternal DBFOUNDATIONyou own it

The whole road network. Yours.

[ 02 ]A week in your business

One week, two ways.

Same business, same five moments. The only difference is whether the data underneath is connected.

Monday morning number
Without

Your ops lead exports four CSVs, reconciles them in a sheet, sends it at 11am. It disagrees with the one finance sent earlier.

With one

Auto-generated Monday report hits your inbox at 7am. Same numbers every team is looking at. No one prepped it.

A question from the CEO
Without

Slack thread. Four people loop in. The analyst is on PTO. You get an answer Thursday, caveated.

With one

You type the question. You get an answer in under a minute, with the sources shown.

Your AI tools
Without

Great at writing emails, useless for running the business. Your team stopped opening them weeks ago.

With one

It knows your orders, ad spend, subs, and support, and pulls real numbers with citations.

Automations
Without

Run on screenshots and luck. Break silently. Someone discovers it a month later.

With one

Run on the same clean data your reports use. You get alerted the minute something goes sideways.

Onboarding a new hire
Without

"Here are the 12 tools. Good luck figuring out which numbers to trust." Takes a month to be useful.

With one

One clean view. One set of numbers. Contributing in week one.

[ 03 ]The package

One fixed package, clearly defined.

3 priority systems connected and flowing by week 2. 1 production workflow shipped in 4–6 weeks.

In the box
  • Up to ~10 sources connected and pulling on a schedule
  • 5 reports / dashboards built on the clean data
  • 1 production workflow: an AI assistant, an ops automation, or a leadership report
  • Source code, schemas & docs committed to a Git repo you control
  • Runs in your own AWS account (your storage, your credentials, your access policies)
What "production-grade" means

Alerting on every connection, change-tracked in Git, retries when an upstream API misbehaves. It's the boring infrastructure that keeps things running when nobody's watching.

What I need from you
  • ~2–4 hrs/week from you during the build
  • One kickoff call to align on priorities
  • Credentials, handed over source-by-source (least privilege)
  • Optional: your SSO, if you want it wired in
Boring details that matter

A priority map

You approve it before I build anything, so scope doesn't creep.

Agreed definitions

What counts as a "new customer" or "active subscription". Locked once, so every team and the AI use the same number.

Alerts when something breaks

You know before your team does, instead of discovering a silent failure later.

Plain-English docs

Written for the people who'll run it, and short enough that they will.

[ 04 ]How it works

Four to six weeks, real progress every week.

Wk 1

Map

Discovery, then a priority map you approve before a single line of code. We agree on what matters and in what order.

Wk 2–4

Connect

Your first 3 sources are live by end of week 2, then the rest follow. Custom Python where no connector exists.

Wk 3–5

Organize

Locked definitions and clean, usable tables. No more arguing which number is right.

Wk 5–6

Activate

I ship the workflow, hand the code to your repo, and 30 days of support are included.

Fair warning: week 1 feels slow. It's also what decides whether week 6 ships something useful.

[ 05 ]What I connect

If your business runs on it, I can pull from it.

CRM

Salesforce · HubSpot · Pipedrive

Billing & finance

Stripe · Chargebee · QuickBooks · NetSuite

Ads

Meta · Google · TikTok

Support

Zendesk · Gorgias · Intercom

Project & ops

Asana · Jira · Monday · Notion

Product database

Postgres · MySQL · that ERP from 2003

Commerce

Shopify · Amazon

Spreadsheets & files

Google Sheets · Excel · CSV / SFTP drops

+ everything else

If it has an API, it's on the table.

[ The moat ]

Off-the-shelf connectors cover the easy 60%. Custom connectors cover the 40% that decides whether the AI can answer at all.

If it has an API, a database, a webhook, or even an SFTP drop, I connect it. A brand-new custom connector takes about a week.

RESTGraphQLWebhooksDirect DBSFTP / filesCustom wrappers
200+
connector types
shipped
[ GROUNDED ]AI on real data

The AI tools you already use. Now grounded on your real data.

I don't build you another chat UI. You keep using Claude, ChatGPT, Copilot (whatever you already pay for), and the foundation connects them to your real data, so every answer is cited from a source table instead of guessed from last quarter's PDFs.

No more "based on the documents you uploaded."

your AI · grounded live

What was blended CAC last week vs the week before?

Blended CAC was $42.10 last week[1], down from $48.30[2], driven by lower Meta spend[3] with steady new customers.

cited from orders ad_spend customers
Every figure links to a row you can open.

Illustrative: your real tables, your numbers.

[ 06 ]Pricing

Fixed-fee, set at kickoff.

from $15K
Most land $15K–$30K,
fixed at kickoff before any code is written.
3–5 standard SaaS sources + 1 workflow
$15K–$20K
6–10 sources or custom-connector work
$20K–$30K
Regulated / security-heavy
Custom quote

Less than three months of the data hire you'd otherwise need. A junior analyst runs $120–150K/yr; a data engineer $180–220K. The foundation does that job and runs for years.

Terms
  • $7,500 deposit reserves the kickoff
  • Balance due at handoff
  • 30 days of support included
  • Optional ~$2,500/mo retainer (month-to-month, cancel anytime)
  • Run-rate: a few hundred dollars/month in AWS for most teams
Scope the foundation
[ 07 ]Proof

What it looked like in practice.

Anchor case

How a fast-growing DTC brand stopped reconciling spreadsheets.

Their store, email & SMS, ad platforms, payments, ERP, help-desk, and 3PL, plus a long tail of operational tools, pulled into one clean foundation in their own cloud. It now feeds the daily ops report and an AI assistant grounded on real orders, spend, inventory, and support. It cut the team's morning ops review from 90 minutes to 10.

Before the build, three different tools reported three different customer-acquisition costs, and the Monday meeting was spent arguing about which one was right. Now there's one number, and the meeting is about what to do next.

[ specifics under NDA ] · anonymized + representative

20+
data sources unified
200+
services shipped
$0.012
per AI review
90→10
min morning ops
[ 08 ]Fit

An honest read on fit.

This is for you if…
  • Your business runs on a growing pile of SaaS apps.
  • You've got real volume: orders, customers, revenue moving every day.
  • You want AI that knows your business, not the internet.
  • You're tired of copy-paste and arguing whose number is right.
  • You want a practical start, not a 9-month rebuild.
Probably not if…
  • You just want a chatbot glued to your FAQ.
  • Your key tools have no exports or APIs at all.
  • You're pre-revenue and unsure what data you'll even need.
  • You want everything modeled perfectly before anyone sees a result.
[ 09 ]Under the hood

The engineering under the hood.

Here's what makes this a foundation instead of a pile of scripts. It's the part I'm probably most opinionated about.

A

A governed medallion lake, in your cloud

Every source lands in one place you own and flows through clean layers (raw → curated → aggregated → analytics), catalogued and queryable in seconds, with a lakehouse table format for the high-churn data and a sub-second hot-cache for live screens.

In practice
  • Three ingestion patterns: real-time webhooks (signature-verified), scheduled pulls, on-demand batch.
  • State-machine orchestration with retries, dead-letter queues, and freshness gates.
  • Typical build spans 20+ sources, ~100 catalog tables, dozens of pipelines.
B

Standards enforced by the build itself

The reason it stays trustworthy as it grows: one shared internal SDK every service uses, and a CI 'drift checker' that fails the build the moment someone reaches for a raw cloud client, a hard-coded webhook, or a direct write.

In practice
  • OIDC CI/CD: no stored keys; infrastructure-as-code; secrets in a vault.
  • One isolated cloud account per brand; least-privilege by default.
  • 30+ alarms, structured alerting, self-healing deploys.
C

Cost and reliability, engineered on purpose

Most data plumbing runs up a cloud bill over time. I treat cost as a feature: compacting storage cut objects scanned by ~490×, rewriting heavy queries took several from multi-gigabyte scans to a few kilobytes, and one brand's monthly cloud spend dropped from ~$3.6k to ~$1.3–2k with zero data loss.

In practice
  • AI done with discipline: a cheap model triages, a stronger model does the hard part (one split cut a document-AI bill ~86%).
  • Strict-JSON outputs with deterministic fallbacks. Nothing critical depends on a model 'feeling helpful'.
  • Semantic search across the whole corpus in under half a second.
490×
fewer objects scanned
$3.6k→$1.3k
cloud spend / mo
~86%
cheaper document AI
<0.5s
semantic search

[ anonymized, specifics under NDA ]

[ FAQ ]What people usually ask

Common questions.

Where does our data live?

In your own AWS account, in a region you choose. Never a vendor cloud you can't see into. You own the storage, the credentials, and every access policy.

Who owns the code & infra?

You do. Every line, in a Git repo you control. There's no secret sauce and nothing you have to keep paying me to keep running.

What if you get hit by a bus?

A fair question for a one-person shop. I build on standard, widely-supported tooling rather than a proprietary platform, you own all the source, and plain-English docs are a deliverable, so any competent engineer could pick it up.

What about security?

Encryption in transit and at rest, IAM-scoped credentials per source (least privilege), and no third-party SaaS sitting in your data path. I'll wire it into your SSO and VPC if you have them.

Compliance: HIPAA / SOC 2 / GDPR?

It runs in your AWS, so your existing posture extends to it. I architect to your control set and produce documentation your auditors can read, and I've shipped under HIPAA-aligned and SOC 2 environments before.

Our key tool isn't supported?

If it has an API, a database, a webhook, or an SFTP drop, I connect it. A custom connector takes about one to two weeks and is baked into the build rather than billed as an extra.

Can we cancel partway?

Yes. You keep everything shipped so far (it lives in your own cloud and your repo from day one), and we settle up for the time spent. That's the whole arrangement.

Isn't this just another chatbot?

No. I don't build a chat UI. I ground the AI tools you already use on your real data, so answers are cited from your tables instead of generated from thin air.

Why not just use Fivetran / an off-the-shelf tool?

Those are great for the easy 60%: the standard SaaS connectors. The value here is the 40% they don't cover: your system of record, the legacy ERP, the internal tool nobody else will integrate.

[ Next step ]

Let's find where to start.

A 30-minute scoping call, and you'll leave with a clear plan whether or not we end up working together.