Flutterfrog

Journal

What we have learned building this.

Not company news. Notes on the parts that turned out to matter — including the things we got wrong first.

16 pieces · newest first, in order

August 2026

  1. 8 August 2026

    Method

    Pay them when the money arrives, not when the order is booked

    Delivery apps solved something distribution never has: a field worker who can see what he has earned, today. Copying the feeling is easy. Copying it without wrecking your receivables takes one specific design decision.

    6 min read

  2. 7 August 2026

    Method

    Are you running an electric motor in a water-turbine factory?

    Textile mills were built beside rivers because the river was the power. When electricity arrived, most just swapped the turbine for a motor and changed nothing else. Most companies are doing exactly that with AI.

    6 min read

  3. 7 August 2026

    Craft

    One source, four outputs

    We audited our own document tooling and found something we had not noticed we were doing: every deliverable we produce comes out of one pipeline with four exits. Here it is, including the parts of it that failed.

    6 min read

  4. 6 August 2026

    Evidence

    703 listings, 87 emails, and one message that broke

    Everything else we write argues. This one just reports what our own AI did to our own business over four months — including the parts that failed and the parts a human still has to do.

    7 min read

  5. 5 August 2026

    Evidence

    Why most corporate AI pilots produce nothing

    MIT found around 95% of companies got no measurable result from AI. The cause was not the technology — and the fix is unglamorous.

    4 min read

  6. 4 August 2026

    Ownership

    You own the code, or you don't

    A lot of software sold to mid-size companies keeps the important parts with the vendor. Here is the test that tells you which kind you bought.

    3 min read

  7. 4 August 2026

    Evidence

    The catalogue nobody could sell from

    A grocery marketplace had hundreds of products live and almost none of them were buyable. The data was all there. It was just written for a bookkeeper, not a shopper.

    6 min read

  8. 3 August 2026

    Method

    A second brain is not a filing cabinet

    Every company has tried a shared knowledge system and watched it rot. The reason is always the same, and it is not the software.

    5 min read

  9. 3 August 2026

    Evidence

    The week our own research killed our best idea

    We were our own first customer for this. The most valuable thing the system has produced is not a document — it is three occasions when it told us we were wrong, once about a claim we had already put in front of a client.

    5 min read

July 2026

  1. 30 July 2026

    Economics

    What 48,707 AI calls actually cost

    We measured a month of our own AI usage properly, then re-priced the same work engineered differently. Here are the numbers, and here is exactly which of them are measured and which are modelled.

    6 min read

  2. 29 July 2026

    Evidence

    The number that was wrong everywhere

    A trade association asked us to build a clean member list out of seven incompatible files. The list was the deliverable. The more valuable output was discovering that a figure everyone had been quoting for years — us included — was wrong.

    5 min read

  3. 20 July 2026

    Evidence

    Eighty names on a sheet of paper

    An exhibition stall produced a handwritten list and three bad phone photos of it. Getting that into a usable system is the most ordinary job in business, and it is a good test of whether you trust the method.

    4 min read

June 2026

  1. 12 June 2026

    Method

    What a shared brain costs to keep

    Every company that has tried a shared knowledge system has watched it rot. The reason is not the tool. It is that nobody scheduled the boring half.

    5 min read

May 2026

  1. 30 May 2026

    Craft

    We let two versions of the same document fight

    Two ways of producing the same client proposal, run head to head on a live document, and scored on the rendered pages rather than on the code that made them.

    4 min read

  2. 20 May 2026

    Craft

    The weekend we taught it music, and then stopped

    In one sitting we built a pipeline that turns notation into finished audio and printed sheet music. It worked. We have never used it for anything commercial, and that is the point of writing it down.

    4 min read

  3. 8 May 2026

    Method

    Thinking used to be the scarce thing

    Every business system ever designed assumes thinking is expensive and limited. That assumption is the one thing that just changed — and almost no company has redesigned for it.

    5 min read