I’m Deric. I help companies go AI-native.
Sigmaschool is my 9-to-5; fractional AI is my 5-to-9. I work with a handful of teams who want to use AI to pull away from their category, not just cut costs.
Product, ops, marketing, design, or whatever’s eating your team’s week. I measure the work by output, not hours, and I take on only a few partners at a time.
I’m selective, on purpose.
A few partners at a time. Three things I look for:
Stable & profitable
Non-tech. Established or second-gen. Not a pre-revenue gamble.
Out to stand out
You want tech to make you different, not just cheaper.
Brand & product first
Start there. Bring AI into sales and BD once the moat is built.
Steady sales, ready to sharpen your product and operations? We’ll get along.
Just want a quick cost cut? I’m not your guy.
Services are the new software.
Tomorrow’s leaders won’t sell tools. They’ll sell the work itself, with AI doing the heavy lifting, and leave everyone else behind.
“For every $1 spent on software, $6 is spent on services. The next trillion-dollar company won’t sell software, it will sell the work, delivered by AI at software margins.”
Inside your company, that “$6” is the work still done by hand. AI-native tooling captures it: faster, leaner, higher margin.
Where the shift lands first
The biggest services markets AI is already reshaping, the industries where I see the most to gain:
You’re solid. You’re also blending in.
You look like everyone else in your category.
Your AI tools demo well, and change nothing.
Your team still does by hand what AI could do.
Break the status quo, before someone else does.
Shifts like this are rare. They let small, hungry players walk in and take industries the giants thought they owned. Be the one doing the taking, not the one getting taken.
Go AI-native now, while it’s still a choice and still an edge. A new class of AI-native companies is walking into mature markets and taking the revenue, fast, straight out of the incumbents’ hands:
Cursor vs VS Code
$500M+ ARR
Forked Microsoft’s own editor and out-shipped it. Developers switched, and paid.
Lovable vs dev agencies
$100M ARR
Turns a prompt into a shipped app, the work that used to mean a dev shop and months.
Higgsfield vs studios
$200M ARR
Cinematic AI video with no crew, no studio, no six-figure shoot.
ChatGPT vs Google
$10B+ ARR
Became how the world asks questions, while Google sat on its search lead.
None of that is new money. It’s the incumbent’s money, taken, because they were too slow to go AI-native. The same opening is sitting in your industry right now.
Pick a department. I’ll make it AI-native.
Straight answers, no fluff:
Design
Brand and product design with more polish and more directions, in hours, not weeks.
Marketing
Content and SEO that win the AI answers people now read. Show up everywhere, on autopilot.
Product
Ship the features and tools you’ve been sitting on. Full-stack, AI-native, fast.
Operations
Kill the busywork, proposals, reports, data entry, so your team does what actually matters.
Anything else?
If it eats your team’s time, AI can probably do it. Tell me what’s slowing you down.
The tools I build with.
At the frontier of AI tooling, on a foundation that runs in production. A sample:
AI-native
Claude
Cursor
Gemini
Perplexity
Hugging Face
ElevenLabs
n8n
Zapier
Replit
OllamaThe build stack
React
Next.js
Tailwind
Node.js
Express
Python
GraphQL
Postgres
Supabase
Docker
Google Cloud
Vercel
TypeScript
Figma
I’ve shipped it, taught it, and bet my career on it.
I’m a self-taught builder. I founded Sigmaschool, where I’ve helped 100+ people break into tech and now train developers on the exact AI-native stack I’d use for you. I’ve shipped $400k+ of production software for startups. Before all that I sat on the funding side as a VC, so I think in ROI, not just code.
Featured in Astro, BFM, Vulcan Post, and The Edge.
Honest, hands-on, no fluff.
Your data stays yours
I work inside your environment with least-privilege access. Nothing trains a public model.
You own everything
The code, the systems, the accounts. If you ever want to run it without me, you can.
Paid by outcomes
We start with a small pilot tied to a real result, so you see the value before you commit.
You work with me
Directly. No junior hand-offs, no account-management layer between you and the work.
From hello to shipped.
Three steps, low risk. You see real value before any big commitment.
-
1
Pilot
~1–3 weeks
We pick one painful, measurable workflow and I ship a working fix. Small scope, paid, no long commitment, you judge it on the result.
-
2
Build
Rolling
If the pilot lands, we expand to the next highest-leverage workflows, build the systems properly, and wire them into how your team already works.
-
3
Scale & hand off
Ongoing
Your team gets trained on what we built and owns it fully. I stay on only as long as I’m adding more than I cost.
What could AI give you back?
A rough idea of the time and money AI-native tooling can reclaim from repetitive work. Move the sliders:
Reclaimed every month
0 hrs
$0 / month
Assumes AI-native tooling absorbs ~60% of repetitive work. A ballpark, not a quote, your real number depends on the workflows.
Questions, answered.
How do engagements actually work?
We start with a small, paid pilot tied to one real outcome, usually a few weeks. If it lands, we scope the next thing. No long lock-ins, no retainers for the sake of it.
What does it cost?
It depends on scope. Pilots are deliberately small so you see value before committing; from there we size to the work. The application asks your budget range so I can be upfront fast.
Who owns the code and the data?
You do, all of it. I work inside your environment with least-privilege access, you keep the code, systems and accounts, and nothing trains a public model.
How fast will we see results?
The first pilot is designed to show a tangible result in weeks, not quarters. If something isn’t working, you’ll know early.
Do I work with you, or a team?
Me, directly. No junior hand-offs and no account-management layer between you and the work.
What if my problem isn’t really “AI”?
Then I’ll tell you. If AI isn’t the right tool for what you need, I’d rather save us both the time and point you somewhere better.
Think we’re a fit?
I only take on a few partners at a time. The more you share, the faster I can tell you honestly whether I can help.