Santa Rosa, CA · AI productions for small businesses and nonprofits

AI that works the first day and proves it every month

I'm Josef, and this is the part where you hand it over. The phone videos nobody has time to edit, the lessons living in a binder: I'll take it from here. You get reels, apps and workflows that run without babysitting, each with a way to check it, and nothing reaches your customers until a person has signed off.

Start with a Blueprint $1,500 See the receipts first

Two weeks · fixed price · credited in full toward your build

RUN RECEIPT REELS ENGINE

One cooking-class shoot, one finished reel. A real run from August 2026.

Raw footage21:28
Action kept by motion scan13:33
Scan speed29× realtime
Finished reel81 sec
Captioned steps9
Machine time, start to finish~4 min
Client: a Sonoma County children's nonprofit 1080×1920
PERSON APPROVED

Month two is where most AI projects get lost

The demo dazzles. A few weeks later it has quietly broken, or it sounds like nobody you know, and nobody can say what it does anymore. I plan for month two on day one: everything I build comes with a one-page check each month that you can read in a minute.

32% of owners name accuracy as their top AI worry
29% name losing the human touch. Cost came in at 5%.

Source: Bluehost survey of 350 US small business owners, May 2026

Start here. What do you have a pile of?

Tap one and I'll show you the way in.

Three engines, already road-tested

Each one is built, tested and running on real work. You get finished pieces you can put in front of a customer, and you don't pay me to invent the machine first.

ENGINE A

The Reels Engine

Your phone footage in. A month of finished reels out.

YOU HAND OVER
Raw clips from your phone, any length, plus your recipe card, menu or notes.
YOU GET
8 or 12 captioned vertical reels a month in your approved style, delivered as one batch by the 5th.
PROOF BUILT IN
A person checks every reel against a style sheet you signed, and nothing posts without your yes. The monthly page counts inquiries and bookings. Views are at the bottom.

From $800/month · three-month minimum

ENGINE B

Program Apps

Your curriculum or recipes, as an app your program owns instead of rents.

YOU HAND OVER
The content you already teach: lessons, recipes, activities, a resource library.
YOU GET
An iPhone, iPad and Android app on a tested engine, published under your own store accounts.
PROOF BUILT IN
The database itself refuses bad entries, like a recipe with no photo. The current build runs 324 automated tests, and your staff use it before any family does.

Build from $8,000 · then a yearly license and care plan

ENGINE C

Built-to-Prove Workflows

The one task that eats your week, rebuilt to run on its own.

YOU HAND OVER
The routine, and an hour with whoever does it now.
YOU GET
That process running, with a person approving anything that touches a customer or a donor.
PROOF BUILT IN
The logic is tested before launch. Each month you get one page showing what ran and anything the gate held back.

Build from $3,000 · care plan from $750/month

Don't take my word for it. Take the logs.

Real numbers from real runs, every one tied to a log. Pick a tab, tap a number, and ask me to open the log on a call.

RECEIPT · REELS ENGINE AUG 2026

One shoot, one finished reel

Tap any orange number to see where it comes from.
Raw phone footage from one cooking-class shoot21:28
Action kept after the motion scan (cleanup and empty-pot shots dropped)13:33
Finished vertical reel, house-style captions81 sec · 9 steps
Machine time for the whole episode~4 min
Defects the client reviewer caught in the first three rounds3 of 3 fixed
Reels posted without the client approving them0

Those three catches were ragged caption boxes, square corners and orphaned words. Each one is now a rule the machine checks on every reel, so nobody has to catch it twice.

Where 21 minutes of footage went

The same August shoot · drawn to scale

About 94 of every 100 seconds filmed never reach the reel. The motion scan drops the cleanup and the empty pots, and the edit keeps the 81 seconds that walk through the recipe one step at a time.

The route, start to finish

Three stops, agreed before we set out, so you always know where we are and what comes next.

  1. DAYS 1 TO 14

    The Blueprint · $1,500

    Fixed price. Credited in full toward the build if you go ahead, and yours to keep if you don't.

    DAY 1I come to you and watch the real work happen, anywhere in Sonoma County.
    DAY 7A working sample made from your own material. You see real work before you decide anything.
    DAY 14The build spec, a fixed price and a live date. Or a straight answer that you don't need me.
  2. ON THE DATE IN THE SPEC

    The Build

    A fixed fee, agreed before any work starts. It ships with its tests, the style sheet you signed and a hand-over page in plain English.

  3. THE 1ST OF EVERY MONTH

    The Proof Page

    One page you can read in a minute and forward to your board: what ran, what it brought in, and anything that broke along with what I did about it.

    PROOF PAGE · [MONTH]sample layout
    Reels posted / planned[n] / [n]
    Inquiries traced to reels[n]
    Held back at the gate[n]
    Broke · fixed · how[n] · [n]
    Numbers left blank on purpose. Yours go here.

The other roads, and where they wash out

DIY WITH AI TOOLS A TYPICAL AGENCY DRAGOMAN'S JOURNEY
Who checks it before a customer sees itYou, when there's timeDepends who's on your accountA person, every time, by rule
What you own at the endSome prompts in a chat historyOften less than you'd thinkYour content, accounts and data, in your name, in writing
How you know it still worksA customer tells youA views dashboardA proof page on the 1st of every month
What it costsA subscription and your eveningsUsually quoted after a few callsFixed, and printed on this page

This route is for you if

  • Small businesses and nonprofits in Sonoma County and the North Bay. Remote works too.
  • You already have the raw material and no time to turn it into anything.
  • One person on your side can say yes.
  • You care more about inquiries than about views.

Pick another guide if

  • You want me to repair an AI tool another vendor built. I'll quote a rebuild or point you somewhere better.
  • You want a chatbot talking to kids. I don't build those, for anyone.
  • You need it by Friday and nobody has looked at how the work happens now.
38.44° N · 122.71° W JS

Josef Stephens · Santa Rosa, California · raised in Alaska

Hey, I'm Josef.

I grew up in Alaska and learned to work next to my granny and Leland, two hardcore Alaskans who did not leave a job half done.

Then came years of commission sales, including insurance at State Farm and Allstate, where I learned that the honest answer sometimes loses you the sale and you give it anyway. If your Blueprint says you don't need me, that is what it will say.

I taught myself to build software with AI. Bird League, a competitive birding app, went from zero lines of code to real users and an App Store submission. This year a Sonoma County children's nonprofit became my first client, and the tools I built for them are the engines on this page.

All of it runs on a setup I built for myself: written rules the AI can't argue with, and tests that have to pass before anything ships. It's the least glamorous thing I've made, and it's why the reels come out right.

Josef

Recently shipped, with dates you can check

  1. 2026-10-14Bird League. Export to eBird goes live, so birders send their sightings to Cornell in one tap.
  2. 2026-10-07Program app engine. Latest release passes 8 of 8 build gates and 324 automated tests.
  3. 2026-08-26Reels Engine. First run on a real shoot. 21 minutes of raw footage in, an 81-second captioned reel out.
  4. 2026-08-23Proof method, in public. A second AI translation of a banking program, checked line by line. The failures are published next to the wins.

Fair questions, straight answers

No. You need to know your own work, which you already do. I handle the AI part and explain what I built in plain English, on one page, before you pay for the build.

ONCE A MONTH · SANTA ROSA · FREE

Bring your pile

Bring the binder, the phone full of clips or the spreadsheet you dread. We sit down for twenty minutes and look at it together, and you leave knowing one thing you could do about it that week, with or without me.

NEXT DROP-IN The list hears first Twenty minutes, your pile and my full attention, somewhere in Santa Rosa with decent coffee. Dates go to the list before they go anywhere else.

Tell me what eats your week.

Two lines is plenty: what you run, and the part that never gets done. I read every message myself and write back with the next step.

Start a Blueprint · $1,500 Or come to drop-in hours

It's afternoon in Santa Rosa.

The other route

The same rules, carried up to a bank's core systems

The rule that stops a kids' recipe from publishing until it names the grown-up's job also stops a migrated interest routine from shipping with an open question. For banks, insurers and agencies moving COBOL with AI, it takes the form of a harness that checks the new system against the old one.

Take the Mainframe Route →