Ideator Labs is an early-stage AI studio — an advisory approach and a set of venture experiments. The idea: apply the scientific method to business operations (hypothesis → instrumentation → measurement → verdict), then engineer the AI and automation that capture what the measurements expose. Fixed-scope, senior-only, built in the open — one project at a time.
We find the margin. Then we build the machine.
The same patterns show up in nearly every operations-heavy business — professional services, logistics & distribution, manufacturing, multi-site healthcare. Each is measurable, and each is money.
| Signal | Finding |
|---|---|
| Profitability | 15–30% of customers are typically unprofitable — invisible until margin is measured per customer / SKU / job |
| Capacity | 20–40% of admin payroll goes to manual work AI can now do — documents, rekeying, status-chasing, reconciliation |
| Pricing | one point of unmanaged pricing moves profit 8–12% — the highest-ROI fix that exists |
| Service | 30–60% cut in cost-per-contact with AI deflection, drafting & triage — CSAT held or improved |
| Cash | $500k–$5M routinely freed from the cash-conversion cycle — billing lag, collections, over-ordered inventory |
| Systems | only ~20% of the ERP/CRM most companies pay for is actually used — while the workarounds cost more |
→ Try the live profit-leak estimator — six one-tap signals, your own estimate, entirely on-device.
Every engagement runs one disciplined protocol. No opinions without instruments; no recommendations without a number attached.
| Stage | What happens | |
|---|---|---|
| 01 · Baseline | days 1–5 | Observe the system — interviews, systems inventory, data extraction |
| 02 · Diagnose | days 5–12 | Form & test hypotheses on a MECE issue tree — confirmed / refuted / inconclusive |
| 03 · Quantify | days 10–15 | Price every finding — margin waterfalls, time-and-volume studies, the value map |
| 04 · Design | days 12–21 | Sequence the fixes — impact-vs-effort, 12-month roadmap, business case per initiative |
| 05 · Drive | ongoing | Build & measure realization against the baseline — reported as cumulative value |
Every relationship starts small and fixed-fee. Each step is earned by finding money in the one before it.
| Engagement | Shape | |
|---|---|---|
| 01 · Diagnose | Diagnostic Sprint | fixed fee · 2–4 wks — a priced opportunity map you own either way |
| 02 · Design | Roadmap & Business Case | fixed fee · 3–8 wks — every initiative costed with its payback period |
| 03 · Deliver | Build Retainer | monthly · 3–12 mo — document AI, automation, dashboards, copilots; measured vs baseline |
| 04 · Drive | Advisory | monthly · ongoing — quarterly reviews, accountable to the cumulative value number |
Advisory is the approach. The Lab is the venture side — independent products being built with the same engineering, plus the open research beneath them.
| Venture | What it is | Status |
|---|---|---|
| LeadHive | AI Marketplace 2.0 — a Growth OS for service businesses. Signals → intent graph → agents → outcomes. | Active build · private |
| Reflex | Autonomous data engine — declare the outcome; pipelines plan, run, heal, and learn. | Early build |
| Open research | Status | |
|---|---|---|
| CORTEX | Composable orchestration for LLM agents, tools & agent-to-agent exchange | Open research |
| YAMCP | Multi-transport Model Context Protocol tool server — HTTP / WS / CLI | v0.1 testing |
| Brain | Context-aware AI memory — project classification, privacy tiers, retrieval | Early research · private |
Everything we recommend has survived our own lab first.
Bring one broken process or one suspicious number. In 25 minutes we'll tell you whether there's a figure worth finding — and if there isn't, we'll say so.
hello@ideatorlabs.dev · ideatorlabs.github.io
MEASURE → PROVE → BUILD → COMPOUND · © 2026 Ideator Labs