Playbook Ventures builds personalized AI command dashboards. Your data, your workflows and a team of AI agents automating the repetition, all in one place, with every action waiting on your approval. We also build AI outbound GTM and revenue systems, and consult on agent creation and the audits that come first.
No salary, benefits, ramp-up or management overhead — agents start scoped, supervised and already trained on your workflows.
Each agent is priced per month by how much responsibility it carries — not by work area — and approved by you in the portal before anything goes live. These are starting prices; they come down as we get faster at building.
Final pricing is set in your plan after the audit. Every approved agent shows its own cost and savings on your dashboard.
Live data from the tools you already use, pulled into a single branded view with the numbers that matter to you.
AI agents scoped to your actual processes: research, follow-ups, reporting, triage and the busywork in between.
Every agent proposes into one approval queue. You decide what goes out, and any agent can be adjusted or switched off.
Every dashboard and agent is built in Claude, then polished and hosted in Lovable.
Designed around your workflows, your tools and your team, from the first screen to the last agent.
A dashboard already built for businesses like yours, fitted to your brand and data.
Agents that watch your accounts, competitors and market, and tell you what changed and who to call. See intel dashboards ›
Choose from ten work areas, name your agent and list your tools. AI drafts a build card with role, skills, starter prompt and approval rules, then suggests the agents that pair with it.
Start with an audit of your audience, offer and inbox health. Then build research, outreach and follow-up workflows, with replies and booked calls visible in your dashboard.
Explore outbound ›Get guidance on creating AI agents in Claude and Muse, defining useful skills and approval rules, and auditing the data and workflows behind your dashboards and outbound programs. We also offer AI adtech consulting as a service.
Explore consulting ›Twenty minutes, no deck. We'll talk through how you run things today and what a dashboard could take off your plate.
A command dashboard sits on top of the tools you already use. It shows you what's happening, puts AI agents to work on the routine parts, and keeps you in charge of every decision.
No salary, benefits, ramp-up or management overhead — agents start scoped, supervised and already trained on your workflows.
Climbs as each agent goes live and earns trust
What agents proposed, and what you did with it
Live from your CRM, with the deals agents flagged for attention
Every build is scoped to the business, but most dashboards land on the same backbone: one screen for the numbers, agents on the routine work, and an approval queue for everything that goes out. Three recent builds show the shape.
Agentic Command Center is a single control surface for an up and coming adtech client's agent program. It tracks every agent across the seven lanes, every approved audit item, and every pull request and phase report. True North gives the week at a glance, and the Audit and Execution tabs split work into what the executor can do now and what's waiting on a named person. Approvals, scheduled monitors and the executor all write to the same live database, so the page stays current without anyone editing it.
From bid to closeout on SCA school jobs. Public bids from SCA, DDC, OGS and DASNY are ranked nightly by fit and win likelihood, and a won job's NTP builds its own submittals, safety forms and baseline schedule. Daily reports, pay reqs with photo packages and change orders live on one screen. Agents handle the bid sweep, Friday look aheads, weekly payroll compliance checks and overnight field sync, and the owner signs off on everything that goes out the door.
A market-intelligence dashboard for the live-music economy. One interface covers a worldwide database of artists, labels, venues, promoters and festivals, with scope switching between global, measured and modeled markets, sourced DJ Mag and ticketing references, and a CSV export plus a sources panel that flags every estimated figure. It layers live Spotify artist data, a 950-track own catalogue, venue-finder and promoter-scout tools, sound and lighting planning, and a proposal-and-invoice builder, then converts visitors through four self-serve pricing tiers.
Accounts, competitor moves and the next follow-up, without another morning spent researching.
| Account / signal | Next step |
|---|---|
| Northstar · expanding its team | Review outreach |
| Meridian · new product launch | Read brief |
| Atlas · pricing changed | Check alert |
Northstar posted new operations roles. A tailored introduction is ready for review.
Outreach draft · awaiting approvalA daily view of jobs and missing paperwork, with agents preparing the follow-ups.
| Job / exception | Status |
|---|---|
| Oak Street · site report received | Ready to review |
| Riverside · crew report missing | Follow-up drafted |
| West End · job complete | Invoice drafted |
The West End completion report is matched to the job. The invoice draft is ready to check.
Invoice draft · awaiting approvalSources, changes and client-ready summaries gathered in one place for the team to check.
| Monitor / update | Status |
|---|---|
| Category watch · weekly roundup | Brief drafted |
| Competitor watch · launch detected | Source attached |
| Client brief · new findings | Ready to review |
The weekly category summary includes four changes, with source links attached to each finding.
Client summary · awaiting approvalAn intel dashboard watches the world outside your business: accounts, competitors, pricing, hiring, funding, reviews and news. Agents read the signals, score what matters and brief you on what changed, with every follow-up waiting for your approval.
AI has made it practical to consolidate data subscriptions. Agents read the feeds, exports and dashboards you already pay for and put them on one screen, so overlapping tools become a renewal decision instead of an automatic yes.
Built around your company's process for teams that want every screen and every agent fitted to how they work.
Proven in your category and fitted to your brand and data, so you're running sooner.
Agents that watch your accounts, competitors and market, and tell you what changed and who to call.
For organizations running many agents at once, with audit, approvals and governance built in.
Through partner channels, our templates reach industries with their own needs and their own language.
Every engagement follows the same four phases. No agent is built until it has a written scope you've signed, nothing acts without your approval, and there's no monthly fee until your dashboard is live. The audit runs $1,500–$2,500, and that fee can be applied to the cost of services.
We find where your team's hours go and decide which agents are worth building.
We connect your tools and build the agents, skills, lead agents and dashboard, shipping something you can click every week.
Agents go live proposing only. You approve, edit or decline every action, and each edit teaches the agent what good looks like.
We keep agents tuned, data fresh and the dashboard current. Agents that prove reliable can take on routine actions, only when you say so.
Standard pace, by how many agents you start with
More build capacity finishes sooner; a slower pace keeps cost down. Starter and Team start from proven industry templates.
Phases overlap, so agents start proposing before the last ones are built
The scope card is the contract between you and the agent. You sign off before we build, and it's what we test against before launch.
Every agent we build comes with a document behind it: the job, the access, the limits, the tests. We don’t publish the document itself — this is its shape.
The one thing this agent does, in plain words.
What it can read, and what it can never touch.
Which tools it reaches, through which link, on whose credentials.
The instruction packs it draws on, and where each one was tested.
The approved add-ons it may call, and who signed them off.
When it runs: on a schedule, on an event, or when you ask.
Spend caps, never-touch lists, and exactly when it stops to ask.
What it produces, in what format, and where it lands.
The checks it must pass before anything reaches your team.
Who owns it, how changes are tracked, how you switch it off.
The same order every time, on the same clock as the 16-week build above.
We read the workflows, write a scope card for each agent and put the hours on the table. Nothing gets built until you sign the cards.
You see: scope cards, the hours estimate, the order of workRead-only connectors to the tools the agent needs, checked one at a time: what it can read, what it can write, whose credentials it uses, how access is revoked.
You see: a list of what it can and cannot reachSkills assembled and tested, plugins approved, agents drafted against their cards. Every prompt and workflow kept in version control as it goes.
You see: a draft running on your own sample dataAgents propose into your approval queue. You approve, edit or decline. Nothing goes out on its own.
You see: the queue, and how often a draft needed a changeThe queue stays. Hours returned are measured every month, and skills or connectors are updated when your tools change.
You see: hours returned, and what movedThe AI dashboard is the best way to manage the build: every scope card, connector check, draft and approval lands there, so you always know where things stand without a status call.
Every area gets the same parts — connectors, skills, plugins, an approval queue. What changes is the one piece we build custom.
CRM connector, enrichment skill, drafts held for review.
A signal watcher reorders the list each morning, so the team works the accounts that moved this week.
Tracker connector, scheduler skill, approval before anything is dispatched.
A vendor check that runs before the purchase order, not after the invoice.
Job management connector, photo skill, a daily report on a schedule.
Photos from a phone are tagged to the job, and the day’s report writes itself before the crew leaves site.
Ledger connector read-only to start, coding skill, spend caps enforced.
The close runs on a schedule and asks only about the lines it cannot resolve.
Connectors across CRM, finance and delivery, a template skill, one orchestrator.
An anomaly spotter flags what moved before the brief is written, so it leads with the change.
Helpdesk connector, tone-of-voice skill, drafts held until trust is earned.
Triage reads the account history first, so a long-standing client is never answered like a new one.
Document store connector, evidence skill, renewal watch on a schedule.
Every finding links back to the source file, so nothing rests on the agent’s memory.
Calendar and inbox connectors, notes skill, follow-up drafter.
The tracker follows up on its own and escalates only what slips past the date.
Every agent starts at the first step. It moves up only when its record shows it's ready and you agree.
Proposes every action. You approve, edit or decline each one.
Routine proposals grouped so you can clear a day's work in one pass.
Handles routine items under limits you set, like a dollar cap or a list of approved contacts.
Acts on routine work and tells you what it did in the weekly brief. Anything unusual still asks.
You set the bar for each step, for example a run of weeks with almost no edits. Any agent can be moved back a step or switched off at any time.
Only what each scope card allows. Access starts read-only, and you can revoke any connection at any time.
It proposes, it doesn't act. You edit or decline the proposal, and that edit becomes how we tune it. Nothing reaches a customer or a payment without your approval.
The ones you already use: CRMs like HubSpot and Salesforce, Google Workspace and Microsoft 365, accounting tools like QuickBooks and Xero, and field, hospitality and outbound platforms. If a tool has no connector, we find another way in during scoping.
Yes. Starter covers five agents on a proven template and builds in about a month. Most teams add agents once the first ones prove themselves.
You do. Your data stays in your tools, and the scope cards, dashboard and agent setup are yours.
We design, build and run AI agents around the way your business already works. Every one is scoped before it's built, organized under a lead agent, and asks you before it acts.
No salary, benefits, ramp-up or management overhead — agents start scoped, supervised and already trained on your workflows.
This is what a full build looks like: one person at the top, twenty agents underneath — each scoped to a work area, each proposing into the same approval queue. No interviews, no salaries, no ramp-up. The founder still makes every call.
Hours scale the home-page calculator's ten-agent team (63 hrs/wk, $116,112/yr) to twenty. Your numbers depend on your team and rate — run them in the calculator.
Agents read and write through secure connectors and MCP links — on your credentials, with your approval rules. A sample of what we connect:
Don't see yours? If it has an API, we can usually reach it — ask us.
Big jobs go wrong when one agent tries to do everything. We give each job an orchestrator that plans the work, hands tasks to subagents, and checks their results before anything reaches you.
Keeps every agent on schedule, routes their proposals to the right person and spots any agent that stops producing.
A sales lead, an operations lead, a reporting lead. Each guides the subagents for its part of the business.
Review other agents' output against the source and flag drift, so quality holds as the team grows.
These are examples. Your roster comes out of the audit, shaped to your workflows.
A skill is a reusable package of instructions, tools and checks for one kind of work. We build each skill once, test it, and share it across every agent that needs it.
The structure stays the same as you add agents. Specialists do the work, team leads guide them, and one command orchestrator keeps the whole fleet on schedule.
Hiring for those hours means salaries, benefits, months of ramp-up and someone to manage them. Agents carry the same load for a fraction of the cost — and the $116,112 a year of team time in our example goes back to the people you already have.
A zero-hire system means the work grows without the headcount. These are the agents we start with most often, ranked by time returned for a typical 10–50 person business, with the role each one keeps you from adding. Your audit replaces these estimates with your own numbers.
Each agent stacks onto the last, for a typical 10–50 person business
Estimates, using the same model as the savings calculator: the hours each agent takes on per week × the typical loaded hourly cost for that work × 48 working weeks, for a typical 10–50 person business. Hours vary with volume, and every agent still proposes into your approval queue. Speed-to-lead source: Harvard Business Review, "The Short Life of Online Sales Leads" (2011).
Sometimes the fastest win is one workflow, done end to end: invoices coded, leads routed, reports written. We audit how the work moves today, then build automations on the tools you already use, with an approval step on anything that writes or sends.
No salary, benefits, ramp-up or management overhead — agents start scoped, supervised and already trained on your workflows.
The full fee can be applied to the cost of services if you go ahead.
We map each workflow step by step, time it, and flag what's already automated, what needs a fix and what's missing. $1,500–$2,500, applied to the cost of services if you go ahead.
Automations run on your stack, connected to your CRM, inbox, finance and field tools, with Claude doing the reading and writing.
You get runbooks, a list of every automation and agent, and the option to add a dashboard when you want to see it all in one place.
Automation handles a fixed sequence of steps. Agents handle work that needs reading, judgment and drafting. Most teams start with a few automations and grow into an agentic dashboard.
We'll map it, time it and tell you what it would take to hand it off.
An outbound system that targets the right accounts, drafts the outreach, triages replies and keeps your CRM clean. It ships with its own dashboard.
Agents do the research and the drafting. People approve every send.
Move the inputs to model your motion.
Illustrative model. We book qualified meetings; you close them.
Get my custom model ›One sequenced engagement. Four phases. No long ramps, no SDR hires, no patchwork tooling.
ICP, positioning, offer, signals and the system your team will run.
Domains, mailboxes, warmup, CRM wiring, enrichment, sequences and the agent stack.
Multi-channel outbound live across email and LinkedIn, with voice on Growth and Scale builds. We tune copy, routing and replies to first meetings.
Performance tuning, documentation and ownership handed to your team.
We can keep building, running and tuning your revenue system while your team stays focused on closing.
Talk to us about ongoing execution ›Nothing goes out until the inboxes are warm
Every step approved by a person
We're writing up our first builds now. Client names stay private on this site; serious buyers can request access to our full portfolio.
Teams we build for
Client details stay private on this site; full case studies are shared under NDA on request.
Playbook Ventures is an AI consulting studio. We scope the work with you, build the dashboards and agents ourselves, run them alongside your team, and leave behind systems you own.
Shaun designs and builds the agent dashboards and revenue systems Playbook delivers. He owns the parts that are hard to hand over: what a system needs to know, which agents do the work, how they connect to a client's data and tools, and where people still make the call. The repetition is the agents' job.
His current work shows the approach end to end: a fleet of agents that researches, drafts and verifies, run from a single dashboard. He sets the architecture and the approval rules; the agents do the running. Every agent's skills, prompts and workflows live in GitHub, so the client can see exactly how the system works — and change it — without asking us first.
He spent 24 years in advertising, media and technology, including 12 at Amazon leading product sales and go-to-market teams across advertising, Fire TV, Alexa, connected devices, connected TV and digital signage. There he built new sales motions, launched business lines and turned complex technical products into commercial businesses. He and Bradley Dobbs teamed up building the mobile app and game developer category for Amazon's advertising sales — the partnership they now bring to Playbook Ventures. Earlier roles include ESPN, Anheuser-Busch and Millennial Media.
Amazon's operating habits, from weekly business reviews to working backward from the customer, shape how he builds with AI: redesign the operating system around it, don't bolt it on as a feature.
A dashboard tells you what happened. An agent does something about it. The approval queue is where you decide which actions are worth taking.
Bradley advises Playbook on sales and go-to-market, especially across advertising, agencies and media. He builds sales organizations from zero and scales them into forecastable revenue.
At Amazon Ads he built three outbound-first advertising businesses with no playbook to start from: one cross-border across the US, EU, Japan and China, one agency-first, and one for mobile app and game developers, which he built alongside Shaun O'Farrell. Each ended with disciplined pipeline management and repeatable growth.
He has led a 45-person organization of four managers and 41 account executives against a quota of more than $550M, and a nine-person team that grew regional agency revenue 50% and Prime Video revenue 211% year over year. His recent work on the Prime Video ads team covers commercialization and product strategy.
Every sales team I built started with a spreadsheet nobody trusted. The fix was never more data. It was one screen the whole team acts from.
No agency lock-in. The dashboards, agents and data stay in your accounts.
Flat fees, no markup on the tools you run.
Working automations and written procedures, whenever you want to take the wheel.
Built in Claude. Polished and hosted in Lovable.
Create agents in Claude and Muse with a clear job, useful skills and boundaries you can trust. Audit the workflows and data first, so your dashboard and outbound program are built around how your business actually works. We also offer AI adtech consulting as a service.
A useful agent needs more than a prompt. We help you decide what it owns, what information it can trust, and where a person must stay in the loop.
Turn a recurring responsibility into an agent brief. Choose the right environment for the job, then define its instructions, reference material, tools and approval rules.
An agent brief, skill outline, permissions checklist and test cases to guide the build.
Before setting up a dashboard, establish which decisions it supports and where each number comes from. A polished screen cannot fix inconsistent data.
A dashboard scope, data-source map and prioritized build plan for a command center, industry template or intel dashboard.
Audit the audience, offer, sending setup and follow-up process before creating an outbound program. More volume is not a substitute for relevance or inbox health.
An outbound readiness checklist, campaign brief and rollout priorities, with clear owners for replies and follow-up.
One workflow connects agent creation, your dashboard and outbound follow-up.
Where does the enquiry arrive? Who checks it? What gets lost between the inbox, CRM and calendar?
Give it the job of researching the company and drafting a response, with missing details flagged rather than invented.
The draft enters an approval queue. A person decides what sends; the dashboard tracks the next step and any follow-up due.
We also work with advertising and ad tech teams. Same method: audit the reporting and the campaign workflow first, then build the agents and dashboards that keep it honest.
Campaign, traffic and revenue numbers from ad servers, supply platforms, attribution tools and spreadsheets, consolidated into one dashboard with agreed definitions and a named source for every figure.
Agents watch pacing, yield, fill rates and inventory anomalies, flag what moved and who owns the fix, and draft the note to the trading desk before anyone asks.
Traffic plans, tags, creatives and policy checks handled by agents, with a person approving every change that goes live.
Share the tools you use, the work you want to hand off and the decisions you want on screen. We’ll agree the audit scope and price before work starts.
The Playbook Ventures blog on building a company without hiring
A new post every week since January: agentic dashboards, the models and tools underneath them, and the outbound engine alongside.
A useful first agent owns one bounded decision. Start with a practical brief, approval boundary and test plan.
Read article ›AI & toolsA Skill Is a Contract, Not a Clever PromptClear inputs, evidence, outputs and failure rules turn repeated work into reusable skills.
Read article ›AutomationYour Automation Needs an Exception BudgetMeasure review, exceptions and recovery to find out whether automation really gives you time back.
Read article ›AutomationThe Workflow Audit: How We Find the Hours Before We AutomateWhat happens in a workflow audit, what it costs and what you get at the end.
Read article ›AutomationRules, Judgment and Hand-offs: How to Design an Automation ChainBuild predictable rules and agent judgment into a chain, with one approval queue at the end.
Read article ›DashboardsWhy Every Agent Should Ask FirstWhy the approval queue is the most important screen on an agent dashboard.
Read article ›Free membership for readers
Every Solopreneur signup gets a free reader dashboard. Here’s exactly what’s inside — no paywall, no trial timer.
Exclusive posts and early-access updates that never appear on the public blog — deeper numbers, real build notes and lessons we only share with members.
Draft your own agent briefs — role, skills, boundaries and approval rules — and keep them saved in your dashboard. Refine them whenever you like.
Opt in to the member directory, find other solopreneurs building with agents, and send connection requests — you control what’s visible.
Members’ consultation requests are flagged for priority scheduling, so your call with Shaun jumps the queue.
New templates, scope features and agent tooling land in member dashboards before they’re announced publicly.
Your profile, drafts and connections are yours. Directory listing is opt-in, and nothing you save is shared without your say-so.
Sign up with your email, confirm it, and your dashboard is ready — articles, drafts, directory and all.
The Playbook Ventures blog on building a company without hiring
‹ All postsTell us what you'd want on one screen and we'll talk it through.
Type your business domain. We read your public site and draft your agent command center, the industry template we'd start from, and the intel dashboard you'd run it all from — in about a minute.
Tell us about the workflows that eat your week. Our AI drafts the automation opportunities we'd look at first and the questions we'd want to cover on your consultation.
Thirty minutes with a founder, Tuesday to Thursday afternoons (New York time). Bring your workflow check results and we'll start from there.
Choose the work. Shape the agent. Review what it would do — before anything goes out.
A person reads every message and replies within one business day.