What a Three-Day Starter Build Actually Looks Like, Hour by Hour

Most AI proposals ask you to imagine something. This one asks you to look at it. A Starter Build is three working days, on your own documents, inside a Google account you own. At the end, your team tries it and decides. Here is what actually happens.

Day zero: the walkthrough

An hour, at your office, before anything is agreed. We stand at somebody's desk and watch a job get done — the real inbox, the real folder, the real invoice pile. We ask small questions: where does that file live, who else needs it, what happens when the person who knows is on holiday.

At the end of the hour we say which single job we would start with, or that this isn't worth doing for you. That second answer happens, and it is a perfectly good outcome for an hour of everyone's time.

Day one: access and shape

The morning is administrative and boring: a Google Cloud project gets created in your name, we get read-only access to one folder or one mailbox, and your IT people — if you have them — watch us do it. Nothing is copied anywhere else. If you don't have IT, this is the part we handle with you, and it takes about an hour.

The afternoon is the interesting part: we index what's there and find out what the documents are actually like. Scanned PDFs from 2004, spreadsheets with merged cells, a naming convention that changed three times. This is where a real build stops resembling a demo, because demos are built on clean data and your business isn't.

Day two: the twenty questions

Before the build starts, we ask your team for twenty real questions — the ones they actually ask each other, in the words they actually use. Not “retrieve customer documentation” but “what did we send Miller for that bracket job.”

Those twenty questions become the acceptance test. Day two is spent making the answers correct and making the sources visible, so that every answer comes back with the document it came from attached. An answer without a source is a guess, and a guess is worse than nothing in an operations setting.

Day three: your team, not us

We hand it to the people who do the job and stay quiet. They ask their own questions, find the places it gets confused, and tell us what a right answer should have looked like. We fix what we can that afternoon and write down what we can't.

Then you decide. If it earns its place, we scope the full build — fixed price, in writing, and the Starter fee comes off it. If it doesn't, you keep what was built anyway, because it is already sitting in your account, and we shake hands.

What it is not

• It is not a pilot programme. There is no committee and no phase two by default.
• It is not a sandbox we own. It runs in your account from the first morning. Nothing to migrate later.
• It is not the whole company. One job, one department, one fixed price.

Three days is short enough that finding out it doesn't work is cheap. That is the entire point of the format. We would much rather learn that on a Thursday than three months into something nobody wants to admit isn't working.