03 / BUILDING

Building

Building products, prototypes and new ventures at Octopolis and Signal Theory.

THE LAB · THE AGENCY · THE PLAYGROUND

THE LAB

Octopolis

INDEPENDENT PRODUCT LAB — EST. 2026 — KANSAS CITY

Building intelligent software for how organizations listen, speak and respond — three products, one for each verb, plus a small number of bespoke platform commissions.

Uwasa
BETA
LISTEN, TO PEOPLE AND MACHINES
Search visibility for the age of answers — Google, Maps, ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, voice. Uwasa is Japanese for word of mouth: what gets said about you when you're not in the room. SEO, GEO and AEO, minus the alphabet soup.
UWASA.AI (opens in new tab)
No Coast
LIVE
SPEAK, EVERYWHERE AT ONCE
Co-op and local-store marketing platforms rebuilt as if software had been invented this year — AI-native, and owned outright. One build fee. Your IP. No license fees, ever.
NOCOAST.AI (opens in new tab)
Crisis Copilot
COMING SOON
RESPOND, QUICKLY AND ACCURATELY
Trained on your crisis plans long before you need them. On the worst day it drafts the statement, the release, even the voice — in moments instead of meetings.
CRISISCOPILOT.COM (opens in new tab)

Named for the octopus settlement in Jervis Bay: evolution grew a mind twice, and the second one built a city nobody thought to look for until 2009.

VISIT OCTOPOLIS.AI

THE AGENCY

Signal Theory

INNOVATION & TECHNOLOGY DIRECTOR — YEAR 10 — KANSAS CITY + WICHITA

SIGNALTHEORY.COM

A behavioral-science-driven brand agency, and my tenth year there: digital producer first, then associate technology director, and since 2026 part of the executive committee, where technology and AI sit as a core leadership function.

AL
LIVE
AN AI EMPLOYEE, BUILT IN-HOUSE
The build I'm proudest of: named, with founder Al Higdon's permission, after the man himself, and seeded with the speech he gave for the agency's fiftieth anniversary. AL runs as a closed system, so client data never touches public models. More than ten million words in its first hundred days; nearly eighty percent of the agency works with it today, and it's become a product of its own, sold to other agencies.
AL.CHAT (opens in new tab)
The XR Years
AR & VR, BEFORE THE AI WAVE
A National Geographic Mars-rover filter with an operable robot arm and real Perseverance textures, a Valentine's Day art gallery in browser VR, and an MIT Reality Hack collaboration using extended reality to build empathy around Alzheimer's.

The through-line hasn't changed — new technology, pointed at human problems, actually shipped.

VISIT SIGNALTHEORY.COM

THE PLAYGROUND

Experiments

JUST FOR FUN — SHIPPED ON THE SIDE, KEPT FOR THE LESSONS

DEC 2025AI Meet BrandOPEN STANDARDbrand.json — a robots.txt for brand identity. A small machine-readable file at your domain root that teaches AI systems your colors, type, logos and voice, so 53 pages of guidelines stop being invisible to the machines making your ads. Spec, JSON Schema, and a conversational generator. Free to use.AIMEETBRAND.COM (opens in new tab)
AUG 2025The Wonderer — Gen:48AI FILMRunway's 48-hour AI filmmaking challenge, Aleph edition. One weekend, one half marathon, one hard pivot at a beer garden — and a text that settled it: “Just use skydive footage. Get wild.” Seventy seconds of my own skydiving footage, transformed.WATCH ON YOUTUBE (opens in new tab)
MAY 2023AI Every Day22-VIDEO SERIESA new AI tool demoed on LinkedIn every business day for a month — ChatGPT plugins, Midjourney, ElevenLabs voice clones, Wonder Studio, Skybox AI, an automated weather bot for the office chat. The strongest tools from the series ended up in the agency's daily workflow.THE SERIES (opens in new tab)

In the Press

10 STORIES SINCE 2023

Building

Octopolis

Uwasa

No Coast

Crisis Copilot

Signal Theory

AL

The XR Years

Experiments

In the Press