← Curio
want more?
IV
the fourth focus

Solutions

Sometimes you don't need another framework. You need someone who's done this — and the permission to hand them the task.

You don't need a vendor. You need a partner who's already done this institutionally.

✕ fallacy of guilt Solutions overcomes the question "is this cheating?" — the one the people running the future stopped asking years ago.

✕ fallacy of guilt Solutions overcomes the team question "should we be doing this ourselves?" — the one the rooms that move stopped asking years ago.

the lane shift

Sometimes you just need someone who's done this.

Sometimes you just need a partner who's done this.

It's OK to not do it this time.

Stop scoping a vendor.

Hand me the task.

Hire the partner who already did it.

You have an idea. It's been there for months. A small tool you keep mocking up in your head — the one that would save you twenty minutes a day if it existed. A Brain you keep wanting to build but never sit down to. A primer you wish your old company had given you on day one.

The hardest part is starting. Most people stall because they have a half-formed task and no one to hand it to. They feel silly asking. They tell themselves they should figure it out alone. They don't have to.

That's where I come in. Imagine if the small tool you keep mocking up is on your desk by Friday. Imagine if the brain you wish you had is set up by next Tuesday and writing itself by the week after. You hand me the task; I sit down and build it. Sometimes a working day, sometimes a week. The thing gets out of your head and into the world. That's the only point.

Most agencies offer "AI services" as a SKU bolted onto a list of capabilities. That isn't what your team needs. A SKU is a vendor relationship: you brief it, they deliver it, you check the box. Then it sits in a Notion page nobody opens.

What your team needs is a partner who can sit inside your operations, your culture, and your real workflow — and build with you instead of around you. Someone who's already done the hard institutional version once: 75% Claude utilization in four weeks, ~$433K in cost-recovery questions surfaced via MCP, an institutional vision-transfer artifact your peers can walk through right now.

That's the model. It replicates for your organization — tuned to your team's belief mix, role coverage, and rollout plan. Not a deliverable. A working artifact your team owns and runs after I leave.

three mental models

How to start, smaller than you think.

Tap any card. Each one is a small analogy that lowers the bar — the back has the rest of it.

i · forty-five minutes back today

Not a vision. Not a pitch.

Just real time savings, starting now. Pick one. Do it today. See what happens.

turn over↻
the rest of it

Theory is fine. Results are better. Three things you can do in the next hour that will save you real time — no setup, no training, no special access required.

  1. The email you've been putting off. Paste the situation into Claude. Get a draft back in 10 seconds. Edit it. Send it. Done.
  2. The recap nobody wants to write. Paste your bullet notes from a meeting. Ask Claude to turn them into a client-facing recap. 30 seconds.
  3. The thing you need to understand fast. New client category? Competitor you've never heard of? Ask Claude to brief you in plain language. Faster than Google — it synthesizes instead of just listing links.
"Pick one. Do it today. See what happens. That's the whole experiment." turn back↺
ii · stop reading. try it.

You are one task away from never working the old way again.

The article will still be there. The thread will still be there. Open Claude. Type the actual problem.

turn over↻
the rest of it

No more reading about AI. No more demos. Open Claude in a new tab. Pick one of these — the one that costs you the most time today — and just go.

  1. The RFP you're dreading. Paste the brief. Ask for the executive summary. 45 seconds.
  2. The recap you've been putting off. Paste your bullet notes. Ask for a client-ready version. 30 seconds.
  3. The client you know nothing about. Type their name and category. Ask for a brief like you have 10 minutes before a call.

The moment you get a result that surprises you — that's the switch. Everything changes after that moment.

"You are one task away from never working the old way again." turn back↺
iii · meet your new colleague

Already on staff. You're already paying.

Former doctor, lawyer, coder, strategist, creative director. Speaks every language. Available 24/7.

turn over↻
the rest of it

Claude scored in the 90th percentile on the Bar Exam. Top marks on the US Medical Licensing Exam. 95th percentile on the GRE. This is not a search engine. It's a colleague with credentials most of us will never have — and it's sitting in a browser tab you open twice a week to ask one question. McKinsey research found knowledge workers using AI save 1.5–2 hours every day. Not because the tool is magical — because they actually ask it things. That's a full extra workday every week, compounding.

"You wouldn't hire a brilliant strategist and only ask them to fix your typos. Stop doing that with Claude." turn back↺
the whole deck

Solutions I built with AI.

Every card here started as a task I handed to Claude. Shuffle the deck below — click a card, hit the arrows, or use ←/→. If a piece of it is the kind of thing you'd want for yourself or your team, hand me the task.

I editorial / data viz

The Ladder
That Isn't

An interactive editorial dashboard about American wealth. Built in a Sunday afternoon. Cited by a working journalist.

open↗ II team enablement

RedPeg
Curiosity Catalog

A 40-person agency moves from skeptical to fluent in four weeks. Fourteen entry points by belief system.

open↗ III one-for-one primer

A primer
for John

Ten chapters tuned to one former colleague's career shape. Built in a working day. The next one takes 2–3 hours.

open↗ IV SaaS / web app

Style
Sync

Multi-API AI moodboard tool for agency creative work. Live and functional. Sixty seconds, not sixty minutes.

open↗ V D2C product

Lantern
& Fox

Heirloom kit + AI story engine. The bedtime story changes every night, the kit doesn't.

open↗ VI long-form fiction

Gift.Script
a novel

A 340-page published novel about simulated worlds. AI as an authorship tool. The kind of thing I would never have made before.

amazon↗
VII operational analysis

Claude
× your data

Claude wired to Excel, Asana, NetSuite via MCP. Surfaced ~$433K in cost-recovery questions in a single afternoon.

internal
VIII my own brain

The Brain
AI memory

3,346 indexed conversations as a working second memory. The system that produced everything else here.

private
IX portfolio

ryanoconnor
.design

The portfolio that talks back. AI chatbot per project, custom interactions, vibe-coded with Claude.

open↗
01 / 09
an essay

Waiting for Humans

On what AI can't do yet, and why that's still the real story.

↗
an essay

The Employee Is the Audience Nobody Is Building For

B2E is the empty lane in experiential. That signal deserves a builder, not a vendor.

↗
★ if you want more

Two ways. Both casual.

Reach out. If something landed and you want to talk it through — your work, your team, a thing you’re trying to figure out — say hi. I take a few consulting hours when they fit. Casual rate, casual scope — $200 to $1,000, depending on what we’re doing.

Start here. Two starter packs — pick the depth that fits.

$9 the first hour ↗ for getting started with Claude
$25 the field guide ↗ for more depth — already using AI
if you're still wondering —

"Where is this all going long-term?"

"Where is this all going long-term for us?"

I loop back

Inspiration

Where this is all going.

→