In production
Autopilot CRM
Payments, Gmail, bookings and automations unified into one in-house system.
$5,000+/yr of subscriptions replaced by my in-house tools together: CRM, auto-edit, auto-sort and auto-crop
I build AI systems that run real businesses.
AI Engineer & Automation Builder · open to contracts and remote roles
- AI Engineer
- Automation builder
- Agents + human approval
- Evals & testing
- iOS / macOS apps
- Full-stack
12 years running a 3,000+ event photography business — then I built the AI systems that run it: a CRM, content engines, video pipelines and three apps. Now taking AI build contracts and open to remote roles.
WORK EXPERIENCE
My path
I've been running my own business since 2014 — and I love using AI every day. I use it to create things, automate the boring, repetitive stuff, and make work more fun (while cutting the time, money and effort)!
2014business started (12+ years running it)
3,000+events captured
40k+followers — Instagram
120+reviews · 4.9 stars
$5k+per year saved in subscriptions — replaced with tools I built myself
6 hrs → 30 minper carousel post
1M+Instagram impressions · June 2026
500 hrs/yrsaved — Ferdi's CRM saves two hours a day
AI that writes my posts
It looks things up, writes a draft, checks its own work, then publishes. I just give the final nod.
One program runs the business
Money, emails, bookings — all handled by one system I built. Together, my in-house CRM, auto-edit, auto-sort and auto-crop tools replaced $5,000+/yr of subscriptions.
I build phone apps
I made a photography teaching app all by myself and put it on the App Store — 59 lessons, 127 cheat sheets.
AI that sorts photos
Drop in 1,000 messy photos, get tidy tagged piles back. No more sorting by hand.
Machines that edit my videos
They watch my long videos, grab the best bits, and turn them into short clips — 60+ so far.
Guard-rails on everything
Checks (evals) that catch bad AI work before anyone ever sees it — and I'm the human in the loop.
WHAT I BUILD
What I've built
Every system here was built for a real business first — mine — and runs on real work every day.
In production
EDL shorts factory
Long-form transcripts → scored edit-decision lists → QA'd, taste-audited renders. Every cut chained to source truth.
60+ shorts generated from existing content
In production
Content engine
Research → draft → review → publish loop that feeds the carousel and shorts machines.
1,000,000+ Instagram impressions in June 2026
In production
Carousel post maker
Pain point + solution in → researched, verified, hooked, designed carousel out. Versioned, checksummed, repeatable.
6 hours → 30 minutes per post
Live on App Store
iOS
Event Photography 101 — iOS app
A 59-lesson photography learning app — 4 courses + Extras, 127 cheat sheets and 23+ hours of content. Live on the Apple App Store.
Designed, built and shipped end to end
Live on Mac App Store
macOS
Squeeze — RAW photo shrinker (macOS)
Shrinks camera RAW files into much smaller DNGs. Lightroom edits carry over; originals are never touched. Live on the Mac App Store.
62–95% smaller files in tests across 5 camera brands
Pre-launch
Annotastic — Apple Pencil video lessons (iPad + Mac)
Draw over photos, PDFs and slides with Apple Pencil, talk over it, and export a finished video lesson.
Pixel-identical preview and export · crash-safe recording
In production
Whiteboard Copilot
Talking-head video → animated whiteboard explainer with visuals, paraphrase and truth-checks.
1 hour of talking → 5 videos shipped per week
Live
kyurate.ai
Vision-based photo sorting: 1,000 random photos → auto-tagged, grouped sets.
Manual sorting replaced across thousands of files
TOOLS I WORK WITH
Claude
ChatGPT
Python
Swift
TypeScript
PostgreSQL
Docker
AWS
FFmpeg
Stripe
GitHub
n8n
HOW I WORK
How I can help
You bring the bottleneck. I scope it, build it, prove it with tests, then hand it over — as a contract or as part of your team.
Your problem
- Manual admin eats your hours
- Lead follow-up slips through
- Content takes too long to make
- Can't scale without hiring
My process
- 1 Listen & map goals
- 2 Research the system
- 3 Develop the automation
- 4 Produce & prove it works
- 5 Hand over & train
What you get
- 6 hrs → 30 min per carousel post
- 1M+ impressions in a single month
- $5,000+/yr subscriptions eliminated
- 3,000+ events · 30+ person team run on it
ABOUT
A business built by hand, now run by AI systems
I started my photography business in 2014 and grew it to 3,000+ events with a 30+ person team — 17 years behind the camera, 120+ reviews at 4.9 stars. Then I taught AI to do the boring parts: it researches, writes and ships the work, and I check it. I build the machines, prove they work, then hand them to the team.
- 12 years in business
- 17 years behind the camera
- 30+ person team
WRITING
Field notes
How the systems actually behave — including where they fail and what that taught me.
Article
What the machine got wrong
How the EDL pipeline failed on a bad transcript — and the gates that now block it.
Case study
Event Photography 101 iOS app
A 59-lesson photography course designed, built and shipped to the App Store on SwiftUI, AVKit and StoreKit.
Case study
Autopilot CRM
Payments, Gmail, bookings and automations unified into one in-house system.
Case study
Carousel post maker
Pain point + solution in, researched and designed carousel out — 6 hours → 30 minutes per post.
Case study
EDL shorts factory
Long-form transcripts into scored edit-decision lists — 60+ shorts generated from existing content.
Case study
Whiteboard Copilot
Talking-head video into animated whiteboard explainers — 1 hour of talking, 5 videos shipped per week.
Case study
AI website production
Business brief to polished, deployed website with AI agents in the loop — human control over brand and quality.
Case study
Squeeze — RAW photo shrinker
A Rust encoder and Swift Mac app that shrink RAW files while keeping Lightroom edits and originals safe.
Case study
Annotastic — Apple Pencil video lessons
A shared Swift render pipeline for drawing, narration and video lessons on iPad and Mac.
Say Hey!
Tell me what's eating your hours. Automation, implementation, or creative AI — if it's repetitive, I've probably already built a system for it.
I reply fast — usually within a day. admin@ferdi.com.au