Case Study
ForgeHouse
From concept to live product in 3 hours.
Concept to launch
Page views, day one
Mentor onboarded
The Problem
Mentorship is broken in two directions. Experienced operators want to share what they know but don't have time for 1-on-1 calls. Founders who need guidance can't afford $500/hour and can't wait three weeks for a calendar slot.
The knowledge exists. The delivery mechanism doesn't.
The Insight
What if the mentor didn't need to be in the room? Train an AI agent on a mentor's real expertise, frameworks, and thinking patterns. The mentor contributes once. The agent serves thousands. Available at midnight on a Sunday when the founder is stuck and needs a sounding board.
The Build
Business model + positioning
Revenue model, mentor split (75/25), category definition. Not a chatbot company. A mentorship platform where AI is the delivery mechanism.
Design system + site architecture
Full design language from scratch. Not a template. Landing page, mentor profiles, agent chat interface, pricing structure.
Deploy + first mentor recruited
Live at forgehouse.io. First mentor onboarded with a personalized contribute page. Analytics wired. Everything works.
The Model
For mentors
Contribute your expertise once. Earn 75% of subscription revenue from your agent. No calendar management. No calls. Your knowledge works while you sleep.
For founders
Access to experienced operators' thinking. Not generic AI. Agents trained on real frameworks from people who built real companies. Available instantly.
The "Friedrich Move"
A free blended agent gives everyone access to collective mentor wisdom. Subscriptions unlock individual mentor agents. Free tier drives adoption, paid tier drives revenue. The mentors subsidize their own distribution.
My Role
Result
A live product with its first mentor, first traffic, and a revenue model that compounds without scaling headcount. Built in an afternoon.
The constraint was never time or money. It was seeing the full picture clearly enough to build it in one pass.*
*The actual constraint was GoDaddy DNS propagation. The product was done before the domain pointed to it.