Justin Smith

I build the operations layer your platform connects to

I am Justin Smith, General Manager of Adventure Idaho. For four years I have been the customer: a multi-base operation with 44 seasonal staff, running on vertical booking software, with an operations layer I built on top of the platform's API and ran for a full season. Weekly planning went from 20 to 40 hours a week to 2 to 4. On the busiest day the layer coordinated 272 people on the water.

I have published what that layer needs from a platform. I work with software companies that want to build it.

To be plain about what this is not: I am not building a system of record. Yours is the system of record. What I build is the operating model that runs on top of one, which is why the two endpoints matter so much and why I ask for so little. They make the work possible. They do not do the work. Computing the answer is the part that takes knowing the business, and that part stays with the operator.

What I bring

A season of evidence, not a slide. I did not theorize the layer. I built it on a live platform API, ran an operation on it while the whole crew depended on it, and wrote down where it broke. That includes the part product teams without operating scars get wrong: it is never the code. It is the per-operator logic, the exceptions a spec never imagines, and the trust a crew needs before they will open the thing.

The operational semantics. What each object and each change actually means for the operation, what breaks downstream when one number moves, which actions are consequential, and where a human has to stay in the loop. This is the part a read/write API does not give you and the part that decides whether an action is correct.

The spec. Ten things a platform has to expose before an outside system can safely act on a business, and the five things an operator evaluates when deciding whether to trust one. Written from the buyer's side of the API.

The adoption problem, solved once. A seasonal crew of 44 used my board every day because there was nothing to log into. Plain language in, schedule change out. Adoption is the step that never gets cheaper, and I have one working answer to it.

How does this work?

Two shapes. I am open on which.

What I care about is the mandate to actually build it, and a stake in whether it works.

What I will not do

I do not name platforms on this site, including the ones I run on, and I do not criticize anyone's product in public. What I will tell you privately is exactly where yours stops and the whiteboard starts, because I have lived on the far side of that line.

I run a company through September. After that, this is where the winter goes.

Running one of these businesses rather than building for them? The install page is the one you want.