What I've built

Fourteen builds. Two years. No technical background when I started.

dreamstorm is a strategy practice and a studio. The strategy work runs on retainers and audits. The studio side is where I build things, sometimes for clients, sometimes for ventures, sometimes for the research that underpins all of it.

Every build runs on the same principles. Extension, not extraction. Design with, not for. Values in the architecture. Absolute data sovereignty. Build capability, not dependency.

Four builds get the full case study treatment below. The rest sit in the archive underneath.

Featured builds

Bea

Relational AI for whānau. Solo build. Five days.

Anthropic & Cerebral Valley hackathon, April 2026
Solo entry, five-day sprint
Open source under MIT licence

What it is

A quiet, relational AI presence for families. She listens. She notices the patterns families cannot see from inside them. She reflects those patterns back, gently, when the moment is right. Not a wellness app. Not a chatbot. A new category: presence-based technology where the unit of intelligence is the whānau, not the individual.

Why it matters

Bea isn't built on good intentions. It's built on documented architecture and refusal. Eleven hard constraints written into the code. Three governing frameworks. That's the difference between AI ethics as language and AI ethics as code.

bea-lime.vercel.app →

Coach Emma

Voice-first AI coaching companion for Scaled Ambition.

16 of 16 participant activation in pilot
Built for Emma Kirkman's Scaled Ambition leadership programme
Voice cloning, conversational AI SDK, dynamic profile system

What it is

A voice-first AI coaching companion for women leaders. Coach Emma sounds like Emma, thinks like Emma, shows up for participants at 11pm on a Tuesday when they're spiralling. Not a chatbot. An actual coaching conversation in Emma's cloned voice, informed by her frameworks, her language patterns, her brand.

Why it matters

Voice AI changes the ceiling of what's possible in digital coaching. But only if the AI sounds like the coach, knows the programme, and stays inside ethical boundaries. The data sovereignty design came directly from the research values.

"It's the ultimate bridge between sessions. My clients now have a confidential space to practise my frameworks the moment they need it."

Emma Kirkman, Founder, Scaled Ambition

YourHQ

Websites-as-a-service for NZ small businesses. The dreamstorm revenue engine.

Operating venture, recurring revenue model
LTV:CAC ratios of 40:1 to 85:1
Conversational AI runs the discovery

What it is

Hand-coded websites for NZ small businesses, delivered in five business days from a single phone call, maintained long-term through a Caretaker model. Concept to live. No jargon. No faff. YourHQ is the deliberate revenue engine that funds dreamstorm's innovation work.

Why it matters

YourHQ proves the dreamstorm thesis: serving underserved small businesses is commercially viable when AI is the lever, not the product. It's the recurring revenue underneath the whole studio.

yourhq.co.nz →

Project Rise survey agent

The first build. Voice as research methodology.

68% of participants chose voice over text
Redirected an 18-month research programme
The build that started everything

What it is

A voice-based research survey agent that tested whether voice changed the quality of research participation. Built to answer one question: does the medium change what people are willing to say? 68% of participants chose voice over text when given the choice. That finding redirected the entire eighteen-month research programme.

Why it matters

This is where dreamstorm's voice-first thesis was proven, not assumed. It's also where the relational safety framework was first tested at scale. Every voice product that came after — Vox, Coach Emma, Coach Strong — runs on the answer this build found.

Read the research →

The archive

The rest, in shorter form.

Built

Vox

A voice-first tracker for holistic health, fitness, and wellbeing. Built for the people who don't want another dashboard, another streak, another guilt loop. Conversational when it helps. Structured when it matters. Built as part of the Project Rise progressive vulnerability sequence — tested the relational safety framework at the wellness layer.

Delivered

Coach Strong

Voice-first AI companion for Eske Dost's 8-Weeks to Strong programme. The second build on the Coach Emma architecture. Built end-to-end: voice agent, knowledge base, crisis protocols, escalation logic. The strategic proof point that the model is repeatable, not a one-off.

Live

StorySmith Legacy

A voice-first AI platform that turns conversations into keepsakes. Peg, the AI companion, has a three-month conversation with users about their lives. Deliverable is a hardback book, PDF, and digital flipbook. 2-for-1 social impact model. Co-operated with Tai Passmore.

app.storysmith.work →

Piloted

Ray

A voice-based AI coach for adult relationships. Western evidence-based frameworks on one side, Te Ao Māori and Pasifika values on the other. Fifteen-person pilot. 100% of users felt the cultural values embedded in Ray's design. 30% could name them. The cultural safety was in the prompt, the database schema, and the data design.

Live

Culture Meets AI wānanga agent

A co-research project with Lee Palamo. 25+ Māori and Pasifika community members. Kaupapa Māori methodology throughout. The finding: communities aren't anti-technology. They're anti-extraction. When the design respects that, they engage.

culturemeetsai.space →

Research build

Spoken Legacy prototype

Whakapapa preservation through AI voice. Built with Tai Passmore. Surfaced one of the sharpest tensions in the research: protecting cultural knowledge too tightly can cause its loss through non-transmission. That paradox sits unresolved in the thesis, deliberately.

Launching May 2026

dreamstorm × 123Online AI workshop

A full-day AI adoption workshop for NZ small businesses, co-delivered with Larissa from 123Online. Built around a customer lifecycle spine, not a tool taxonomy. Designed to qualify for Regional Business Partners Network funding.

Every build documented honestly, including the parts that didn't work.

What happens next

Two doors in.

If you've got a build in mind, the studio door is open. One active build at a time. Custom code, written from scratch, by exception when the project is right. A free 30-minute conversation first to see if it's a fit.

If the work above is making you think about your business in a different way, that's also a real reason to talk. Most builds happen alongside the strategy practice, not separate from it.

Strategy is the practice. Building is the upside. Always one at a time.

Tell me about a build See how I work

More coming

There's more in development. I'll share it here when it's ready. Not before.