I Hired a Team. Then I Built an AI So I Never Have to Say "It Depends" Again.

Momentous just went from one person to four. The first thing I built for the new setup was a way to stop guessing what to charge.

I hate saying "it depends." I hate it every time. Or the other version: "let me get back to you on that one, I don't know."

That's usually what happens when a prospect asks me what a project costs.

Here's what's changing that, and it started with something bigger. Momentous just went from me doing basically everything myself to a team of four. I brought on a Chief Production Officer, head of production, actively shooting, directing, doing cinematography and editing. A COO, handling day-to-day operations and project management. And a CMO, who's also running a new photography department and handling relationship marketing and content marketing.

It's a big deal, and I'm genuinely excited about what it means for the company. I've said before it's really hard to scale anything when you're the one doing all the work yourself, and once you've got retainer clients on top of new project work, there's no natural break where you get to step back and build the systems that would let you hand things off. You're just... in it.

So that's the first fix. The second one is smaller, but it's the one I actually want to walk you through, because I built it myself, this past week, mostly out of tools I was already using.

The problem it's solving

Every time a prospect asks what something costs, I've had two bad options: guess, or stall. I hate both. I'd much rather walk into a call already knowing. Here's where this brand's content actually has gaps, here's what closing those gaps looks like, here's what it costs. Not a guess. A diagnosis.

What I built

It's a custom Claude skill. I'm calling it Pulse. You feed it info on a brand or a person, company details, social handles, or a raw sales call transcript, and it pulls from the research stack I already use for client work: VidIQ, TubeLab, Sandcastles, Buzzabout, Eden, a trends tool, and a Notion board I built with Apify that catalogs something like 65 different Meta ad categories with real reference examples for each one.

It's basically data-driven, and it's built on strategy I've already baked into a different skill I call ShowRunner, that one understands current strategies for pretty much every platform out there. Pulse cross-checks a prospect's actual situation against all of that, and hands back a diagnosis: where they're at, what's broken, what closing the gap takes, and a price.

Why not just build three pricing tiers

I thought about productizing this. A tiered list, pick your tier, done. I get the appeal. It makes sense why someone would want that on the business side.

But when you're working with clients who have specific needs, the more premium move is to actually give them something custom-fit. The catch, and it's a real catch, is that custom takes a lot more time. More time to bid on projects, to scope them out, to figure out what you're even offering. That's the exact tax Pulse is built to cut down. The diagnosis and the pricing math happen before I'm even on the call, not during it.

What I don't know yet

I built this over the past week, mostly by wiring together tools I already had. I haven't run it against a real prospect yet. I don't know if the pricing holds up, or if the gaps it finds are the ones a client actually cares about once we're talking. I'll find out soon. And you'll hear about it here either way, including if it gets something wrong.

The team means I'm not the only one who can deliver the work anymore. Pulse is supposed to mean I'm not the only one who can price it. I'm genuinely excited to see if it holds up. I just don't know yet that it will.

If you've built something to fix a business problem you were sick of solving by hand, hit reply. I want to hear what it was.