Now forming the first cohort
Understudy builds the systems that do your repeat work — the follow-ups, the scheduling, the reporting, the chasing — and then runs them for you. Built by an operator who runs them on his own businesses first.
No pitch deck. No discovery call. Tell us what eats your week.
The work that doesn't need you
Every business runs on a handful of jobs that repeat, never finish, and quietly decide whether this month is a good one. They're the first roles we cast.
Who this is built for
The work underneath is the same. What it's called, and what it's worth, is not. Pick the room you're standing in.
Track one
Restaurants, shops, trades, clinics, studios — anywhere the phone, the calendar and the follow-up are the business.
Track two
Agents and teams losing hours to coordination that a system should be carrying — not the selling, the scaffolding around it.
Track three
Small teams where everyone is doing three jobs and the ops work lands on whoever has the least leverage to refuse it.
Don't take our word for it
Pick a job you recognise. This is the same sequence an Understudy runs in production — the timings are real.
These are illustrations, not recordings of a real customer's job — but the steps, the order and the timings are what an Understudy actually does. Nothing above is a feature that doesn't exist yet.
How it works
Nobody should sign a retainer for a system they haven't watched work. So we start with one job, prove it, and go from there.
We pick the single task that costs you the most time or the most money, and we take it off your desk. Fixed scope, fixed price, no retainer.
Once one works, we map the rest — built around how you already operate, not a template you have to bend yourself into.
Automation nobody watches is a liability. Monthly means it's monitored, it's kept current, and when it breaks it's already being fixed.
Why this one is different
This category is full of people who finished a course last month. The difference is simple: nothing gets sold here that isn't already running in production on our own businesses.
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I didn't come to this from a course. I've spent over a decade in real estate, I build software and websites for businesses across Arkansas, and I run a software product of my own. Every system I'll sell you, I built for myself first — and I'm still the one it wakes up at 4am when something breaks. If it isn't good enough for my own business, it doesn't get sold.
Sam Bartolotta · Founder
How this company runs
Most businesses in this category would rather you didn't know how few people are behind them. We'd rather just tell you, because it's the whole point.
It's also why you won't find "our team is in your timezone" anywhere on this page. There is no team. There's one operator in Arkansas and a system that doesn't sleep — which is exactly how a company this small answers a lead in Singapore at three in the morning, and why it doesn't matter where you are.
The waitlist
We're taking a small first cohort so each build gets the attention it needs. Tell us the job you'd hand off first — the more specific, the higher you move.