Monster Orange Contact

We build what you actually need — and we build it to last.

We take on the work that needs a builder in the room: platforms, teams, and the technology decisions behind both.

Let’s Connect
Mikan, the Monster Orange mascot

Services

Four ways in. Each one is the same bet: put someone in the room who has built the thing before, and the decisions get cheaper.

Fractional CTO

Technology leadership on the clock you need it — architecture, hiring, roadmap, and the hard calls. The same role Ward has held for StrategyPlus and Allakando.

0-to-1 Product Build

From a whiteboard to a production platform serving real customers. Rails, Postgres, Hotwire, and a test suite you can actually trust.

Applied AI

Pragmatic AI in production systems: content generation, data extraction, and assistant integrations that hold up under real traffic.

Team & Culture

Rebuilding teams from the ground up by cultivating psychological safety, so failures become learning and outcomes compound.

What we're building

Four projects, one thesis: AI earns its place when it makes an ordinary decision better and you can still check the work. One is in the market, one is in beta, one is in build. The fourth is what lets a small team ship all of them to the same standard.

MO Platform

In use

The standard our own products are built to — and the road a vibe-coded idea takes to become a system you can run.

  1. One set of standards, a suite that proves an app actually meets them, and templates that start it off already meeting them.
  2. A prototype someone vibe-coded in a weekend gets the same treatment our own products do: agents do the building, the conformance suite decides when it is finished.
  3. Two languages and three separate codebases deploy the same shape, so what we learn fixing one product is a fix for all of them.
  4. Already licensed to a team outside Monster Orange.

Wayfinder

In the market

A retirement and life-scenario planner for a one- or two-person household.

wayfinderfi.com
  1. Answers the question people actually have — when can I stop working — with a year-by-year ledger you can interrogate, not a six-question quiz.
  2. Compares the real choices: downsize, relocate, go nomad, each measured against staying put.
  3. Runs thousands of market sequences, so a plan is judged on the bad decades as well as the good ones.
  4. An AI agent can drive the whole model, but it never invents a number. The engine is deterministic: the same inputs always produce the same answer, and every figure traces back to an input.

Narai 習い — learning by practice

In beta

An adaptive learning platform where a subject is a graph, not a playlist.

beta.michinar.ai
  1. Running in the cloud now. The level test, lessons with the tutor and the progress pages all work today.
  2. Japanese is the first subject — one path from a learner's first kana to N1, opened a course at a time. Japanese first, not Japanese only.
  3. Three agents with distinct jobs: one teaches, one works out where the learner actually is, one proves mastery before it lets them move on.
  4. A course declares what it is optimising for, and the agents improve against that objective instead of a fixed script.
  5. Human experts are brought in by policy, at the points where a person is worth more than a model.

Arbor

In build

An AI writing assistant that keeps your work on your machine.

  1. Writing organised as a tree of ideas rather than a pile of documents, so long work stays navigable as it grows.
  2. Local-first by default: the database and the file store run on your own computer, and it opens with no sign-in at all.
  3. Two ways to run it — hosted by us, or entirely by you.

Start with the part that is stuck.

Technology leadership, a build from zero, or AI that has to survive real traffic. The first step is the same for all three — a conversation about what you are actually trying to ship.

Book time now