Coexist Media Coexist Media
[ 001 ] AI FOR BUSINESS · CARPINTERIA, CA
BUSINESS-FIRST. NO JARGON. NO BLOAT.

Practical AI for Carpinteria businesses.

Carpinteria has a strong mix of agriculture, cannabis, manufacturing, and an emerging DTC scene. Its proximity to Santa Barbara makes it part of the broader Central Coast business market, with operators who move fast and prefer practical over theoretical.

We build useful tools that fit your existing workflows. Not a platform transformation, not a six-month project. Starts with a free AI audit. No commitment beyond.

REAL THINGS WE BUILD —
CRM Cleanup Daily Outreach Bots Document Parsing Voice-to-Notes Custom GPTs Workflow Automation Internal Search
Useful. Boring. Yours.

Three engagements. No commitment until it works.

Every relationship starts with a free AI audit: a quick scan of your website that maps your top friction points and automation opportunities. Build only what's worth building.

FOR CONTEXT —
FT engineer~$150k+/yr
Boutique agency project$25k+/engagement
Get a Free Audit$0
Project Work$3k+
Partner Retainer$1,500+/mo
02 / BUILD

Workflows

$3,000+· per build

Useful tools built into how your business actually runs. Each one is a fixed-scope project: designed, built, and handed off. You own the result.

  • Designed around your existing workflow, not against it
  • Typical build: 1–3 weeks
  • Custom GPTs, agents, automations, dashboards
  • Integrated with your tools (HubSpot, Airtable, Sheets, etc.)
  • Available for post-launch support
03 / ONGOING

Operator

$1,500+/ month

We run your AI tools so you don't have to. Monitoring, maintenance, model updates, new tool builds as you grow. Month-to-month, cancel anytime.

  • Tool monitoring & uptime checks
  • Model updates as new versions ship
  • Light new builds (counted toward monthly hours)
  • Quarterly business review & roadmap refresh
  • Cancel anytime with 30 days' notice

Start free. Build only what's worth it.

No retainer required to get started. The free audit tells you what's worth fixing. A conversation tells us whether we're the right fit. Everything after that is scoped and priced before any work begins.

01 / FREE

Audit

Run the free AI audit on your website. You get a scored report covering your online presence, AI readiness, automation opportunities, and three quick wins — in under a minute.

Instant · no form call · yours to keep
02 / FREE

Conversation

We follow up after the audit — a short email thread or a 20-min call, your choice. You tell us what's actually eating your week. We figure out together whether there's a build worth doing and what it would cost.

Email or call · your pick · no charge
03 / PAID

Build

If there's a clear problem and a clear solution, we scope a fixed-price build. You see the price before any work starts. One tool, one workflow, fully yours when it ships.

Fixed scope · fixed price · from $3k
04 / OPTIONAL

Operate

If you want someone to keep the tools running, update models as they improve, and add light builds as you grow — that's the Operator retainer. Month-to-month, cancel anytime.

Month-to-month · from $1,500/mo

Real clients. Real work. Real results.

A selection of engagements across entertainment, gaming, children's media, and DTC. Most are under NDA. The ones here are the ones we can talk about.

Tumble Leaf project
005 Children's Media · DTC

Tumble Leaf

Shopify e-commerce platform for the Emmy-winning Amazon Kids+ series.

DesignStrategy
AoEZone project
004 Gaming · Community

AoEZone

The largest and most authoritative community for Age of Empires — owned and operated.

DesignInnovationStrategy
Snap Creative project
003 Themed Entertainment

Snap Creative

Design and manufacturing service for Disney, Universal, Warner Bros and more.

DesignStrategy
THQ Nordic project
002 Gaming · DTC Merchandising

THQ Nordic

Dedicated Shopify e-commerce platform for the global video game publisher.

DesignStrategy
Tiny Chef Show project
001 Children's Media · DTC

Tiny Chef Show

Official Shopify platform for the popular Nickelodeon children's media franchise.

DesignStrategy

Who this is and isn't for.

We work best with owner-operators of established businesses who want practical AI without a 6-month transformation project.

FOR

  • You run a $1M–$30M business and have a real team
  • You've personally tried ChatGPT and seen the potential
  • You can't justify a $200k engineering hire yet
  • Your operations live in spreadsheets and email
  • You want small, useful tools. Not a transformation.
  • You need branding, a website, or marketing assets — we build these faster with AI

NOT FOR

  • You're a Series B+ company with a dedicated engineering team
  • You want us to build your product or replatform a SaaS
  • You expect AI to replace your team in 90 days
  • You haven't tried any AI tools yet and aren't sure you want to
  • You need someone to manage your marketing channels or write your content
  • You haven't identified a specific workflow that's slowing you down
  • You want a 12-month contract before seeing value

The honest comparison.

Two common alternatives — and why they don't fit most businesses that actually need to move quickly.

Coexist Full-time AI Engineer Boutique AI Agency
Cost From $3k $150k–$250k / year $20k–$80k / project
First delivery 2–6 weeks 3–6 months to ramp 8–16 weeks
AI approach Practical tools only Varies by hire Often LLM demos, not workflows
Who you talk to The person building it One person, limited context Account manager
Ongoing support Optional retainer Full-time, whether needed or not Separate retainer required
Flexibility 30-day notice Hard to scale down Long-term commitments

← scroll to compare all options →

Common builds: harvest and fulfillment tracking automation for growers, compliance reporting workflows for cannabis operators, and order management and customer communication pipelines for DTC brands. The common thread is founders doing $2M–$10M in revenue with no ops hire — every manual process is a liability.

Agriculture & FloricultureCannabisLight ManufacturingDirect-to-Consumer BrandsRetail

The questions that always come up.

No catch. The AI audit runs automatically against your website and gives you a real scored report with specific findings. We follow up because some percentage of people want help acting on it, and that's how we get clients. But the report is yours either way, and the follow-up conversation costs you nothing.

That's a perfectly good Audit outcome and it happens. If the right answer is "you need a checklist, not an agent" or "fix your CRM hygiene before adding tooling," that's what the deliverable says. We'd rather lose the upsell and keep the trust than build something that won't move the business.

Yes. Every tool lives in your accounts (your Google Workspace, your Anthropic/OpenAI key, your Airtable, etc.) under your credentials. We don't put anything between you and the AI provider.

Usually $50–$500/month per tool, depending on usage. We'll give you cost estimates in the Audit before you commit to anything, and we use the cheapest model that gets the job done, not the most impressive one.

Often yes, just not as a monthly retainer for an early team. If you're an early-stage startup or a lean firm that wants someone senior to own part of your technical roadmap, the most efficient way to work together is a scoped build: we define the outcome, agree on a fixed price, ship it, and hand it off. You get the senior judgment without paying for embedded hours you can't fully use yet. If you're past roughly $10M in revenue and genuinely need an embedded technical leader several days a week, that's a different engagement. Tell us and we'll talk through whether a fractional CTO arrangement fits.

Start free.
Go deeper when ready.