detoil

A way of working

How we work.
And how to copy it.

The operating model behind detoil, the stack it runs on, and the reasoning that produced both. Take what is useful.

See the stack Get in touch

The premise

Three realities we build around.

  1. 01

    The system is full of toil

    Every company has to navigate bureaucratic and legal machinery that returns far more repetition than value. Window dressing, mostly. You cannot opt out of it.

  2. 02

    LLM work is a value-to-cost trade

    The interesting question is never what the model can do. It is what it can do for materially less than the thing it replaces costs you.

  3. 03

    AI is a clever intern

    Not an expert executive. Fast, capable, eager, and wrong often enough that everything it produces gets checked before it leaves.

01 — The toil is structural

A third of the week, gone.

36%

of an entrepreneur’s work week goes to small administrative tasks: invoicing, data entry, ordering supplies, chasing paper.

The conventional fix
An accountant, a lawyer, and admin staff. Roughly R26,000 a month. And now you have people to manage, which is its own job.
The aim
Reduce the founder’s admin load to one hour a week, at a fraction of that cost, without adding a single person to manage.

Survey of 251 US entrepreneurs commissioned by Time etc, conducted by Censuswide, September 2023. Reported in Forbes, November 2023.

02 — Value to cost

Subscriptions are subsidised. Use that.

21×

Our measured ratio: what the same volume of work costs through the API versus a Claude Max 5× seat.

Subscriptions are shackled by design. The value is in the workarounds.

Harnesses for coding
Drive the model through a tool that structures and batches the work, instead of typing into a chat window.
Scheduled actions in downtime
Queue the long jobs into the slots where your limits have reset and you are asleep.
Custom APIs and MCP
Reach out of the subscription to the services that actually hold your data.

Ratio is detoil’s own measurement at our usage volume, not a published Anthropic figure. It scales with how hard you use the seat.

03 — Clever interns, not executives

Data, not vibes.

Give it structure

Agentic memory is not a filing system. It recalls impressions; a register recalls facts. The model has to be handed a company that is already written down: registers, templates, procedures, decisions.

Then check the work

You cannot trust the output. It gets checked, corrected, and the correction gets fed back so the same mistake is not made twice. Verification is not overhead. It is the process.

This is as much about training the executive as it is about building the technology.

The mission

Help founders get back to product and sales.

Everything below follows from that. These are the rules we will not trade away for revenue.

  1. 01

    No lock-in

    We do not build a moat out of your dependency on us. The stack is yours, the data is yours, and you can walk with both.

  2. 02

    We give away what is trivial

    If a thing takes an afternoon to build, you should not be paying anyone a retainer for it. We hand it over and move on.

  3. 03

    Orders of magnitude

    A solution has to return far more than it costs. Not a slim margin of improvement. If it does not clear that bar, we should not be selling it.

The stack

Three tiers. The first one is free.

Tier 01 — DIY

Do it yourself.

Everything you need is already on the market. This tier is the shopping list and the instructions.

The stack

Google Workspace
Or Microsoft 365. Email, docs, calls, calendar. Paid.
Claude
The model. Paid tier.
Notion
Memory. Free tier is enough here.
Xero
Accounting. Paid tier.

detoil provides

Skill pack
The procedures, written for the model.
Template pack
Contracts, reports, registers, resolutions.
Integration instructions
How to wire the four together.

From here you are on your own. That is deliberate, and it is free.

Tier 02 — Base

Base.

The same foundation, plus a server of your own and a chat interface. This is where the work becomes asynchronous.

The stack

Google Workspace
Or Microsoft 365. Paid.
Claude
The model. Paid.
Notion
Team tier. Company-wide memory.
Xero
Accounting. Paid.
VPS
Your own server. Any provider.
Telegram
The chat interface.

detoil provides

Scheduler and orchestration bot
Async work over Telegram. Send it and walk away.
Data ingestion into Notion
Your existing knowledge, loaded as memory.
Website, built and hosted
On your VPS. No charge.
Document signature platform
Hosted on your VPS, wired to the model.

Tier 03 — Automation

Automation.

Everything in Base, and one addition that changes the economics.

The addition

Hosted n8n on your VPS
Complex automations that run on a schedule, on a trigger, or on a webhook, without spending a single token to do it.

Deterministic work should not cost model calls. n8n does the plumbing; the model is kept for the judgment.

Inherits from Base

  • Full Base stack and tooling
  • Scheduler and orchestration bot
  • Notion company memory
  • Website and hosting
  • Document signature platform

Optional — prescriptive business building

There is a right thing to do next.

There is a right way to build a company, and the process layer is the easiest place to enforce it. The bot knows what stage you are at, and prompts for that stage only.

Pre-MVP

Go and talk to potential customers.

Do not write board policies. You do not have a board problem yet.

First hires

Employment contracts, UIF, payroll, onboarding.

Now it matters, and now it is cheap to get right.

Raising

Data room, governance cadence, board reporting.

The things a funder will ask for before they ask for them.

The right thing, at the right time, and nothing sooner.

In practice

Three things it already does.

The monthly board report.

What used to be a weekend of assembly.

  1. The founder records a ten-minute meeting talking through what happened last month.
  2. The automation finds the previous board updates and holds the same structure.
  3. It pulls the annual, quarterly and monthly plans and compares them against actual progress.
  4. It pulls the finances out of Xero and runs the analysis.
  5. It drafts the report and sends it back to the founder to review and send on.

Ten minutes of talking, and one review pass.

A new hire.

From one sentence to a fully onboarded employee.

  1. The founder says someone new is joining.
  2. The bot asks for the details it does not already hold.
  3. It pulls the standard contract template and fills it in.
  4. The draft goes back to the founder for review.
  5. The contract goes out for signature.
  6. Contract and data land in memory, onboarding tasks are scheduled across three months, and the ones needing a human land in the founder’s calendar.

One instruction, and a hire who is actually onboarded.

The data room.

The part founders always leave until the week it is due.

  1. The founder gives the spec for the data room, or just asks for a standard one.
  2. The agent moves the relevant files into a folder in Drive.
  3. It writes a manifest: what is in there, and what is missing.
  4. It raises tasks for the gaps that need a human or a third party.
  5. It builds the documents it can build itself, from what is already in Notion.

The list of what is missing is the valuable part.

Engagement

How we come in.

The hard part of this is never the software. It is getting how the company actually runs out of the founder’s head and into a form the model can use.

Free tier

You are on your own.

The skill pack, the template pack, the instructions. No hand-holding, no invoice.

Recommended

Fractional COO, three months.

We drop someone in to run alongside you and capture the processes as they actually happen, rather than as you remember them.

Alternative

Structured integration.

Structured interviews, a staged rollout, and weekly check-ins. Slower and lighter-touch, and it works.

Either route produces the same artefact: your processes, written down, and running.

Security, in plain terms

Built the way your accountant would build it.

Access control
Your agent does not hold your API keys or your bank passwords. You decide which systems it can read from and which it can write to, the same way you’d decide which staff member gets a set of keys to which cupboard.
Authorisation levels
Different actions need different approvals. Reading a document is different from sending one; sending a document is different from paying for one. We set those levels up with you during onboarding.
Consent at the point of action
Before the agent does anything that leaves a trace — sending an email, signing a contract, scheduling a meeting — it asks you first and shows you what it’s about to do.
Backups you control
A copy of your data sits on your own Google Drive, a copy sits on your server, and you can keep an offline copy as well. The agent cannot reach the backups.
Offboarding without friction
If you stop using the service, your files stay filed correctly in your Google Drive, in the order you’d expect to find them. The work can be picked up by hand the next day.

This isn’t a product.
It’s a way of working,
adapted to a changing reality.

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