Business types · Handmade & makers
You make things by hand. Here's the crew that guards your making hours.
Tell setup “handmade & makers” and the crew arrives already tuned to it: a pre-filled business configuration plus per-seat tuning notes, written into your own brain vault in plain English. Everything on this page comes from that preset, and every word of it stays yours to edit.
This preset is a researched starting point, built from operating experience in adjacent verticals rather than a business we run ourselves, and it says so in its own file.
The shape of the risk
Straight from the preset’s own risk section. This is what the crew is organised around in your business.
The loud failure is a damaged parcel or an unhappy custom buyer. The silent failure, and the one that decides whether this business is sustainable, is the overcommitted queue. Every sale is a promise drawn against future making hours, and making hours do not scale: when orders arrive faster than hands can work, the queue quietly becomes a backlog of ageing promises. Nothing errors. The shop looks successful. And the maker is working nights toward a wall of missed dates.
So the defining behaviour of this preset is queue accounting: open orders priced in making-hours against your real weekly capacity give a current honest lead time, and that lead time is what new buyers are told. When the queue passes your comfort ceiling, e.g. three weeks of capacity, the crew surfaces the decisions actually available: extend the stated lead time, pause listings, raise prices, or batch. Working harder is not on the list; it is the option that fails silently last.
The second risk is materials: a batch stalling because a component ran out mid-run. Materials cover is watched against the queue, not the calendar: enough of everything for the orders already promised, before anything is promised anew.
Third, custom work. A commission is a conversation that becomes a promise, and the promise lives in the thread: dimensions, colours, spellings, dates. Every custom detail gets confirmed back to the buyer in one summary before making starts; details are never guessed and never auto-corrected. Custom work is permanently excluded from any auto lane.
The seats, tuned for handmade & makers
These 6 seats get tuning notes for this business type. The rest of the twelve run exactly as shipped, and the agents themselves are never forked: the notes live in your vault.
queue accounting. The maker makes; Porter keeps the promises honest.
- ✓Prices the open queue in making-hours against real capacity daily, computes the current honest lead time, and surfaces the ceiling decision the day the queue crosses it.
- ✓Ages every order against its promised date and drafts the honest update before the buyer has to ask.
- ✓Checks materials cover against promised work and escalates the gap before it stalls a batch.
- ✕Never: Lets the stated lead time drift from the computed one without the operator seeing the gap that day.
- ✕Never: Marks anything shipped without a tracking event, or made without the maker saying so.
custom conversations, where the promise is assembled.
- ✓Summarises every custom conversation into one confirmation message (dimensions, colours, spellings, dates) and gets written agreement before anything joins the making queue.
- ✓Nudges unconfirmed custom threads warmly after a few days, because unconfirmed means unmade and buyers forget they are the blocker.
- ✓Answers lead-time questions with the computed number, not the hoped one.
- ✕Never: Guesses or auto-corrects a personalisation detail. Unusual is the norm.
- ✕Never: Promises a date the queue accounting does not support.
marketing throttled by capacity, telling the making story.
- ✓Markets from the real bench: process, materials, finished pieces, in the maker's voice, with real photographs.
- ✓Throttles visibility work when the queue is over ceiling and says so in the plan, because selling a backlog manufactures disappointment.
- ✓Prepares seasonal pushes backwards from capacity: what can honestly be promised for the gift season is a number, not a vibe.
- ✕Never: Shows a customer's custom piece without their recorded yes.
- ✕Never: Runs urgency or scarcity framing on made-to-order work. The scarcity is real; manufacturing extra is dishonest.
whether the making earns a wage.
- ✓Reports revenue per making-hour by product line, because a sold-out line can still be the one losing money.
- ✓Tracks materials cost creep against the prices that assumed the old costs, and surfaces the pricing conversation with numbers.
- ✓Watches sustained sell-out pace and names it as a pricing signal.
- ✕Never: Adjusts a price. The case gets built; the decision is the maker's.
the demand side of a capacity-bound business.
- ✓Reports sales pace against capacity and the queue's direction, both ways: backlog forming, or income gap forming.
- ✓Watches which products and channels actually convert, so the limited making-hours chase the proven sellers.
- ✕Never: Reports a sell-out as pure success without the capacity and pricing read next to it.
the promise gate.
- ✓Blocks any custom piece from the making queue without the buyer's written confirmation of the summary.
- ✓Holds the lead-time line: nothing outbound states a date the queue accounting does not support.
- ✓Keeps wholesale and bulk enquiries out of every auto lane, routed with a capacity impact estimate attached.
- ✕Never: Promotes custom-work handling to auto, however many clean approvals accumulate. This exclusion is permanent.
Plus the rest of the twelve: meet the whole crew.
What never happens without you
Every preset ships with a shared floor of hard escalations, and this one adds its own. These reach you and stop; the crew does not act on them alone.
- ✕Starting any custom piece before the buyer has confirmed the summary: every detail, in one message, agreed in writing.
- ✕Any stated lead time longer or shorter than the queue accounting supports. Optimistic dates are borrowed trust.
- ✕Any refund, remake or discount decision.
- ✕Pausing or reopening listings: the crew recommends with numbers; the shopfront decision is yours.
- ✕Wholesale enquiries and bulk orders: one email can consume a month of capacity, and only you can decide to sell a month.
The shared floor, on every business type: any price or discount figure in outbound copy; anything naming a real identifiable person; any charity or donation claim; the first use of a new format or channel.
What setup will ask you
One short conversation fills the preset with your reality. The questions, summarised:
- 1
What do you make, from what, in what style?
- 2
Price range and channels.
- 3
Honest make time per piece, and honest weekly capacity, counting the life around the making.
- 4
Queue ceiling: how many weeks of promised work can you carry comfortably?
- 5
Custom work: what kinds, what details get collected?
- 6
Your core materials and where reorder points live.
Skip anything you don't know yet. A blank bracket is a visible gap, not a broken crew. Without a capacity number the crew still ages orders against their promised dates, and says that is all it can see.
Yours to edit, all of it
The preset and every agent it tunes are plain files in your own brain vault. If your handmade & makersbusiness does something this page doesn’t cover, you write it in, and the crew reads what your vault says, not what our template said. A skipped setup answer is a visible gap in the file, not a broken crew.
One question at setup. This whole page arrives tuned.
A$99 once on your own Claude plan, or A$79 a month with the engine included. All twenty presets are in the pack either way.