Apps for coaches and authors
An app readers, clients, or students can use when they are stuck, curious, or ready to put the work into practice.
AI apps for coaches and authors
I turn your message and method into an app people can use. And it still feels like you.
Plenty of people can build an AI app. The rare part is making people feel a message, and I've been doing that for 20 years. This is the new medium: something readers, clients, or students can use when the book, session, or class is over. Something that knows your method, remembers what matters, and helps with the next small step when they're stuck.
Available for remote work with US and international teams.
Best fit for coaches and nonfiction authors with a body of knowledge and a distinctive way of helping people use it.
When a client needs it, I also build the tools around the app: agents, automation, and small internal systems that keep work from getting dropped.
An example of my work
Try an AI app I built.
The Practice helps someone talk through a difficult moment. Pick a fictional situation and chat for a few turns. Then tap “I'm activated.” The app stops analyzing the story and shifts to simple, body-based help.
Open The PracticeNo account · session only · 20-turn limit · not therapy
The Practice
Iso Rabins
A fictional moment
You shared an idea in a meeting and the room moved on without responding.
Before we make meaning of it, can you feel where the reaction is landing in your body?
Selected work
Four things I built with AI.
The Practice is the clearest example of where I'm headed. The other three show the range behind it: a long-memory business partner, a consumer assessment that turns results into conversation, and a public agent experiment that keeps the failures visible.
Practice companion
The Practice
A fictional, session-only app that changes what it does when the person is activated. This is closest to the work I want to do more of.
Try The Practice
AI business partner
Fridays at Four
The first full AI product I built: a business partner that remembers the idea, the plan, and the long thread of the work.
Visit Fridays at Four
Assessment + AI
Attachment Style Quiz
An 18-question assessment that gives a result, then lets the person talk with an AI that already knows the result.
Take the quiz
Public AI experiment
A Language All Their Own
Two agents building a language in public, one tested rule at a time. The failures stay visible alongside what actually worked.
See the experimentWhat I build
The main thing is apps that make a body of knowledge useful when someone actually needs it.
Memory that follows the person
It can remember what someone is working on, what language helps them, and what they keep running into.
Your real material, made useful
Books, transcripts, cards, exercises, stories, and frameworks, turned into something the app can use without making the person dig through a library.
The taste part
The taste is in the decisions the app makes.
Voice is part of it, but not the whole thing. The system has to know when to ask a question, when to offer a practice, when to stay small, and when to hand someone back to a real person. That's what I love about the work. There's a real art to taking out the AI voice and putting yours in its place.
If all you want is a book people can chat with, that's a real thing. It's just not really what I do. I'm more interested in turning the method behind the book into a product with standards, taste, and a real sense of why the work matters.
The business part
I have been building and running businesses for 20 years.
That matters here because the hard part isn't getting an AI to answer. The hard part is understanding what people want, why they want it, what makes them trust help, and what makes them come back to something when nobody is making them.
The specifics: I started ForageSF in 2009 and it still supports me today. The Underground Market I built put me on the front page of the New York Times. I raised $146,000 from strangers on Kickstarter to build Forage Kitchen, a shared kitchen in Oakland that's still running today. Twenty years of making things people showed up for. That's what I bring into the work: product judgment, not just prompts.
“His keystone contribution to the Bay Area is his ability to communicate his vision of feeding communities without the agro-industrial machine.”
SF Bay Guardian, naming Iso a Local Hero, 2010
How I work
I like the smallest thing that proves the feeling.
For a coach app, that means one moment where a person is stuck and the app actually helps. Not a feature list. One moment that feels like you. Once that moment is real, the rest of the app grows around it.
- 01Find the method.
- 02Build the first real moment.
- 03Add memory where it matters.
- 04Keep the human in charge.
Contact
If you have a method people already trust, tell me what you want it to help with.
You don't need a full brief. A few sentences is enough: who you help, what they get stuck on, and what would be useful between sessions.
Send a note