How our own studio ended up building Rivilo.

The Future Ready studio in Amsterdam: three people working at their desks, with a wall of notes behind them

  1. October 2025

    An agent called Bob.

    We were curious about what the new models could actually do, and sceptical about what they were being sold as. The only way to find out was to put one inside our own team and watch. So: a Mac Mini under the desk, an API key, and a name to argue with.

    Bob, the first agent: a friendly blue cartoon robot giving a thumbs up Powered by OpenClaw

  2. Early 2026

    Bob went to work.

    We put it inside the tools we already used. It read client tickets, wrote action plans, drafted the reply. Some of it was genuinely good. But most of it was disappointing and unreliable.

    Bob posting an internal action plan and a draft reply inside a client ticket

  3. Then it broke. Repeatedly.

    Telegram integrations. Background jobs that deleted their own files. Bob asking us at eight in the morning, for the third time, which list it was supposed to check.

    A Telegram thread where Bob reports on background tasks and asks again for a list ID

  4. We even tried giving it a body.

    If something is part of the team, should it have a face? We put a robot on the table to find out. It danced. The answer was no, but the question was right.

    The team around a table reacting to a small white robot

  5. So we stopped building and started asking.

    What do we actually want from an AI in our team, and what should it never be allowed to do? We covered a wall in post-its before writing another line of code. One rule survived that wall: nothing leaves without a person approving it.

    A studio wall reading bring the future back, covered in post-its, two people working in front of it

  6. March 2026

    Then we built our own.

    Not a bot inside someone else's software. Our own board, our own agent, shaped around the way the studio actually works. We called it Ready.

    Ready, the second mascot: a small soft white character

    Bob became Ready.

    The internal tool: a dark support board with the Ready assistant alongside it

  7. May 2026

    We cancelled everything else.

    Every project tool we had been paying for, gone. From then on the studio ran its own client work on the thing we built. If it broke, it broke on us first.

    −€430a month

    More than €5,000 a year no longer spent on software. Our work was starting to pay off.

  8. Then we measured whether it was worth it.

    Liking a tool is not the same as it saving time. So we tracked the two things that fill most of our week: writing client documents, and planning projects and roadmaps.

    7 min
    median to write a client document, down from about 90 before Rivilo
    25 of 36
    documents finished within half an hour
    16 min
    on average to plan a project or roadmap, down from 3 to 4 hours

    Document figures measured in our own account, 27 May to 13 September 2026. The before figures are our own estimates of the old way of working.

  9. Summer 2026

    And then it got its own name.

    Ready was ours. Rivilo is the version built to work in a studio that is not ours: a new name, a new face, and the whole thing rebuilt around what a year of getting it wrong had taught us.

    The Rivilo character: a small sheep

    Ready became Rivilo.

    Rivilo today: a client requests board with the assistant alongside it, proposing a rule

  10. We even had a meme phase.

    A new name, an inbox that emptied itself, and apparently some time left over: the studio started making Rivilo memes.

  11. September 2026

    The first one from outside.

    Rick at Uncode became the first person outside the studio to run his own work through it. Not a demo account. His actual week.

    Rick and Robbin on a sofa in the studio, laughing, with an old CRT television and a games console on the floor
    Rick and Robbin, before any of it worked properly.
    What do you do when people ask you to test their new AI tool that wants to read all your data? You say yes, of course. Rick BossenbroekFounder, Uncode, Amsterdam

  12. Now

    Opening up, slowly.

    A handful of early adopters are shaping it with us. We add them one at a time, because every new team still finds something we got wrong.

  13. World domination.

    (somewhere in the near future)

    Planet Earth wearing the round Rivilo glasses, smiling Be part of it

Our values

  1. Privacy by design

    Your work is stored in the EU and never used to train anyone's model. Everything Rivilo remembers about a client is visible, editable and deletable, by you.

  2. Value human work

    The judgement, the taste and the relationship with the client are the job. Those stay with the people who were hired to do them.

  3. Keep the user in control

    Every reply, document and invoice stays a draft until a person approves it. Nothing goes to a client on its own.

  4. Automate the distractions

    Sorting, chasing, formatting, remembering: the groundwork that has to happen and that nobody was hired for. That is what we automate, so the rest of the day is free for what actually matters.