hundo: AI pipeline, process design, and a copilot shipped in six weeks
hundo had a mission to reduce global youth unemployment through career-readiness education. They had ambition, funding, and a founding team. What they needed was someone to build the operational backbone and design the processes, with AI doing the heavy lifting. I joined from day zero and stayed through to scale.
The short version
I designed the backend processes, built an AI-powered content pipeline, and shipped a career copilot from concept to production in six weeks. Along the way I helped the team navigate a major product pivot and scale operations up and down without losing momentum. The systems behind it let a small team operate like a much bigger one.
The company raised a $2M seed round, was named a World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer, and showcased at SXSW and Slush.
The operational challenge
hundo's founder, Esther O'Callaghan, had a clear vision. The challenge was building the operational machinery to deliver it. They needed to prove value to learners and partners quickly, stay flexible as the market shifted, and do it all without a large permanent team.
My role sat across process design, operations, and delivery. I worked directly with the founding team to figure out what to build, designed how it would run day-to-day, and stayed involved through every phase.
Building the systems
The first thing we did was map the end-to-end journey: how a student signs up, how they get value in their first five minutes, how a college partner brings this to their students, and what happens behind the scenes to make all of that work smoothly.
I designed the backend processes, prototyped the experience, and worked alongside the development team to ship it. We kept the team lean and flexible, scaling capacity up when we needed to move fast and back down when we didn't.
One of the bigger moments was CareerCon22. Over 20 hours of content, produced and managed end-to-end. That was the point where hundo went from "we have a platform" to "we can deliver." The systems we'd built made it possible with a fraction of the team you'd normally need.
When the market shifted, we pivoted. The original product leaned on Web3 concepts that were getting in the way. We reframed the whole proposition around what students needed, rewrote the processes, and simplified flows that had become unnecessarily complex. The systems we'd designed were flexible enough to absorb the change without starting from scratch.
AI content pipeline and career copilot
I built an AI-powered pipeline for content creation that turned a manual, time-intensive process into something that ran on its own. The system handled generation, curation, and delivery. The team got to focus on quality and partnerships instead of production.
When AI tooling matured further, we saw an opportunity for a career planning copilot. I took it from concept to production in six weeks. Requirements, design, build, launch. Tight scope, real users early, clear success criteria. No committee. No 12-week discovery.
"I cannot recommend him highly enough. He brings not only the calibre of product experience that you would expect, but the ability to translate that for non-tech founders and teams, with a strong commercial understanding of how product strategy, design, and deployment needs to work in real-world use cases."
Esther O'Callaghan OBE · CEO, hundo
What changed
- AI copilot shipped from concept to production in six weeks
- AI content pipeline replaced manual production process
- Backend operations built to run with a lean team
- Platform reached thousands of students globally
- Successfully pivoted product direction without losing momentum
- Raised a $2M seed round
- Named a World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer (2023)
- Secured B2B partnerships with NHS, City & Guilds, and Coldplay
What I delivered
Backend process design and operations
AI content pipeline (build and deployment)
AI Career Copilot: concept to launch
Product strategy and roadmap
UX design, prototyping, and user testing
Team scaling across product, engineering, and design
Product pivot from Web3 to student-first
CareerCon22 content production and live event
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