You'd be working with the people who build it.
Ironstone Foundry is a small, founder-led software and AI studio. We build and run our own products — our flagship is Spoolroom, a web and mobile app for 3D-printing makers — and we build for clients. The client work starts with the people who do the job and the process they actually run — then software, and AI where it fits.
Hi, I'm Dan.
I started Ironstone Foundry to keep the distance short between the people who have the problem and the people building the fix. The person on your first call scopes the work and stays on it through the handoff. Nothing gets sold by one person and passed to a team you never meet.
My work sits where day-to-day operations meet the software that runs them. Some of it is unglamorous and important: build pipelines, data validation, and reliability fixes on a system a team already depends on. Some of it is getting an owner-run business off a paper calendar and three apps that don't talk to each other. The job is the same either way: learn how the work really gets done, then change only what makes it easier.
I use AI where it saves someone real time, under one fixed rule: anything AI-drafted that reaches a customer, touches money, or is hard to undo gets approved by a person first. Ferro, the assistant on this site, runs under that rule, and how it's built is written up in full.
Based in Pennsylvania, working remotely with teams across the US, on-site when it helps. Named case studies are available on request.
- 01A system your team depends on has become risky to change. Releases feel like a gamble and nobody wants to touch the fragile parts.
- 02A process lives in spreadsheets, email, and one person's memory. It works until that person is out for a week.
- 03There's an AI idea, but no plan for doing it safely. Use cases, guardrails, cost, and rollout get worked out before anything is built.
- 04An owner-run business is juggling paper and too many apps. Quotes, scheduling, and invoicing end up in one place, with the owner approving what goes out.
- 05A decision is coming and you want a straight read first. Build or buy, which vendor, or whether a stalled project is worth rescuing.
Ironstone is ordinary rock with iron in it. It isn't much use as it comes out of the ground; it becomes useful once it's smelted and cast into a part that does a job. Most projects start out the same way: a rough spreadsheet, a process that lives in someone's head, an idea nobody has pinned down yet.
A written scope, small releases, and documentation you keep.
Before work starts, you get a written scope: what's in, what's out, and what we're assuming. The work ships in pieces you can use along the way, not one big reveal at the end. If the honest answer is to buy something off the shelf or change the process instead of building, we'll say so. Remote-first on US Eastern time, and you'll hear back within one business day.