Every service studio has the same dirty secret: the tools they use internally are held together with spreadsheets, Airtable, and Notion pages that should not be load-bearing.
We got tired of that. So we built Jamii Studios — the lab inside Jamii Technology where we prototype the tools we actually use. Some of them eventually ship to clients. Most stay internal. All of them make the work better.
Here's a partial list.
1. The gallery system
We shoot a lot of events through Jamii Creative Studio. Clients used to get galleries via Dropbox links or Google Drive folders. Neither was good:
- Dropbox — ugly, no branding, expires
- Google Drive — same problems, plus IT teams at nonprofits block it half the time
So we built our own. Every album has its own URL on jamiitech.com. Access types (public, members, client-only, paid). Watermarked previews. Full-res downloads gated by role. Same infrastructure as a headless e-commerce site, just for photos.
You can see it live at /gallery. Sign in as a client to see the full experience.
2. The proposal generator
Writing proposals was eating a full day per week. Copy-paste, reformat, rename, export PDF. Every proposal looked slightly different because the previous one was whatever the last person copied.
Jamii Studios version 1: a CMS-driven proposal generator. Pick the service modules. Pick the pricing tier. Generates a branded PDF with consistent typography and the real numbers from our services database.
Time to draft a proposal: 8 hours → 20 minutes.
That one isn't public. But a version of it probably ships as a product someday.
3. The deploy dashboard
We run maybe 30 client websites on Vercel and Supabase. Each one has a staging URL, a prod URL, a database, a log stream, edge functions, and at least one webhook that can break silently.
Checking 30 dashboards across 30 Vercel projects every morning is not a thing a human should do.
Jamii Studios version 2: a one-page internal dashboard that shows deploy status, last build time, test pass/fail, runtime errors from Sentry, and uptime for every client site. One tab, one glance. When something's red, we know before the client does.
4. The photo tagger
Events mean thousands of photos. Clients want theirs tagged. Our photographers don't want to spend three hours per shoot tagging faces.
So we built a lightweight face-clustering tool that groups photos by person. Photographer spends 15 minutes labeling clusters instead of three hours tagging individuals. Same output, 12× less time.
Why this matters to clients
You're probably reading this thinking "cool, but I'm hiring a web studio, not buying their internal ops."
Fair. But the reason Jamii Technology ships faster than most studios our size is that we're not fighting our own tools. When an agency is running on duct tape internally, the client feels it:
- Deadlines slip because someone couldn't find a file
- Deliverables drift because nobody has the source of truth
- Bugs recur because the team can't tell if tests passed
Studios with good internal tools ship better work for clients. It's not coincidence.
What's next in the lab
Working on:
- A CMS-less authoring flow for case studies (we write them in Markdown, they deploy themselves)
- A better newsletter pipeline that doesn't require Mailchimp
- A design token sync between Figma and our Tailwind config
Most of it will never leave Jamii Studios. Some of it will show up on jamiitech.com eventually. All of it makes us faster at the real work.
If you want a partner that invests in its own craft, start a project with Jamii Technology.
— Danny McLane, Founder