01
Advise
Growth, retention and lifetime-value work for consumer and DTC brands. Fixed scope, evidence first, run on a context-driven playbook.
How it works →
Fri Oct 23 · Originals Summit LA · say hi
Bill Hudak.
Bill Hudak.
Growth operator.
Company of one.
Nearly 30 years growing consumer and subscription businesses, from Google #220 to McAfee and Dollar Shave Club. Today I advise brands with a context-driven playbook, and I build the apps they run on, solo, with an AI-native stack.
- Googler #220
- 3 founding-team exits
- McAfee · DSC
- Ships in days, not quarters
02
Build
Customer-facing sites and back-office tools for real businesses: ordering, bookings, time clocks, dashboards. Live links, not mockups.
See the work →03
Show the stack
One operator, an AI collaborator and a durable stack. I'll walk founders and teams through exactly how I ship, costs included.
Open the stack →SELECTED WORK
Things I've built and the problems they solve.
Some you can open. Client work is described, not named; the method travels, the client's details stay private.
community project · alpha
GOAT ILK
Every kid is a GOAT. This is the ILK.
An experiment in helping independent artists own their corner of the internet without becoming influencers. Step one is a plain-language DIY guide: artists build and run their own selling site from a laptop or phone by asking an AI helper, on accounts they own, with no one taking a cut.
- Artist owns everything. Domain, checkout, files and customers stay theirs.
- Plain-English stack. Perplexity as the helper, GitHub for files, Cloudflare to host, Stripe to get paid.
- Real identity service. Artists can claim a branded email address that forwards to their inbox.
- Pull before platform. The collective comes later, only if artists ask for it.
client · restaurant group
Front of house to back office
A multi-location restaurant with food trucks and stadium stands. Rebuilt the customer site phone-first, then added the operations layer behind it.
What's in it
- Customer side: menu, truck finder, order-ahead demo, event and truck booking, catering requests, social photos feeding the site.
- Crew side: a location-aware time clock for trucks, stands and pop-ups, so punches happen where the work is.
- Next: one database for orders, bookings, merch and punches; loyalty and text club.
client · DTC brand
Retention & LTV diagnostic
A growing DTC brand wanted to know where customers drop off and what to fix first. I ran the context-driven playbook and handed over briefs their team can run.
How the playbook works
- Context first. The brand's data, docs and decisions go into one dedicated AI workspace, so every analysis starts from shared memory.
- Eight workstreams. Acquisition quality, early behavior, lifecycle, transactional, account experience, save motions, data and payments.
- Independent evidence. Platform self-attribution never counts on its own.
- Hand-off ready. Prioritized briefs with effort sizes, baselines and impact math.
concept · private brief
Ouroboros
A platform concept for how brands buy, manage and govern the SaaS and AI tools they run on. The brief is gated; ask me for a PIN.
ALSO SHIPPED
YE Chicago · a phone-first trip app for a 14-person concert weekend ↗
and the site you're on.
HOW I SHIP · COMPANY OF ONE
Vibe coding is a prompt. This is a company of one.
One operator, an AI collaborator with memory, and a boring, durable stack wired together. That's how the work above goes from an idea in the morning to a live link by dinner.
- 01The operator
Me, as product manager, program manager, prompter and prototyper. I own the brief and the ship decision.
- 02Perplexity Computer
The collaborator: research, planning, design, code and testing. It browses, builds and checks its own work.
- 03Projects & memory
A workspace per initiative with instructions, files and a knowledge wiki. This is where the context-driven playbook lives.
- 04GitHub
Every change saved and reversible. The source of record every other tool talks to.
- 05Vercel or Cloudflare
Hosting, preview links on every change, custom domains, rollbacks in a click.
- 06Supabase
A real database with auth, for when an app needs to remember orders, bookings or punches.
- 07Connected tools
Mail, calendar, Drive, Slack and more, reachable from the same session writing the code.
- 08The browser
Everything ships as a URL. No app store, no installer. Send a link, it loads on a phone.
How is this different from vibe coding? Compare →
| Vibe coding | Company of one | |
|---|---|---|
| Output | A one-shot artifact | A live URL with a domain and analytics |
| Memory | Every prompt starts cold | Project memory across sessions |
| Data | Whatever fits in the prompt | Real database, auth and integrations |
| Deploy | Copy-paste somewhere | Managed hosting, previews, rollbacks |
| Iteration | Regenerate and hope | Commit, review, redeploy |
| Ceiling | Toy demos | Client sites, internal tools, dashboards in production |
The difference isn't the model. It's the workflow, the memory, and that every session ends with a link someone else can open.
BONA FIDES
Nearly 30 years turning consumer businesses into recurring-revenue machines.
I've worked every side of digital commerce: the brand, the martech platform and the ad platform. I've built the tools brands buy, run the P&L lines they report, and been the person the deal memo lands on.
Retention & LTV
Subscription growth
Lifecycle & CRM
Payments & authorization
Consumer diligence
AI-native building
WHERE IT STARTED
Googler #220. Interviewed by Larry Page, then five years of a small company becoming a big one.
FOUNDING TEAMS WITH EXITS
Epinions, which became Shopping.com (acquired by eBay); Efficient Frontier (acquired by Adobe); Offermatica (acquired by Omniture, now Adobe).
McAFEE, UNDER INTEL
Started as head of global DTC and grew into owning ecommerce infrastructure: push messaging to 30M devices daily, a proprietary attribution platform, retention and payment-retry logic, and the HP channel. The consumer business grew from $1B to $1.4B ahead of its sale to TPG.
DOLLAR SHAVE CLUB
Diligence for Nexus Capital on its 2023 purchase from Unilever, then VP of Ecommerce in 2024 and 2025.
WEB 1.0
Hearst Magazines online in 1998, the banner-ad era.
WHERE I'LL BE
Come say hi.
-
OCT23Details ↗UP NEXT · ATTENDINGOriginals Summit // Los Angeles
A one-day summit with the founders and operators behind fast-growing consumer brands. Find me, or just say "hit up FastBilly."
RECENTLY
Emcee, TopTier Summit at YFCon, Anaheim (Oct)
Ecom North LA Summit (Sep)
RetailClub AI Festival, Huntington Beach (Sep)
OFF THE CLOCK
Mountain bikes, live music, good food.
I'm on a trail or an e-bike most weekends, and out at shows and restaurants the rest. If you ride, let's ride sometime.
SAY HI
Send a note. It comes straight to me.
Founder, investor, operator, artist or fellow rider. A couple of lines is plenty.