Every first post starts with the same temptation — introduce ourselves, lay out the manifesto, explain the brand. We're skipping most of that. This is a working journal. Short notes from inside B2B teams, the patterns we keep seeing, and the things we wish we'd known six months ago.
One thing is worth saying once, plainly: what Vanilla Labs is for.
For decades, the tool was the moat. Services were the awkward side business. That's flipped. Anyone can spin up a dashboard or an automation in days. What can't be replicated quickly is the judgment behind it: knowing which workflows to build, why they'll stick, and how to get a team to actually use them.
Vanilla Labs is built for that world. We embed with B2B teams — 10 to 100 people — and work in three layers, in order: educate the team, design the human/agent workflows, audit what's already running. We leave on a date. The deliverable is your team owning the next round without us in the room.
If we did our job right, the active agent count in your business goes down — and your senior team can name every one that survived.
A B2B founder with three half-built agents. Senior team using AI quietly, in tabs nobody else could see. A phantom layer — automations and prompts running outside anyone's audit — that was bigger than the official one. The founder had become the bottleneck for every AI question, because she was the only person who knew what was running.
The technology wasn't the hard part. The hard part was the gap between a team that was curious about AI and a business that was actually running on it. Nobody had designed the org around the tools, so the tools ran the org.
Vanilla Labs grew out of early AppBuster-adjacent experiments with B2B teams and turned into its own practice once the pattern became too consistent to keep treating as one-off engagements. The thesis is the same. The shape has gotten more specific.
We'll keep this section short and update it as the engagements evolve. Two or three sentences each — so you can see what the practice looks like, week-to-week.
Some of it is client work we can describe without naming the team. Some of it is the internal scaffolding we're building so the practice scales without writing ten proposals from scratch.
We're writing the things we'd want a peer to send us. If you find a post useful, forward it to a B2B operator you know. That's the distribution that matters to us right now.
If you want to actually talk, book a 15-minute triage. It's a working call. You leave with what to do first. If we're not the fit, we say so before the call ends.
— Alex & Rachel
It's a working call. You leave with what to do first.