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The Lab Smart Systems

One job your team dreads, gone. Working in your business, in six to twelve weeks.

Custom software, automation and AI for companies on the island. You keep the tools you already use. We build the piece that is missing between them.

book the leak audit

  • 120+local operations we have worked inside since 2012
  • 14 yrson the island, same timezone, in the room
  • 4languages your team is trained in: Papiamento, Dutch, English, Spanish
  • 100%of the code and the data stays yours
Recognise this

Almost every company here runs on the same four things.

A spreadsheet nobody fully trusts. A WhatsApp group where decisions get made and then lost. A system bought abroad that was never built for how things work here. And one person who knows how it all fits together, who you cannot afford to lose.

None of that is a technology problem. It is a fit problem. Off the shelf software is built for the average company in a market that is not this one, so the gaps get filled by people doing manual work, quietly, every day, forever.

Before you spend anything

Most of this fails. You should know that before we start.

Every agency selling AI right now is showing you the upside. Here is the rest of the picture, because it is what decides how we work.

  • 80%+ of AI projects fail. Roughly twice the rate of other IT projects. RAND Corporation, 2024
  • 42% of businesses scrapped most of their AI initiatives in 2025, up from 17% the year before. S&P Global, 2025
  • 40%+ of agentic AI projects are forecast to be cancelled by the end of 2027, on cost and unclear value. Gartner, June 2025

The pattern underneath those numbers is the useful part. What fails is the unscoped internal experiment: a pilot with no owner, no baseline and no definition of done. A widely reported MIT working paper found tools built with an outside partner reached production about twice as often as tools built internally.

So we do not sell you a pilot. We start by putting a number on what the manual work costs you today, and we only build where that number already justifies the build. If it does not, we say so and you keep the audit.

The rule

We only take on work that gives back five hours a week or more.

5

Below that, the maintenance costs more than the saving and you would be paying us to make your business more complicated. Above it, the arithmetic is usually obvious within one meeting.

It is a filter that loses us work. It is also why we do not have a graveyard of half-used tools behind us.

How you buy it

Three steps. Each one is a product, with a price and an end date.

No open ended discovery, no retainer you cannot leave, and the price is on the page.

Step one

The Leak Audit

One to two weeks, fixed fee
  • We come and watch the work happen, on site, not on a call
  • The real workflow mapped, including the workarounds nobody mentions
  • A monthly cost put on each manual step
  • A ranked list of what to build, and what to leave alone
  • A ninety day plan with names against it
You keep the audit whether you build with us or not. If you do build, the fee comes off the build.
$2,500 fixed, credited against the build
Step two

The Build

Six to twelve weeks to a first working version
  • One workflow, live in your business, not a demo
  • Connected to the systems you already run
  • Delivered in stages, so your team uses something real early
  • Priced once, from what the audit found
  • Code, data and credentials handed over at the end
A first working system costs thousands, not tens of thousands. The audit tells us which number before you commit.
from $9,500 · most first systems $12k to $28k
Step three

Keep It Running

Monthly, cancel whenever
  • Monitoring, fixes and small changes as the business moves
  • One improvement shipped each month, not vague support
  • Training for whoever joins the team next
  • Same island, same timezone, reachable in high season
You are never locked in. The system is yours already. We stay because you want us there.
from $650 per month
How we prove it worked

We measure it. We do not ask you how it felt.

People who adopt a new tool reliably believe it made them faster. In a controlled study of experienced developers, the participants expected to be about a quarter quicker with AI assistance and believed afterwards that they had been. Measured, they were actually slower.

That gap is the reason most automation ROI numbers you see are fiction. So before we build anything we time the job as it runs today, and we time it again afterwards, on the same work. The comparison is instrumented, not surveyed.

And we use your real cost of an hour, not a flattering one. Wages, contributions, the lot. You put the number in.

Where we build

Three sectors we already know from the inside.

We do not build for every industry. We build for the ones whose workflow we have already spent years inside.

Hospitality and tourism operations

hotels · timeshare
tours and activities
car rental · transport
  • One guest record, not fiveBooking data pulled together from your PMS, the OTA extranets and your own site, so the front desk and marketing are finally looking at the same guest.
  • Dispatch that survives high seasonTour and activity manifests, driver assignment, capacity, no shows and last minute changes on one screen instead of six WhatsApp threads.
  • A daily number management actually opensOccupancy, rate, channel mix and revenue in one morning view, sent before the stand up rather than assembled after it.

Healthcare and insurance

clinics · pharmacies
insurers and brokers
AZV linked admin
  • Government forms that fill themselvesThe paper step that ends every campaign, turned into two minutes on a phone. We have already done this one, and it is live.
  • Claims you can seeSubmission and status tracking so a denial gets caught the same week it happens, not at the end of the quarter when it is too late to correct.
  • Intake without the paper formPatient or policyholder intake, appointments and reminders handled digitally, in the language the person actually speaks.

Retail, distribution and F&B

supermarkets · wholesale
restaurants · franchises
multi location operators
  • One stock figure across every locationWarehouse, shop floor and kitchen reconciled into a single number, so you stop ordering what is already sitting in the back.
  • Ordering built for island lead timesPurchase ordering that accounts for shipping windows and supplier reliability, and warns you before a line runs dry rather than after.
  • Books that keep themselvesReceipts sent by WhatsApp or email, filed against the right expense automatically. Twenty hours a week, in one case below.
Why us and not a developer abroad

Four of these are things a firm in New York or Amsterdam cannot do at any price.

We watch the work

Everyone else discovers by video call. We stand at the front desk, in the back office, on the floor, and see the workaround nobody mentions in an interview because they stopped noticing it years ago.

We already know the workflow

We have run marketing for 120+ local operations since 2012. We arrive at the first meeting with questions, not a discovery template.

We speak your team's language

Papiamento, Dutch, English and Spanish. Training happens in the language the work actually gets done in, which is why it sticks.

We can also fill it

Most builders hand over a tool and leave. We are a marketing agency first, so the system arrives connected to the demand that feeds it. On the BENU build below we did both.

What we will not build

The list of things we talk clients out of.

A build that does not pay for itself costs you twice: once to make it, and again every year to keep it alive. So the audit always comes back with a do-not-build list next to the build list.

  • Anything existing software already does, that only needs configuring properly
  • Anything where the process itself is the problem, because software would only make the mess faster
  • Anything where AI is being asked to do what a simple rule does better and cheaper
  • Anything under five hours a week
  • Anything nobody internally will own once we hand it over
Case studies

Three builds we can show you. One of them is ours.

One named, one kept private, and the audit we ran on ourselves before we sold it to anyone.

BENU Pharmacy Aruba · six locations · live since October 2026

Switching pharmacy, cut from a counter visit to two minutes on a phone.

Changing pharmacy on Aruba means an official AZV form: paper, filled in by hand, signed, delivered. So every BENU campaign ended at a counter, and the interest generated online leaked away before it got there.

Now the customer does it themselves and signs with a finger. Behind that signature the page fills AZV's own PDF, placing every value at its exact position, then emails the finished form. AZV receives its own document, correctly completed, which is why it gets accepted.

It runs entirely in the browser, so personal details never leave the customer's phone before they submit. In Papiamento and English.

2Minutes to switch
6Locations served
0Paper forms
We built the tool and ran the campaign that fed it. That is the part most builders cannot do.
Back office · owner managed company

Twenty hours a week of bookkeeping, gone.

The owner was still doing the accounts by hand. We automated the bookkeeping in FreshBooks end to end, then built a second tool that turns a receipt into a filed expense: forward it by email or send it on WhatsApp and it attaches itself to the right entry. No shoebox, no Sunday evening, no catching up in January.

20Hours saved weekly
2Ways to send a receipt
0Manual filing
Twenty hours a week is half a salaried role, returned to the owner.
The Lab · internal tooling · August 2026

We audited the software we pay for. We were using about a seventh of it.

Every company accumulates subscriptions. A project tool, a time tracker, a seat for every client who needs to approve something. Each one made sense the month it was bought, and nobody goes back and checks.

We checked. Not by asking the team what they thought they used, but by reading the data: every task, every field, every channel, every time entry. Then we stopped renewing capability we had never touched, and built the part we actually use. It is called LabTool.

15%Of paid capability in use
LabToolWhat we built instead
This is the Leak Audit above, run on ourselves before we sold it to anyone else.

Tell us what is eating your team's week.

Describe the job everyone dreads. If we have built something like it, we will tell you what it took. If you do not need us, we will tell you that too.

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+297 732 2642  ·  Oranjestad, Aruba  ·  Pietermaai, Curaçao

The Lab team in a meeting around the boardroom table
The Lab's office building in Oranjestad, Aruba
The Lab's office in Pietermaai, Curacao