About

Loam Studios exists to help people avoid the stress of building software. It's a superpower to use a computer to reduce your labour. Gone are the days of dusty filing cabinets or coffee stained legal pads for running your busines. Now we click, tap, and swipe on computers filled with warehouses of information if we were to print it all. In a generation or two, paper archives will only be a thing for archivists and the arcane.

For all its power, building great software is not easy. With agents its never been cheaper. It's also never been harder because building software has never really been about the code. It's about discovering and making explicit the relationships between different pieces of data in a business or a home. It's about understanding how the data is transformed over time.

For example, a property manager signs a tenant to a unit, the lease renews at a new rate, a repair gets billed back to the owner, and the tenant moves out mid-month. Which rent applies, who owes what, and what the unit earned that year all depend on getting those relationships right.

At Loam Studios, we help people navigate the process of building custom software.

Most agencies sell a software build assuming that the project is worth the investment. Then they do damage control when they built what was asked of them and the client discovers it doesn't actually solve their problem. We take the opposite approach.

With an open mind we explore whether there is value in investing the time and money necessary to build the project. In Product Therapy, we unpack the idea. In Proof of Concept, we build enough of the core experience to feel the benefit. And in Build, we take all that we've learned and build for its users.

Loam Studios was started in 2011 while Jeffrey Guenther, our founder, was in graduate school at Simon Fraser University’s School of Interactive Arts and Technology. As he worked on his PhD thesis, he saw a need. Researchers from non-technical fields needed tools built to support their research efforts. To meet this need, he started Loam and began offering design and software development services to other researchers. During this time, Loam worked with researchers in fields of business and sustainability. It built custom web applications that featured custom data visualizations.

After taking a break and working in e-comm, Loam is back for its second season and ready to help you navigate the Age of Agents.