Isaac Correa · Madrid · September 2026
The first year of Hellomatik: what we built, what we published, what we learned, and what we bet
Madrid, September 2026. Hellomatik was incorporated on 28 July 2025, so this is the first September on which there is a year to account for. I am Isaac Correa, one of its co-founders, and I intend to write one of these every September: what we built, what we published, what we learned, and what we bet. Everything in it is either already published with a date on it or can be checked at the place the link goes to. Where it cannot be checked, I say so.
The company started from a habit rather than a plan. Between December 2022 and November 2024 I delivered three hundred Looker Studio dashboards for clients, one commission at a time, starting with a first sale of seven dollars on the last day of 2022. Almost nobody in those three hundred jobs asked me for a chart. They asked a question about their own business and hoped a chart would answer it. The ones who left happiest were the ones who could finally say a sentence out loud about their own company and know it was true. That is the habit: the interpretation goes next to the number, and a number nobody can read is decoration.
Something else was true in every one of those companies. The most valuable information in the building was not in any system. It was in the head of the person who reconciled things by hand every day: transport invoices against shipments, the sales figure of the month that comes out different on every screen, which orders did not leave yesterday and why. Hellomatik exists to write that down.
The first version was a system that answered restaurant phone calls: a voice on top of a database. It repeated what was in the record accurately, and when the record did not contain the answer it produced a plausible one in the same even tone. The two well-known fixes, looking things up instead of recalling them and saying “I do not know”, helped and decided nothing: they do not decide which of three disagreeing systems is believed about a given field, and they cannot look up the conditions a business applies every day and has never written anywhere. Before the software, then, there is a document. That document is what the year went into.
We set out how your company works: its data, its rules with their exact constants, and who may do what. We read your systems without writing to them. The agents only do what you approve: every action is declared in the map and authorised by you. And every figure we publish comes from a case measured at a customer’s site, and every case is published with what it does not show.
Those are the four sentences we repeat everywhere, on purpose, and I do not expect them to change. The language model is the last piece, not the first: models are a commodity, and one can be swapped for another in an afternoon. Data, everybody has. What almost nobody has is a living, governed model of how their company works. The model can change. The governance cannot.
The technical report states the scope of what the method runs on rather than implying it, and I repeat that scope here because it is the only part of this letter that is not an argument. At the time the report was written, three systems were running and one was open to the public, each on a different rung of the ladder from answering to watching to acting, and each with its limit published.
| The system, and what it does | The declared limit |
|---|---|
| Logistics, in production: 24 rules over live warehouse and ERP data, with over 30 million operations and 460,000 locations | Detects, explains and warns; never moves an order |
| B2B sales, in production: 29,000 customers recalculated nightly over 14 million sales lines | Prioritises and warns; the salesperson decides |
| Support, in deployment: reads the mail, builds the file against the ERP and leaves the reply drafted | Nothing goes out without the approved autonomy level |
| Retail, in public use: answers on catalogue and terms and starts defined procedures against the ERP | Only the procedures the company has defined |
Those are counts of what the systems run over, not of what they improved. The measured results are published case by case on Hellomatik’s site, each with what it does not show, and without naming the installation. A few of them, in the form the cases use. In an automated warehouse we measured, an order takes three minutes to pick and four and a half hours, at the median, to reach the person who picks it; nobody had measured that wait before, because it lived between two systems, and it is a measurement, not a result: it has no “after”. In the same installation, 41 per cent of the emails in the customer-service inbox were people asking where their order was; now a list of what did not ship yesterday arrives every morning with the cause, and whether that percentage falls is measured from the day the client signs the channel open. Closing a year of transport invoices, 180 a month in 30 formats, takes eight minutes, where it used to take days of a person who knows what they are doing. And 2,132 orders were held with no reason recorded anywhere, which is not a failure of the people; it is what happens when the map is in their heads and not on paper.
If we cannot name the customer, we say “an automated warehouse” or “a distributor that sells to other businesses” and keep the number. The number is the proof; the logo is not.
We chose to publish the method as a technical report with a DOI rather than as a brochure, because a technical report can be cited, checked and taken apart, and a DOI puts a fixed, dated version of the text in a repository that is not ours. The people we want reading it, operations directors, systems people, the person in a company who is quietly responsible for the ERP, read papers.
Three works carry a DOI. How we build a company’s ontology is the method itself: six layers, twelve rules the engines enforce, and one procedure that builds the model backwards from the first agents, deposited as 10.5281/zenodo.22647735. The machine of the future was written in November 2025 and published in September 2026 without changing a line, so that the date on it means something; it is where I set down what I think the next tool is and what it will always need from us, at 10.5281/zenodo.22671771. And The cliff of innovation names the point where the hard part of building something new stops being building it and becomes integrating it, and states the limit we found at the edge, at 10.5281/zenodo.22704763.
In September I put all of it in one order, in a long essay called The map of a company: nineteen sections with notes, drawn only from those three documents, the pages of this site and the sources they cite, with nothing added that is not in them. If you read one thing from this year, read that; if you read one section of it, read the one on which actions can be undone: the group of actions nothing puts back is usually the shortest list a company can write, and it is the one that decides how much a system may do.
The rest of what I have written is short and lives on this site: the first week, when two competent people give two confident answers to the same question; four questions a company can put to its own people before any software; the vocabulary, each word with what it is not; and the pieces on the people I look for, why a product is aimed at one person or at nobody, and why the tool exists before it is built. Everything published away from this site is listed in one place.
The report records three findings that changed the procedure, and they are the most useful paragraphs in it. Language turned out to be a property of the visitor, not of each message, and is now session state with a written precedence, tested before anything is switched on. A phase that depends on people acquiring a new habit, such as copying an inbox in, is not data; it is an assumption, and it now gets written down as a risk before the work starts. And at a manufacturer selling through subsidiaries, the field that looked like the customer identified who gets invoiced, not who buys: column names lie, and their contents almost never do, which is the entire reason the second step of the procedure is to read a real sample of records before naming anything.
Two things were confirmed rather than learned. The one requirement to start is not technical: somebody inside the company has to be able to say, for each decision under discussion, what the right answer is and why, because that is what the model writes down; if that person does not exist or has no time, the project stops there, and it is better to learn it on day one than in month three. And the limit of a system that acts inside a company is not the model and not the computing power, both of which improve every month without our help. The possibilities end where the creativity of the last person who uses it ends. The product’s job is to make asking easy. The company’s job is to have people who ask.
A letter like this is more useful for what it rules out than for what it promises, so here is what the rules cost, said plainly. Your team does not pull a new report on its own: every business question is a function written by hand, with its formula, because a free report generator produces reports that cannot be compared with each other. There is no forecasting with trained models: the signals are explicit rules that the person responsible can argue with and change. The initial load runs at night and takes hours; an agent takes time to switch on, because it is not activated without a frozen baseline, a stop rule and a rehearsal; and the daily series reach yesterday, not now. No agent writes except through a typed action declared in advance, and no limit lives in a prompt, because a limit in a prompt is a request to the model and a limit in the data is something a person can read, audit and change without redeploying anything.
We also do not name clients, and we do not publish a price. The licence is for the whole company, with unlimited users, and the figure is agreed in the first meeting.
A description that predicts nothing is a story, so the predictions carry dates. I keep the ones I have put a date on in one place: four so far, all due in 2028, three from the working paper on the cliff and one earlier, on X, each with where it was said and how anyone can check it. Next September this letter will report on them as they stand, and when the date comes, the row on that page will say held or missed, with the original wording untouched.
I do not choose people by their grades or their titles. I look for two things, and neither of them appears on a CV: someone who does not care what other people think of them, including me, and will say what they see instead of what they guess I want to hear; and initiative shown where nobody asked for it, something small built on their own, or an idea tried and not reached, with the exact place where it stopped. People with both signs are rare, and they are worth four of anyone else, not because they work four times as hard but because they need to be told once, they notice what nobody assigned, and they keep the rest of the room honest without meaning to. Being resourceful makes you a better machine. Being hungry makes you a better human.
The engineer who sits in the meeting is the engineer who writes the code, and stays. That is the whole difference between us and a consultant who delivers a report and leaves, and it is the argument a large company cannot make.
The ambition is to be the reference company for this category in Europe, starting in Spain and entering each country through the subsidiaries of the clients who are already there. I say that as an ambition of our own, without comparing us to anybody by name.
And the end the map serves has not changed since I wrote it down in November 2025. Running a company will stop being a manual, fragmented activity spread across many separate tools; when a task is repetitive, can be expressed as rules and is necessary for an organisation to keep going, sooner or later it gets automated. What stays human is the deciding: the value of a company is the people who work in it, and all of this works only with a human component in its decisions. A company, to me, is like a child: if you look after it, it grows, and it needs you every day. Anyone who owns a small business knows the wish to step away for a few days and come back to find the clients answered and the work done. What we are building is what lets that child grow on its own. Put without the metaphor: the difference between having a business and being tied to it.
That is the year. A voice that answered the phone became a document a company can act on; the document became a method with a DOI; the method is running, with its limits written down, in four systems; and the argument is now in one place, dated, so that it can be disagreed with in detail. Next September I will write what held.
Isaac Correa
Co-founder, Hellomatik
Madrid, September 2026. ORCID 0009-0003-0657-4419.
Isaac Correa elsewhere: ORCID · GitHub · Crunchbase · LinkedIn · X · Medium · Hashnode · Substack · blog · Peerlist · Hellomatik · Kodalogic. The full list, with identifiers, is on the home page.
The map of a company — the long essay, in nineteen sections with notes.
Bets, with dates — four predictions due in 2028, with where each was said and how to check it.
How we build a company’s ontology — the method, published as a technical report with a DOI.
How Hellomatik started — from a voice that answered restaurant calls to a document a company can act on.
The people I look for — two signs, neither of them on a CV.
The timeline — every date with the place you can check it.