Cheap code turned Sitemate's customers into competitors. Here's how Hartley responded.

Hartley Pike is co-founder and CEO of Sitemate, which builds software for frontline workers in construction, infrastructure, energy and utilities. Sitemate has thousands of customers, offices around the world and backing from Blackbird. Before founding it, Hartley was a construction engineer at Lendlease, working on projects like NorthConnex.

In 2025 Hartley saw his competition jump tenfold. Other software companies were part of it, but the bigger threat was his own customers, who could now build their own tools as the cost of code collapsed. So he set Sitemate a goal: be ten times better, faster and cheaper than the option of building it yourself.

Hartley walks through each one: how moving the whole engineering, product and design team closer to customers is shrinking the feedback loop from months towards days, how Storm takes on the work that happens around Sitemate's software, why hiring is above plan rather than below it, and how a personal AI agent cleared 18 hours of his admin in one weekend.

What you'll take away:

• The new bar: "you have to be ten times faster at responding to feedback directly from users than that user or company could process a change internally themselves."
• Feedback loops took years with on-premises software and months in the cloud. In the AI era Hartley expects days, even hours: "From the point where a user has friction with something to, six hours later, it's on production."
• Forward deploy the whole organisation, not one role. Every engineering, product and design team member moves closer to customers, and "scaled forward deployed engineers" work the daily stream of user feedback.
• Aspirational jobs to be done: work people would do "if they had infinite hours in the day. But no one actually does them." AI can, because "it's just token costs. It's not real human time."
• Storm checks the work, not just the form. Was the inspection done properly, or just ticked and flicked? Hartley estimates Sitemate couldn't help with seventy per cent of that work before.
• New roles are appearing as fast as old ones go: forward deployed roles, AI ops, and people managing Storm's cost and performance. "People should be much more concerned about a peer who's AI native than about a role being made redundant."
• "Use more AI" isn't an instruction. Sitemate removed limits on tools, rewrote "How Sitemate Communicates" for the AI era, and now rates staff on AI usage against impact in performance reviews. High usage, low impact is a "meat proxy".
• Hartley handed his personal admin to Instinct, a personal AI agent, and processed "about 18 hours of administrative work" in his first weekend.

Links

• Hartley Pike: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hartleypike/
• Sitemate: https://sitemate.com/
• Alasdair Bell: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alasdairbell/
• Fractional Head of AI: https://www.alasdairbell.com/

Hosted by Alasdair Bell, fractional head of AI for startups.

Chapters
00:00 Intro
05:09 Competition jumps tenfold
07:30 Customers building their own tools
10:50 Ten times better, faster, cheaper
13:06 Faster: from years to hours
17:00 Bring engineers closer to customers
19:23 Forward deploy the whole org
22:10 Just because we can, should we?
23:23 Better: building Storm
27:35 Aspirational jobs to be done
29:38 Checking the work, not the form
33:41 Cheaper: what AI did to hiring
37:59 Beyond "use more AI"
39:24 Meat proxies and slop cannons
41:06 Getting people to AI native
43:43 Constraint as a forcing function
46:01 How the CEO role has changed
49:26 Instinct: 18 hours in a weekend
53:52 Advice for a 50-person builder