How We Built 12 AI Companies in 12 Months

Most holding companies acquire businesses. We build them from scratch — but with one critical difference: they all share the same backbone.

Every company in the TKC Group portfolio runs on the same Firebase authentication system, the same GCP project, and the same Vertex AI models. When a user creates an account on HAMR.ai, they can log into TextAlerts.ai, MiniCFO.ai, or any other portfolio company with the same credentials.

This isn't a nice-to-have. It's the entire strategy.

Here's what the timeline actually looked like:

**Week 1**: Domain purchased. Next.js scaffold deployed to Vercel. Firebase auth wired in (takes 20 minutes because the shared config is already built).

**Week 2**: Core product logic. This is the only part that's truly unique per company — the actual value proposition.

**Week 3**: Landing page, SEO metadata, Insights integration. Kane gets the content pipeline going.

**Week 4**: Launch. Push to Product Hunt, share across channels, let Kane handle the social distribution.

Four weeks. Not four months. And the next company launches in three weeks because you've learned from the last one.

Here's what shipped:

**HAMR.ai** — Enterprise AI workforce. This is the flagship. Marketing agents, dispatch AI, revenue optimization. Where Kane and Midas live.

**Altbot.ai** — Consumer AI platform. The experimental lab for trading bots, research agents, and creative automation.

**TheAire.co** — Real estate marketing AI. Automated listing descriptions, market analysis, social posts for realtors.

**TextAlerts.ai** — SMS marketing for small businesses. AI-powered campaign generation and scheduling.

**MiniCFO.ai** — Financial AI for SMBs. Automated bookkeeping insights, cash flow forecasting.

**BatchFormat.ai** — Bulk file processing. Convert, compress, resize — all in the browser.

**WitCraft.ai** — AI content creation. Blog posts, social copy, marketing materials.

**FastLayne.io** — AI consulting and training for businesses new to AI.

1. **Start with shared auth from Day 1.** We didn't. The first three companies had separate auth, and migrating was painful.

2. **Don't over-design.** Ship the MVP, watch real users, then iterate. We wasted weeks on BatchFormat.ai's landing page when the conversion was happening on a completely different flow.

3. **Let AI write your content.** Kane (our marketing agent) now generates 90% of our social content and insight articles. We should have built him first, not fifth.

4. **Charge from Day 1.** Free tiers attract tire-kickers. Even $5/month filters for real users.