What I'm Building and Why I Can't Shut Up About It
The short version
I'm building a software company called CAMU that makes tools for manufacturing leaders. The first product, GembaBot, is live now at gembabot.com.
Think of it like this: factories have whiteboards on the floor where leaders track problems, assign tasks, and keep things running. I'm turning that whiteboard into software — but software that still feels like it belongs on the shop floor, not in a corporate office.
The problem I live every day
I run a manufacturing floor. We make precision parts for the oil and gas industry — stainless steel components that go into drilling equipment, held to tolerances thinner than a human hair.
Running a floor like this means walking it constantly. You're looking for problems, checking on processes, talking to operators, making sure nothing slips. In the manufacturing world, this is called a Gemba walk — "gemba" being the Japanese word for "the actual place." The idea is simple: go to where the work happens, observe with your own eyes, and act on what you find.
The problem? Most teams do this with paper checklists, or they just wing it. Important observations get lost. Problems get spotted but never tracked. The same issues come up week after week because nobody closed the loop.
The tools that exist to fix this fall into two camps, and neither works for someone like me:
There's nothing in between. Nothing purpose-built for lean manufacturing that you can download from the App Store and start using the same day. No IT ticket. No six-month implementation. No $200/hour consultant telling you what you already know.
That's the gap. That's what CAMU fills.
What GembaBot actually does
GembaBot guides a leader through a structured walk of their facility. You set up your floor layout — departments, work cells, the path you walk — and the app prompts you with consistent questions at each stop. Things like: Is the area clean and organized? Are the operators following standard work? Is there a safety concern? What surprised you?
When you see a problem, you flag it — add a note, snap a photo. When the walk is done, everything syncs and shows up for the team to review together in their daily meeting.
From that review, the team assigns actions: who's fixing it, by when, what priority. Those actions get tracked until they're closed. The full loop looks like this:
Walk → Flag → Review → Action → Close
That's it. It sounds simple because it is. But that loop — done consistently — is the difference between a manufacturing floor that slowly improves and one that slowly deteriorates. The hard part was never knowing what to do. It was having a system that makes sure it keeps getting done.
Why this is a real business
Manufacturing is enormous. There are over 600,000 manufacturing facilities in the US alone. Most of them run on paper, whiteboards, and tribal knowledge. The industry is going through a digital transformation, but the tools being built are either too expensive or too generic for the people who actually run the floor.
CAMU's business model works in two layers:
The apps feed the premium business. The premium business teaches us what to build next in the apps. It's a flywheel.
I'm building this with two partners. Between the three of us, we have manufacturing engineering backgrounds, lean training, and the sales instincts to make it work. And here's the part that matters: we're not guessing what manufacturers need. We ARE manufacturers. I use my own tools on my own floor every day. When I show a prospect how GembaBot works, I'm showing them my actual data from my actual facility.
Why I'm so pumped
I've spent years watching expensive consultants fly in, tell us what we already know, hand us a binder, and fly out. The binder goes on a shelf. Nothing changes. The knowledge was never the problem — the sustainment was.
CAMU is the sustainment. It's the tool that keeps the good habits alive after the consultant leaves. It's the system that makes sure the Gemba walks keep happening, the problems keep getting tracked, and the actions keep getting closed.
And the interface? It looks like the whiteboard on our shop floor. White background, green and red magnets, black tape grids. Every manufacturing person who sees it instantly recognizes it. It doesn't look like software designed in Silicon Valley. It looks like something that belongs in the plant.
The name CAMU stands for Clarity, Accountability, Momentum, and Unity — which is exactly what happens when a leadership team actually uses these tools consistently. And our URL is letscamu.com because the vision is that teams gather around a screen every morning and someone says: "Let's CAMU."
It becomes the verb. The tool disappears into the habit. That's when you know lean is actually working.