A small studio.
One vertical. Custom builds.
SoftKnack is a founder-led studio building custom AI agents for US day spas. We find where your spa is losing money — through a free 30-min discovery call and a 20–40 page custom AI audit ($2,500 value) — then build the single agent that stops it for $1,000 flat. Med spas open up in Phase 2 (Q4) with HIPAA-ready infra.
About these numbers: 15+ years is the founder's track record at Series A–C product companies. The $2,500 figure is what a comparable AI audit costs from a consulting firm — we give it free as our closer. Spa work at SoftKnack is new; we're picking 5 founding clients in exchange for case-study rights and locked retainer pricing.
A founder-led studio.
Not a 50-person agency in a startup costume.
SoftKnack today is the founder plus a small team of engineers, building custom AI agents for one vertical: US day spas. We don't have SDRs, account managers between you and the work, or an offshore-vendor playbook. The person you meet on the discovery call is the person writing your audit and building your agent.
The model is deliberately small. Founder-led delivery on every spa. Custom training on every agent. Hosting that we run, monitoring we watch, monthly tuning we do personally. That's the unit. It doesn't scale beyond ~30 spas without breaking, which is exactly the size we want to stay until Phase 2 opens up med spas with HIPAA-ready infrastructure.
Our focus is simple — give a handful of day spas the kind of AI ops layer that's usually only built in-house at chains with 30 locations, then prove it works and grow only as fast as we can grow it well.
Make AI worth
what it costs.
Most AI tools for service businesses are off-the-shelf chatbots that sound like AI. Most "AI agencies" charge five figures for a Zapier flow. We do neither. Four operating principles.
Custom on the outside, modular inside
Every spa's agent is trained on its own services, prices, and voice. Internally we reuse a clean module library so we move fast without selling you a template.
Shadow mode before auto-mode
Every agent runs in shadow for the first two weeks — it drafts, you approve, the customer gets your reply. By go-live you've already seen the agent at work. No black-box launch.
Founder on every engagement
As long as we're small enough for it — and we plan to stay small — the founder is on every audit, every build, and every monthly tuning. That accountability is part of the deliverable, not a bonus.
Honest pricing, honest scope
Pricing is on the website. The audit is free. If we don't think we're the right fit, we'll say so on the call and recommend what to do instead. No SOW gymnastics, no fake urgency, no hidden setup fees.
“Every spa I look at is losing real money to slow follow-up and missed bookings. A custom agent fixes both. The problem isn't AI. The problem is most AI tools weren't built for this kind of business.”
— Deepak T M S, Founder
The founder.
The person building your agent.
Deepak T M S is an engineering leader with 15+ years of experience building software at Series A–C product companies — spanning food-tech, enterprise services, and fast-growing scale-ups.
Across those roles, he led engineering and quality orgs from 2 to 25+ engineers, built automation systems from scratch, and owned the operational metrics that actually move — cycle time, customer follow-up speed, and team productivity.
He started SoftKnack to do one thing well: build the kind of AI ops layer that small service businesses can't usually afford, into US day spas. The pivot to a single vertical was deliberate — horizontal AI consulting dies in 90 days, vertical custom builds compound.
Off-the-shelf AI chatbots are everywhere. Spa owners can tell. Custom-built agents that sound like your spa is the only version of this that actually converts.
Engineering achievements (prior roles)
Today Deepak is on every discovery call, writes every audit personally, and is on every build. As we sign founding clients and grow, that direct involvement is the deliverable — not a marketing promise. If at any point you don't get a reply from the founder within a business day, the model has broken and we'd want to hear about it.
Want to see what we'd build for you?
Free 30-min discovery call. 20–40 page custom AI audit ($2,500 value) inside 48–72 hours. No commitment to anything that comes next.