For more years than I wish to recount, I have been building software that helps organisations eliminate repetitive work.
Most of my career has been spent leading engineering teams that automate complex business processes. We built systems that could replace days or weeks of manual effort with workflows that completed in minutes.
The goal was always the same. Let people spend less time pushing information around and more time doing work that actually mattered.
The creative industry was never part of that plan.
That changed because of a conversation with my partner, Kara.
The question that started it
Kara has spent years working in creative agencies. One day she watched me demonstrating some of the automation systems we had built and asked a simple question.
"What could you do for an agency?"
- Kara
I didn't know.
So I asked her to explain how agencies actually work.
She walked me through everything. How a client brief arrives. How it gets refined. How teams interpret it differently. How projects are costed. How work moves through client service, strategy, traffic, creative, production and finance. How people rely on experience, instinct and conversations that never make it into a system.
The more we talked, the more obvious it became that agencies were carrying an enormous amount of hidden knowledge.
The systems knew very little.
The people knew almost everything.
The first prototype
Within a few weeks I had built a small proof of concept.
It could read a client brief, understand the deliverables, recommend the right people based on their skills and availability, build a realistic project plan and schedule the work.
At first I assumed it would be an interesting experiment.
Then we started testing it with real client work.
That was the moment everything changed.
We pilot tested genuine agency briefs through the system and compared the results with what experienced operations teams would have produced.
The recommended people matched the people the agency would have selected. The timelines were realistic. The project plans made sense.
Then something unexpected happened.
The system started validating fixed fee budgets against client pricing schedules with surprising accuracy. We had never specifically designed it to solve that problem, but because it understood the project, the client, the deliverables and the commercial constraints, it simply became another decision it could help make.
That was the moment I realised this was much bigger than project planning.
Planning needs context
To create a good project plan, the platform needed to understand everything around the work.
It needed to understand the client, the brief, the agency. Most importantly, it needed to understand the people.
Once all of that context existed in one place, planning became easier. Scheduling became smarter. AI could assist with real work instead of isolated tasks.
Every decision became more informed because it was grounded in the same shared understanding of the organisation.
That small prototype slowly evolved into what Runnit is today: an AI-native work management platform built specifically for creative agencies.
Not because agencies need another project management tool.
Because they need a system that understands how they actually work.
The problem we believe needs solving
The same information gets entered multiple times. Critical knowledge lives inside experienced people instead of systems. Some briefs are exceptional while others barely contain enough information to start.
Every weak handover creates more questions, more meetings, more rework and more pressure further down the project.
None of that makes agencies more creative.
It simply makes them slower.
For years, software could only automate highly structured processes. AI changed that.
For the first time, we can help teams work with the messy, unstructured information that agencies deal with every day. Briefs. Client requests. Feedback. Conversations. Brand knowledge. Team experience.
That changes the kind of support software can provide.
Our mission iS simple
Help agencies large or small deliver the same outstanding work they always have while operating faster, more efficiently and more profitably.
The future is not about replacing creative people. It is about giving them the time, information and support to do their best work.
That is why we built Runnit.
- Mark