More than likely, the last time you heard from Torta Studios was over a year ago.
We are pleased to inform you that we didn’t shut down, pivot to crypto, or disappear as part of some elaborate guerrilla marketing stunt. We just stopped sending the newsletter.
If you don't remember us, or don’t remember signing up to the newsletter, here we are again.
We’re Colin Thornton and Alan Corvalis, two longtime friends and Charlotte residents who co-founded Torta Studios, a company that helps founder-led startups with product growth and retention.
If by now you’re thinking, “I definitely don’t remember subscribing to this” you might actually be right.
If you’re around Charlotte, there’s a good chance we met at Seed the South or another event we sponsored, where sponsors received attendee contact information.
If you don’t want us in your inbox, the unsubscribe is at the bottom of this email. No hard feelings!
While The Proofing Room collected dust, Torta Studios got a lot busier…
Part of that meant spending less time talking about the Charlotte startup community online and more time actually showing up.
We sponsored and spoke at Seed the South, worked with Innovate Charlotte on Growth and Product Jams, spent time with founders at CLT Startup House, and started a podcast with our friends Drew Burdick and Charles D'Andrea called Builders of Charlotte.
Our tiny software studio, casually sponsoring the Southeast’s largest venture funding event alongside Bank of America, while somehow out-sponsoring some of our former employers. As one does.
The bigger change, though, happened inside Torta. A year ago, we spent a lot of time talking about AI tools:
Which model was better
What coding agent was faster
Which workflow was the newest thing on X that week
And to be frank, we still care about all of that, but much less than we used to. What’s top of mind for us right now is this:
How do we build AI systems that preserve a consistent standard of work while different models are doing different parts of the same job?
Answering that question changed how we build products and how much work a tiny team can realistically take on. Somewhere along the way, our agents became part of our workforce, and now they even have names and personalities.
We have a lot to share about what’s happened over the last 12 months. As you may imagine, some of our experiments worked extremely well and some of them crashed and burned.
That's what The Proofing Room is going to be about again: what we're building, what we're learning while building it, and the mistakes useful enough to share.
Funny enough, this new way of working had one particularly weird side effect… Somewhere between client work, events, the podcast, and rebuilding our development process...
We made a web game. It’s called Torta Stand and it’s live now.
Somewhere in the roadmap, this became a reasonable use of engineering time.
Tomorrow, we'll explain why we ended up building a game about selling chicken tortas in Uptown Charlotte.
- Alan, Colin & the Torta team
P.S. Yes, the game involves customer retention. Also, listen to our podcast!