The vision was always there.
The tools finally caught up.
Built by Bill Hamway — a product manager and designer who spent years designing software he couldn't build, until agentic coding changed everything.
The $48,000 lesson
I hired an offshore development team to build the event photography tools I'd been designing for years. We went 2x over budget. They delivered half of what they promised. I walked away $48,000 lighter with nothing to show for it.
But the vision was never the problem. The barrier to entry was. In 2019, if you couldn't write code yourself, you were at the mercy of whoever could. The gap between knowing exactly what needed to exist and being able to build it was enormous.
Years of waiting
I kept working trade shows, conferences, and corporate events. Every time, the same problem: great photos get taken, and then they disappear into a Dropbox folder nobody opens. Guests never see them. The brand gets nothing. The photographer's work goes to waste.
I kept thinking someone would build the obvious thing — capture photos at events, brand them, get them to guests before they leave. Nobody did.
Agentic coding changed everything
AI coding, now known as agentic coding, reached a turning point. I realized my specific mix of experience — years of software product management, design, and architecture — meant I could finally build real products. Not just Figma mockups. Not just specs for someone else to interpret. Real software.
BrandStudio is built with AI. Specifically, Claude Code. The iOS app, the macOS app, the web platform, the backend, this website. But AI doesn't replace the work. It replaces the bottleneck. I still spend every day designing the product, making decisions, testing on real devices, and pushing it forward. AI let me build what would normally take a team of ten. It didn't make it easy — it made it possible.
Solving real problems
I now have the power to build real software tools I've dreamt of building. Intentional, well-thought-out tools that solve real problems. That's a core value for me: software should make our core work easier. Not harder. Not more complicated. Easier.
- A photographer shouldn't need to understand APIs to get branded photos to guests in real time.
- An event manager shouldn't need a dev team to set up face recognition at a conference.
- A guest shouldn't need to download an app just to see their photos.
Every feature exists because I've stood at a booth or behind a camera and thought “why doesn't this exist yet?”
Expensive event photos and videos, lost to time in a random folder. Guests never see them. The work goes to waste.
Our Values
What drives BrandStudio
Make it work
Not “make it scale” or “make it enterprise-ready.” Make it work. At the event. Under pressure. When it matters. Make the most of what we have.
Reliable and fast
Software should never slow you down. At a high-stakes event, your tools need to be faster than your workflow. Quick, reliable, and out of the way.
Think it through
Think through the best path for a photographer shooting a high-stakes event. Think through how guests receive their photos. How easy it is for a non-tech guest to save a photo to their phone. These details make a remarkable experience.
Your brand, not ours
We give you the tools and get out of the way. Your logo, your colors, your galleries. Guests see your brand, not ours. It's about you, not us.
Complexity is our problem
Face recognition, real-time delivery, brand management — hard problems that should feel simple to the person using them.
People, not leads
Guests are people. Photos are gifts. Every feature starts with “how does this make someone feel?”
BrandStudio isn't backed by a VC or built by a big team.
It's built by someone who does this work and needed better tools to do it.
Come build with us
BrandStudio is early. If you want tools that don't exist yet, you're in the right place.