Stop reading about AI.
Start shipping with it.
4 weeks. Non-technical founders and operators. You ship something real in week one.
This is what the course is and what it produced. Cohort 2 is running now, and we are not taking new students.
Midway through week two it was a takeoff moment. I built a whole marketing system that's streamlining tons of my work, a game app for my son, and a website for my wife. It all just unlocked.
Enrolments are closed
Cohort 2 started on 31 Aug 2026 and there is no waitlist to join. We have not set a date for another cohort. If you want the same outcomes inside your business now, that is what an AI Audit does.
They came to learn AI. They left shipping.
Verbatim from Cohort 1's demo day and weekly calls. Anonymised because we didn't ask to make them famous, just to make them builders.
When I put the project online and realised anyone could look at it and it could actually be a product - my brain went, oh my God. How can I monetise this?
I'm really pleased I've got a tangible outcome - and we did it completely in Claude, which walked me through every small step.
There was something frustrating at work, I jumped in to see if this could solve it, and it unlocked incredibly. I just kept going.
It's personally been one of the most enriching things I've done in quite some time. It's opened up a new world.
Shipped by Cohort 1: non-technical operators, in 4 weeks
- A live personal website taking payments through Stripe
- An internal credit-application system, built in 3 weeks
- A marketing system streamlining a real day job
- An agent that turns meeting notes into draft emails on a schedule
- A lead-gen tool built in one evening
- A World Cup predictions app
- A game app built for (and with) a kid
- Ad creatives and reels spun straight from a brand kit
You know AI is the biggest shift in a decade.
You just haven't shipped anything yet.
The gap between understanding AI and actually building with it feels enormous. Every tutorial assumes you can code. Every course sells theory. And the tools move so fast that what you learned last month is already outdated.
AI Pod closes that gap in 4 weeks. You'll go from watching to shipping, with a cohort of builders and three instructors who do this every single day.
It was taking me a lot of time, so I just built a tool to do it, which made life a lot easier for me.
Ship a website
A live website or tool, built by you with AI. No dev required. Real and on the internet before Week 1 ends.
Build a skill
Your best workflow packaged as a reusable skill - write it once, invoke it any time, share it with your team.
Build an agent
Running daily while you sleep by Week 3. Plus the architecture to keep building your whole suite from here.
This was crazy easy… I've built this in the last three weeks.
Six things you'll actually own
Not just knowledge. Tangible things you built, deployed, and own.
A shipped project
Not a plan. Not a prototype. Something live and usable that solves a real problem in your business.
Your own reusable skill
Your best workflow packaged as a skill you invoke any time - write it once, run it forever, share it with your team.
An agent that works while you sleep
At least one scheduled automation live by Week 3. Set it up once, it runs daily without you.
Every tool connected
Email, calendar, Notion, Slack, Drive, your notetaker: connected in pre-work, so Claude works from the real thing instead of guessing.
A pod that gets it
4 builders matched to your goals and timezone. They'll keep you accountable - and push you to ship more than you thought you could.
A Claude that knows your business
Built by interview in Week 2, corrected every week after. It sounds like you, and it gets sharper the longer you use it.
Everything that I want to do with this website is possible. I just have to do it.
Four things that make it stick.
This isn't a course you watch alone and forget. It's a structured system designed to keep you building, accountable, and learning from 50 people at once.
Weekly content
Michael and Finlay build with AI every week and share what they find. You get the tested version: one lesson, distilled, async.
Pod catch-ups
3-5 people matched to your timezone, experience, and energy. You meet weekly. Real accountability, no fluff.
Whole-group weekly call
Every Friday on Zoom with the full cohort. Show what you shipped, ask the hard questions. Always recorded.
Automated learning digest
Every builder's Claude session gets summarised automatically. What 50 people built lands in your Slack every morning. 1,000 real lessons in 4 weeks.
50 builders × 4 weeks = 1,000 real lessons landing in your Slack automatically.
Most courses give you one perspective: the instructor's. AI Pod gives you 50, from people solving the exact same problems you are, right now.
I couldn't have done that without this course - it's learnings, but also that accountability. Really, really happy something got shipped.
We build in Claude. You keep the thinking.
We have a strong bias towards Claude. It's the most capable tool for non-technical builders today. But 80% of what you learn transfers directly to Cursor, ChatGPT, Gemini, or whatever ships next month. The mental models, the agent architecture, the skills you build: all of it follows you.
Claude (primary)
- CLAUDE.md system
- Projects, skills and agents
- The app, not the terminal
- Connectors into your real tools
Any AI tool
- How to write instructions AI follows
- Agent architecture patterns
- Reusable skill patterns
- Tool connection strategy
Gemini · Cursor · Copilot
- Thinking frameworks carry over
- Agent patterns carry over
- Your voice + context carry over
- Connector-style integrations exist everywhere
The tool is the vehicle. The thinking is what lasts.
How much time does it actually take?
Most students say Week 2 is when it clicks and they start stealing time from other things.
Once I sat down for like an hour, you make so much progress. It's crazy.
4 weeks. Real deliverables every single one.
Pre-work plus 4 weeks of building. Every week opens with a ten-minute quick win, then the main build. Written lessons, screenshots, async content, and 1 hour live every Friday.
- 💳Claude Pro or Max, and the Claude app set up. No code editor, no terminal, nothing you haven't used before.
- 📁Your AI Pod project created, plus your personal course tutor connected so Claude can answer questions on the lesson you're actually on
- 🔌Connectors switched on where your context really lives: email, calendar, Drive, Notion, Slack, Granola
- 🐙Free GitHub, Vercel and Supabase accounts. Claude does the driving; the accounts just need to exist.
- 🛡️What a connector actually grants, and the two actions you never approve on autopilot
- 🎙️Wispr Flow: voice dictation, 5x faster than typing. First month free on the cohort link.
- ⚡Quick win: a morning brief that reads your calendar and inbox and emails you at 7:30am, running in the cloud whether your laptop is open or not
- 🗣️Claude interviews you and writes real files: the start of a setup that makes every future session smarter
- 🎨Claude Design: lay your page out on a canvas instead of describing it in a chat. No CSS, no knowing what CSS is.
- 🌐Your site live on the internet through GitHub and Vercel, unlisted by default, on a link you choose who to send to
- 🧯What to do when it breaks, so being stuck never costs you more than a few minutes
- ⚡Quick win: your last meeting becomes a finished follow-up email in under two minutes
- 🧪The before-and-after experiment that proves why context beats clever prompting
- 📄Your CLAUDE.md, built by interview: the file that makes every session sound like you
- 🔍An audit of your own week, ending with the one build and the one agent you'll make
- 🧠Bonus: personal and company brains, and why they're the thing businesses actually pay for
- ⚡Quick win: your three most overdue replies, drafted in your voice
- 🛠️Skills: walk a workflow through once, save it, then trigger the whole thing with two words
- 🤖Your first agent running on a schedule, safely, while you sleep
- 🗂️A project per workflow: stop re-explaining yourself at the start of every conversation
- 📋The interview that turns your build idea into a brief Claude can actually execute
- ⚡Quick win: a stranger's review of your Week 1 site, and the three fixes it names shipped in one prompt
- 🧱How real software actually gets built: one small piece at a time. Change, look, approve, live.
- ✅The ship checklist that separates 'works on my laptop' from 'works'
- 🔁The feedback loop that keeps your build getting better every week after the course ends
- 🎤Demo day: three minutes in front of the cohort, and 50 builders in your corner afterwards
Pre-work opens the moment you enrol, so you can start setting up tonight. Each week opens as the cohort reaches it, and everything stays open once it does.
The course is balanced well in that you can go deeper if you want to, or if you want to just quickly get on with it, you can too. It's well designed that way.
Taught by builders, not theorists
All three instructors build with AI every single day. This isn't academic. It's what works in the real world, distilled into 4 weeks.
Michael Batko
Co-founder, Hourglass AI
Spent the last 2 years turning Australian businesses into lean, modern machines with AI. Believes every founder should be able to build their own tools. No dev required.
Ships with Claude daily. If it works for Hourglass clients, it goes into the course. 4,000+ subscribers on his AI newsletter.
Anna Sekulic
AI Specialist, Hourglass AI
Building AI workflows since she was 16, with three years of hands-on experience designing agent systems for real businesses. Runs Hourglass' AI audits and team workshops.
AI-native builder: shipped her own iOS app with AI tools alone. She's the bridge between where you are now and what you'll build. She's walked every step herself.
Finlay Ekins
AI Builder, Hourglass AI
Builds the systems that Hourglass ships to clients. Brings the technical depth to make sure you're not just using AI - you're architecting with it.
Specialises in taking non-technical teams from zero to shipping. Designs the agent architectures and workflows that power every Hourglass transformation.
Honest answer: maybe not.
✅ Built for you if…
- →Haven't shipped yet. You've played with AI but haven't built anything real.
- →Founder or operator. Not a full-stack dev. You build the business, not the code.
- →Want to move faster. Not attend another webinar about AI.
- →3-5 hours a week. That's all it takes to ship something real.
- →Learn by doing. Not by watching YouTube playlists.
❌ Not for you if…
- →Want it done for you. You'd rather hire someone than build it yourself.
- →Already shipping. AI workflows every day. This would be too basic.
- →Theory over practice. You prefer learning about AI over building with it.
- →Can't commit. 3 hours a week for 4 weeks is too much right now.
Questions you're probably asking
No. AI Pod is designed for non-technical founders and operators. Everything happens inside the Claude app: no code editors, no terminal, nothing you haven't used before. By the end of Week 1 you'll have a site live on the internet that you built yourself.
No. Cohort 2 has started and enrolments are closed. There is no waitlist and no checkout: the page is here so you can see what the course covers and what people built in it.
We haven't decided. Cohort 3 isn't scheduled and we're not taking names for one. If we run it, it will be announced here first.
Nothing changes. Your seat, your pod, the Slack community, the Friday calls and your billing all carry on exactly as they are. Closing enrolments only stops new sign-ups.
Cohort 2 was $1,499 AUD as a single payment. That price is a record of what this cohort cost, not an offer: pricing for any future cohort would be set then.
Then the course isn't the fastest path anyway. An AI Audit looks at your actual workflows, finds where AI helps, and we build it with you. Same thinking as the course, done directly in your business. Book a discovery call and we'll tell you honestly whether it's worth doing.
3-5 hours: 1 hour of written content (async, read when it suits you), 1 hour on the live Friday call, 1 hour with your pod, and 1-2 hours building your project. Most students say Week 2 is when it clicks and they start stealing time from other things.
A Claude subscription (Pro or Max) and a laptop. That's it. Nobody needed a project idea locked in on day one either: Week 2 audits your actual week and picks the build for you. Pre-work opened a week before kickoff with a detailed checklist, and everything else it asks you to sign up for is free.
A group of 4 to 5 students matched to you on timezone, experience level, and energy. You meet once a week for an hour to share progress, troubleshoot together, and keep each other accountable. Think of it as your personal board of advisors for the month.
Michael Batko, Anna Sekulic and Finlay Ekins from Hourglass AI. Michael has been building AI systems for businesses for the past 2 years - daily. Anna runs Hourglass' AI audits and team workshops and has been building AI workflows since she was 16. Finlay builds the agent architectures and workflows that power every Hourglass client transformation. Together they cover every angle.
We have a strong bias towards Claude. It's the most capable tool for non-technical builders right now. But 80% of what you learn transfers directly to ChatGPT, Cursor, Gemini, Copilot, and whatever ships next month. The mental models, the agent architecture, the skills you build: none of that is Claude-specific. The tool is the vehicle. The thinking is what lasts.
All written content stays accessible for the full cohort duration. Your pod and the Slack community are there to help you catch up. If life genuinely gets in the way, we'll work something out. One Cohort 1 builder lost half the course to travel and still told us: "Got tons of value for the half I've done."
AI Pod is closed to new students.
The work it teaches is not.
Everything on this page is what we teach and what the last cohort shipped. We build the same things directly with businesses: the audit finds where AI actually helps you, then we build it.