What happens when the tools aren't the problem, but everything happening between them is?
For Stacey Kilmister, founder of Hummingbird Tech Group Pty Ltd, the answer starts with understanding what is actually creating friction inside a business.
Stacey first noticed the problem while working in New Zealand, a country largely run by small businesses. What struck her was how exhausted many of the owners were, and how constantly businesses seemed to be opening and closing.
Then she moved to Port Hedland.
Billions of dollars move through the town, yet the local businesses holding the community together were opening and closing so quickly she couldn't keep track.
“Getting the work was never the problem. Running it was.”
What Stacey couldn't let go of was that these people had chosen freedom, and it's exactly what they lose.
When the Founder Becomes the Integration Layer
Businesses don't necessarily need more software. In many cases, the tools they already have work extremely well.
The problem is everything happening between them. Processes don't always connect cleanly, information gets lost along the way, work gets repeated and decisions keep coming back to the founder.
Over time, those small inefficiencies start to add up. Stacey calls this “systems drag.”
This can leave the founder carrying more of the business than they should. The more knowledge, decisions and processes that sit with one person, the harder it becomes for the business to operate without them.
What might begin as an operational headache can eventually affect the bigger picture too. Taking time off, bringing someone new into the business, handing over responsibility or preparing to sell all become more difficult when the business still relies so heavily on its founder.
For Stacey, the first step is understanding where that drag actually exists before deciding how to fix it.
Diagnose Before You Build
Hummingbird starts with diagnosis. The Systems Drag Index™ is the framework, and the diagnostic built on it measures the operational friction already present in a business.
What comes after that diagnosis should depend on what it finds, rather than assuming every business needs the same technology or simply needs more automation.
That's also how Stacey approaches AI. Some problems are better suited to deterministic technology, particularly where certainty, rules and repeatability matter. AI has a role where interpretation, context, pattern recognition or reasoning can genuinely improve the outcome. Other decisions should stay with the founder.
“The destination isn't maximum automation.”
The goal is to give founders more operational independence without taking away their ownership or judgement.
Entering the AI Founder Sprint
By the time Stacey joined Spacecubed's AI Founder Sprint, supported by Superteam Australia and Solana, she'd already spent more than a year working on the problem behind Hummingbird and developing the Systems Drag Index™.
Stacey wasn't looking for a new problem to solve. She wanted to test what should happen next.
The methodology and diagnostic were already in place, but Stacey wanted to see how they held up against real operating businesses rather than relying on her own assumptions. The Sprint also gave her the opportunity to question where AI belonged in Hummingbird, where deterministic technology made more sense, and what should actually be built from there.
Putting the Work in Front of Real Operators
The Sprint gave Stacey the chance to take the work out of development and see what happened when real businesses started using it.
Hummingbird restructured parts of the instrument, launched the pilot cohort and started receiving real results from real operating businesses.
That testing has already started to reveal things that weren't obvious during development. One of the first is founder dependency.
Two very different operators have shown how much important knowledge can still sit with the founder, even when the business itself is operating successfully. If that knowledge isn't transferable, stepping away from the business becomes much harder.
It's still an early signal rather than a conclusion across the cohort, but it's already influencing what Stacey wants the final diagnostic to uncover.
AI Isn't the Proposition
For Stacey, one of the most useful conversations during the Sprint came from a session presenter pointing out that labelling something as AI isn't a differentiator anymore.
That pushed Stacey to think more carefully about where the technology genuinely belongs within Hummingbird.
“AI isn't the proposition. The ability to understand and diagnose the operating problem first is much more important.”
Working alongside other founders reinforced that perspective. Everyone in the Sprint is using increasingly accessible AI capabilities, but the technology itself doesn't explain why one business is different from another.
And with AI making it possible to build faster than ever, Stacey has become more conscious of making sure speed doesn't come at the expense of knowing what should actually be built.
“AI makes it incredibly easy to build quickly, and therefore incredibly easy to build the wrong thing quickly.”
For Hummingbird, that means continuing to validate the measurement before deciding what intervention should follow.
What’s Next for Hummingbird?
The immediate focus is completing the pilot and understanding the operating stories behind the scores. Those results will help shape the final diagnostic before it goes in front of partners.
At the same time, Hummingbird OE is being built around a principle that sits at the centre of Stacey's approach: the diagnosis should inform the intervention.
“Measure and Analyse. Remove and Build. Prove and Improve.”
That doesn't necessarily mean building more software. The right intervention could be removing unnecessary complexity, making better use of systems a business already has, changing a process, using deterministic technology or introducing AI where it genuinely adds value.
The important part is knowing what the business actually needs before deciding what to build.
And as a business grows, the shape of its drag can change too. What works at one stage may create friction at another, which means the operating environment needs to adapt with it.
Ultimately, Stacey wants founders to build businesses where the knowledge isn't trapped inside one person's head.
If the operating knowledge is structured and transferable, someone else can step in, take responsibility or eventually take over without everything walking out the door when the founder does.
The founder can remain in control of the decisions that matter without having to be present for every part of the operation.
That's the kind of freedom Stacey wants Hummingbird to help create. To learn more about Hummingbird Tech Group Pty Ltd or Systems Drag Index™ you can visit their websites or connect with Stacey via LinkedIn here.
See Stacey pitch Hummingbird at our upcoming AI Fellowship and Founder Sprint Demo Night on September 24th. Register here!
The AI Founder Sprint is a Spacecubed program delivered in partnership with Superteam Australia and Solana.