FOLIO 03 · RECTO
bilal & co.
A SMALL SHOP · FOR PEOPLE WHO HAVE TRIED EVERYTHING ELSE
this storefront sells me, in fourteen units, with prices arranged like a menu and the menu arranged like a confession. the experience of buying from this shop is, in most cases, identical to the experience of asking a friend for a favour, except the friend has decided, after years of saying no thank you, to start finally accepting payment. the friend now also brings eight AIs to every job, having discovered they are easier to delegate to than people, which is its own small sadness. you do not have to buy. you are welcome to read.
* i am, on this site, slightly more polite than i am in real life. i have been told this is a feature, not a bug.
00 · IF YOU WANT BACKGROUND FIRST
who is this, in three formats.
if this page raised more questions than it answered, longer answers exist on other domains. one is shaped like a portfolio. one is shaped like a link tree. one is the company brain, sold as a product, which is not a metaphor. none of them will, in any meaningful way, change the price. · the folio → https://lalss.dev · the link tree → https://lalss.dev/bilal · the second brain → https://lal.dev
01 · ABOUT THE SHOP
this used to be a desk. then a habit. now, a shop.
for a few years i did consulting the way most consultants do — by email, slowly, with the unspoken understanding that the price would not be discussed until the work was done. it was, on most days, working. it was also, on most days, exhausting. so i did the only reasonable thing i could think of: i wrote prices on each thing i was already doing, put them on a page, and called it a shop. the work has not changed. the awkward part of the transaction has only moved earlier in the conversation. since then, the shop has taken on staff: eight claude instances that draft, check, and remember. the opinions remain, stubbornly, mine.
the shelf.
i. the lurker
a tier you are already on. you got here by reading the previous sentence. the only feature included is the option to leave, which i would respect. price honest at zero, support honest at none, expectations honest at also none.
Rp0
ii. the small wave
a one-line message, sent through the form below, with no followup expected from either side. the equivalent of waving across a parking lot. acknowledged, not pursued. a surprising number of clients started here. an even more surprising number stopped here, which is also fine.
Rp0
iii. a coffee, on you
you transfer fifty thousand rupiah. somewhere, a barista hands me a cup. that is the entire transaction. there is no service rendered. there is, however, a small uptick in my willingness to reply to your next message, which is, in itself, a service of sorts.
Rp50.000
iv. a letter you did not ask for
one pdf, one page, mailed to your inbox four times a year. it contains: what i made that quarter, what i broke, and one (1) sentence i wrote at 04:00 that i could not, with a clear conscience, delete. subscribers receive nothing else. there is no archive. each letter is, in this sense, also the last one.
Rp150.000
v. one honest page
you tell me what you are working on. i write you back, in one page, what i think of it. signed, dated, formatted like the kind of document you would tape to a wall and then forget about and then find again, six months later, and realise was right. i charge for the writing. the opinion is included at no extra cost.
Rp750.000
vi. one hour, video, no slides
sixty minutes of me, on camera, for whatever you bring. a code walkthrough. a difficult conversation rehearsed. the read-out of a pitch deck you do not yet trust. ends with a written summary delivered the next morning. i have done this six times without anyone crying. i will not promise a seventh.
Rp2.500.000
vii. a review of your code, in writing
i read one of your repositories, end to end. you receive a 12 to 20 page pdf with the things i would change, ranked by how much they would actually matter, and a short list of things i think you got exactly right. it can be sent to investors, to a junior who needs convincing, or to no one. implementation is a separate decision. (the fleet reads it before i do, and argues. the pdf keeps the arguments i lost.)
Rp15.000.000
viii. three months at the edge of your business
i sit beside you for one quarter. weekly meetings. read-only access to whatever you can show me — books, codebase, ops dashboards, the thread your team is too tired to read. ends with a single deck, presented once, then yours to do whatever you want with. i will not chase you for the followup. life has taught me to expect, instead, the second-quarterly silence.
Rp15.000.000
ix. an unscheduled meeting
a flexible engagement for things that resist a checkbox. you describe a problem. i propose a price, a shape, a duration. we agree, we revise, sometimes we walk away. payment can be a number, a barter, or a really good bug i have not seen before. i do not promise a fix. i promise to read the message twice.
Rp5.000.000
x. the long engagement
a sustained relationship. i become a fractional cto, or a co-founder without the equity (the eight-instance fleet arrives with me, constitution included), or a senior pair for your one engineer who is exhausted. weeks become months. months become a deck of slack threads neither of us reads in full. there is no exit clause. there is, however, a quiet protocol: when one of us notices it has stopped working, we say so on the same day. that, too, is part of the offer.
Rp50.000.000
xi. set up your ERP
i install, on your own infrastructure, the same accounting + manufacturing system i run for myself. four to six weeks, mostly spent listening: to your bookkeeper, your operations lead, the spreadsheet that has, against everyone's wishes, become the source of truth. you receive a working ledger and a habit of asking better questions. i receive the small, private satisfaction of seeing it used.
Rp100.000.000
xii. set up your CRM
lead intake, pipeline, marketplace ingestion, a small landing-page builder so your team stops booking my time for three-line edits. two to four weeks. i will not make your salespeople better. i will, more usefully, make their excuses harder to defend. the dashboard is the part that helps. the conversation it forces is the part that matters.
Rp25.000.000
xiii. set up your POS + webstore
a register that works on bad wifi, paired to a webstore that takes the order, sends the bank instructions, watches the deadline, prints the resi, and emails the customer when you mark it paid. customer accounts run on a magic link, no password to forget. emails arrive from your own domain, not from a saas inbox. variants where you need them, none where you do not. one to three weeks per outlet. for shops that, until recently, have kept inventory in someone's head. i train one person on the till. i train another on the editor. then i leave. the system, on most days, will be better at this than i was.
Rp10.000.000
xiv. a day of the fleet
you bring one problem that fits in a working day. i point eight claude instances at it: recon, build, adversarial review, a written trail of every decision. i supervise, disagree where it matters, and sign the result. you receive the output, plus a note on how it was made, because the note is, increasingly, the product. subject to the house constitution: 'done' means verified, in your hands, end to end. one day. one problem. no meetings, unless the problem is a meeting. the fleet does not attend meetings. lucky fleet.
Rp7.500.000
STOCK TAKE · THIS WEEK
in stock: one (1) honest opinion, ready to go. three (3) hours of attention, freshly slept. eight (8) claude instances, chronically awake. low: patience for the same conversation, twice. weekends, broadly. out, again: certainty. a polite version of myself that is also more available.
i ordered a one-page note. he sent me one page. i did not, at any point, feel cheated. i did, at one point, feel a little seen, which i had not asked for, and which i am still, three months later, processing.
— a client, who paid in full and then left a long voice note thanking me, which i have not yet replied to.
03 · WHAT THE SHOP CAN AND CANNOT DO
i sell time, in shapes you can hold.
an hour is an hour. a page is a page. a setup is a setup. these are the things i know how to count. things i cannot sell, despite repeated requests: certainty, urgency, a guarantee that this will help, a polite version of myself that is also more available. the AIs are not for sale separately either; they come embedded in the work, like salt. these are not for sale at any tier. that is, mostly, the whole policy.
04 · IF YOU HAVE READ THIS FAR
thank you for reading.
i wrote each line on this page myself, often more than once, and the fact that you stopped on any of them is something i will, quietly, take as a compliment. if i can help, i will quote you back honestly. if i cannot, i will tell you so, and, if i know one, point you toward a person who can. that, on most days, is the entire job.
04 · BEHIND THE COUNTER
the shop runs on the thing in xiii.
you click an item. you go to checkout. you transfer to the rekening on screen, down to the unique three-digit suffix that helps me find your slip without asking for one. you upload the bukti. an email arrives that looks like it came from lalss.com, because it did. if you forget which order is yours, you type your email at /order, and a magic link delivers every order you have ever made with me, in one quiet list. the receipt that prints when i ship is on a5, not a4, because a5 fits in the dompet of the courier without folding. since this year, every change to this shop ships through eight claude instances and one reviewer that has never once laughed at my jokes. it checks the live site before anyone is allowed to say done. the receipts are still on a5. all of this is also the thing for sale in xiii. that is, perhaps, the most honest thing on this page.