LABSMAW Labs is the R&D wing of Monkeys at Work. We build sites for people who care about their business — and somewhere around the hundredth manual check, we started building the tools instead. This is where those live.
Monkeys at Work builds and maintains sites for people who care about their business. Do that for a few years and you end up with a list: the thing that keeps breaking, the check nobody remembers before a launch, the report someone writes by hand on the first of every month.
Labs is where that list turns into software. Every tool gets built for us first and pointed at live client work. Only then does it get a price, a name, and someone answering support — in that order, and usually later than we would like.
It is a second mode, not a second company. The studio keeps shipping client work. Labs keeps shipping our own, and occasionally deleting it.
If we have to do it by hand twice, we build it. If we build it and nobody reaches for it, we say so out loud and kill it.
Every one of these started as a problem on a real client site, on a real Tuesday. Click through and see the actual output — no screenshots of a dashboard that does not exist yet.
Crawls a storefront the way a customer moves through it and flags every place the French version is missing, shorter, or quietly falling back to English.
// started because « it is translated » and « it is compliant » are not the same sentenceCrawls a storefront the way a customer moves through it and flags every place the French version is missing, shorter, or quietly falling back to English.
// started because « it is translated » and « it is compliant » are not the same sentenceoutput → scan reportSnapshots a live site on a schedule and shows exactly what changed overnight — before a client notices it broke.
// started because nobody enjoys learning about a broken header from the clientoutput → diff + alertThe outreach we were doing by hand in a spreadsheet, turned into a sequence: who to contact, what goes out, when to stop. We use it on ourselves.
// started because the spreadsheet had a tab called « follow up maybe »output → sequenceEvery title, meta description and image alt on a site in one table. Edit hundreds at once, see the before and after, and publish the batch in one go.
// started because fixing meta descriptions one product page at a time is not a job, it is a punishmentoutput → change batchEvery bet goes through the same three gates. Most never make it past the first one — that is the point of having gates, and it is cheaper than finding out in month six.
We ask agencies and store owners whether they have the problem, and whether they would pay to stop having it — before a line of product code exists.
A narrow first version, running on live client sites. If we do not reach for it ourselves within a month, it is not ready to sell to anyone else.
It ships with a price and someone answering support, or it gets killed and written up. No half-alive side projects sitting in a folder.
One email when a bet goes live, with an invite to try it on your own sites. If we ship nothing this quarter, you hear nothing this quarter. That is the whole arrangement.