Work · Case study · 3 November 2026
Karu Materials: name, site, filings, cost model and supplier letters in three months, with a person sending every email
Short answer: A one-person importer got its launch paperwork from AI agents between August and November 2026. The owner sent every letter. It is a related company, not a paying customer.
Karu Materials is a new Atlanta building-materials importer run by the founder’s household. From 3 August 2026 the same agents Staffbox installs did its naming, website, email, market brief, import checklist, warehouse RFPs, landed-cost model and supplier drafts. Every number below has a date and a file behind it. Send up to three requests your team already answered; drafts come back within 2 business days.
Updated 3 November 2026
A one-person building-materials importer, launched by AI agents, with a person sending every email
Fact Karu Materials is a new Atlanta company that will import hemp-lime building blocks from a Portuguese manufacturer. It is run by the founder’s household and it has paid Staffbox nothing, so it is not a customer and is not counted as one; it is the best record we have of what the same agents do for a company that is still just a name and a plan. Everything below has a date and a file behind it. karumaterials.com is the public result.
Day 1 (3 Aug 2026)
Name chosen against a state register search, domain registered, a public site built and deployed with its own deploy pipeline, a LinkedIn company page, and a US market brief on building-code status and online channels.
Weeks 1 to 7
Email on the domain, an import filing checklist with the customs and pallet rules, a thermal-test lab plan, three warehouse requests for proposal, and a landed-cost model with nine linked sheets.
Month 3 (24 Oct 2026)
A written advisor review of market timing, with every number marked as a figure or an estimate, before a call with the manufacturer. The verdict was to go small and slow, and the company followed it.
What the agents produced, in order
| Job | What the agent did | What a person did |
|---|---|---|
| Name and entity | Searched the state register and the trademark register for conflicts, compared three names, wrote the reasons down. | Picked the name. Decided on a trade name first and a company later. |
| Website | Designed and built the single-page site, the image ladders for phones and large screens, the deploy pipeline, and the plain-text summary for language models. Nine copy passes in two days, including one that removed every claim without a source. | Read every pass, sent the feedback from a meeting with the owner, approved each deploy. |
| Set up the domain mail routing and the send-as addresses, tested a round trip. | Logged in where a login was needed; the agent never held a password. | |
| Supplier letters | Drafted the introduction, the pricing ask, the sample-container ask and the test-lab proposal, in the owner’s voice, with the market numbers shown and sourced. | Sent them from their own mailbox. The agent cannot send. |
| Import and logistics | Wrote the one-time filing list (tax number, customs importer record, bond, tariff code) and the per-shipment pack (pre-load filing, treated pallets, lab certificate), then three warehouse RFPs for the port of entry. | Chose the port and the broker route; sent the RFPs. |
| Numbers | Built a landed-cost workbook from the manufacturer’s price list: nine sheets, container mix, freight, duty, dealer margin, and a benchmark against local wall systems. Formulas, not pasted values, so the owner can change an input. | Supplied the real price list and checked the duty rate. |
| Advice | Wrote a review of whether the timing was right, from the drive folder, the mail threads and public market data, with estimates marked as estimates. | Took the decision: a small first order, not a distributorship. |
What we learned, and what carries to your company
- The agent is fast at the paperwork a new company drowns in. Filings, checklists, RFPs and a cost model took hours, not the weeks a first-time importer usually spends finding out what they are.
- Sourcing is the discipline. The first site draft had claims the manufacturer’s data did not support. A pass that removed every unsourced line was the single most useful day. Our workers now label every figure as a fact, a statement or a guess; that habit started here.
- A person sends. Every letter to the supplier, every RFP, every vendor reply went out from the owner’s mailbox after they changed it. Twice the draft was wrong about the owner’s intent and the owner caught it. That is the design, not a failure.
- Credentials stay with people. Registrar, mail, cloud and LinkedIn logins were typed by a person at the keyboard; the agent worked through sessions a person opened.
- What did not go well. The first market brief put a code appendix under the wrong letter; the owner’s read caught it. An early plan aimed at big-box retail listings; the October review reversed that, because the market had moved. Plans written by an agent go stale like any other plan.
Stated For a customer, the same work would run on a Mac mini in your building, on your files, at the price on the home page. No customer has run this yet; this project ran on the founder’s own machines and cloud AI on the founder’s own keys. In the free hour we say whether your first job looks like one of the rows above.
Sources
- The company’s shared drive: the business plan (Aug 2026), the import setup note (4 Aug 2026), the landed-cost model (17 Sep 2026), the container framework (18 Sep 2026) and the advisor review (24 Oct 2026). Private; dates and titles are quoted, contents are not.
- The public site karumaterials.com and its source repository, whose history shows the dated passes.
- No supplier, price, margin or person other than the company is named here on purpose.
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