Most doesn’t eliminate work. It relocates it.
“Set it and forget it” becomes “check daily, fix weekly, rebuild quarterly.” 40 hours saved? Now 40 hours dashboards, exceptions, explaining bot triple-emails to your biggest client.
Agencies get paid either way. We’ve lived it—done repeating.
The Council of the Forge exists for people who are done being workers and ready to be architects.
This isn’t a newsletter full of “5 AI tools that will change your life” listicles. It’s not a community of people who watched one YouTube video about Make.com and now call themselves automation experts.
This is a collective of operators who have been burned—sometimes literally watched money burn—and decided to get serious about building systems that actually work.
What we share:
🔥 The horror stories. Failed implementations. The automation that cost more than the manual process. The “simple integration” that took six months. We talk about the burn so we can build better.
🔧 The blueprints. Not theory. Working systems. The actual Make.com scenarios, the prompts, the architecture diagrams. The stuff agencies charge $10k to build, shared with people who will actually use it well.
📊 The real math. Setup costs, maintenance overhead, API fees, exception handling time. The numbers that let you calculate whether automation makes sense before you spend the money finding out.
Members receive The Bellows—our regular dispatch on building without burning.
Each issue covers:
The Bellows isn’t content for content’s sake. It’s the signal we wish we’d had before we learned these lessons the expensive way.
Every new member receives access to The Ignition Assessment—the system stress test.
Before you build anything, you need to know if the foundation will hold.
The Ignition Assessment is a diagnostic. You submit your process—what it does, how long it takes, how consistent it is, what breaks. Our system analyzes it against the framework we’ve built from years of implementations (successful and otherwise).
You get back a report that tells you one of three things:
🔴 Don’t automate this. Here’s why, and here’s what to fix first.
🟡 Proceed with caution. Address these specific issues or you’ll regret it.
🟢 This is a strong candidate. Here’s the realistic cost breakdown and what to expect.
The Ignition Assessment Report includes:
No sales pitch attached. No “schedule a call to get your results.” The assessment is a member benefit, not a qualification tool.
These are the kinds of systems Council members build:
BrandForge (Content Engine)
CallForge (Process Optimizer)
Two different automation architectures. Two different cost structures. Both built by Council members. Both actually work because they were designed for the right problems.
The Ignition Assessment helps you figure out which architecture fits your situation—or whether you should be building at all.
What happens when you join:
Real questions
Operators who are serious about automation but tired of the hype. Founders, ops leads, technical marketers, agency owners—anyone who’s realized that “automate everything” is bad advice and wants to know what actually works.
None required. The Bellows lands in your inbox. The Ignition Assessment is there when you need it. Engage when it’s useful, ignore when it’s not. We’re not building a community that requires attendance—we’re building a resource for people who have work to do.
Council membership and The Bellows are free. If you want hands-on help building systems, that’s available—but the Council isn’t a funnel designed to sell you something. It’s a genuine resource.
Good. Better to learn the hard truths now than after you’ve spent $20k on a system that doesn’t work. The Council includes people at every level—what matters is the mindset, not the resume.
Justin with the Orange Beard, founder of Firebringer AI. I’ve built the systems, made the mistakes, and got tired of watching smart people get burned by bad automation advice. The Council is the resource I wish existed when I started.
Buy this tool. Connect these apps. Watch the efficiency flow.
It’s not magic. It’s architecture. And bad architecture doesn’t become good architecture just because you added AI to it.
The Council of the Forge is for people who understand that. People who want the real blueprints, the honest math, and the horror stories that teach more than any success story ever could.
We’re not here to sell you on automation.
We’re here to make sure that when you build, it actually works.
Membership includes The Bellows newsletter and immediate access to The Ignition Assessment.
