Before DouxProcess was software, it was decades in insurance. Running agencies. Signing payroll. Watching good people retype the same application into the same carrier website.
Payroll climbed. Errors slipped through. Hiring more hands fixed neither. So our founder learned to build the fix himself. Here's every step since, the good days and the ones we'd rather forget.
Everybody's doing AI now.
Your carrier. Your vendor. Your nephew. The guy at the chamber breakfast with a slide deck and a dream.
Ask the real AI agency to please stand up, and half the room does. That's fine. Honestly, that's good.
Any agency owner who understands a little can build their own system now.
It's just the way I do it.
DOUX
And it's for the agents who feel left behind because they weren't born with the tech itch. You don't need the itch. You need a process that already works.
Robert Badoux, founder
Back before any of this had a name.
Payroll went up every year. Mostly to pay people to retype the same application, the same certificate, the same follow-up. Every retype: a fresh chance to misspell somebody's LLC on a policy.
Instead of hiring rep number six, our founder learned software engineering. The first script typed an application once and filled it in everywhere. Cheaper than a rep. Never calls in sick.
Then software stopped helping with the work and started doing it, right inside the programs we already used.
Funny thing about shortcuts… you only go looking for one once you're good and tired of the long way.
July 2026, when we started building the brain.
Every email got sorted against a rulebook we wrote by hand. Nothing reached a client or a carrier until a human said yes. Day one rule. Still the rule.
We built a bridge so the system could update files on its own.
Where it went sidewaysThe screen said it failed. It hadn't. We ran it 24 times anyway.
Don't take the screen's word for it. Go look at the record yourself.
Every decision, procedure and lesson in one place, read before every action. Page one, roughly: finish what you start, and don't hand the work back.
A nightly job copied a list. Nobody watched it, because why would you.
Where it went sidewaysIt re-added the same entries every night. The list became mostly copies of itself.
Fixing the code is only half of it. You restart whatever runs it, and then you sit there and watch it run.
Every mistake became a written procedure the system checks before it decides. There are 39 now. None of them came cheap.
You don't learn a whole lot on the days it works. It's the days it breaks that teach you, and if you're smart, you write it down.
Late July, our first real product.
We built a self-serve quote site, and the founder tried it cold, like a customer.
Where it went sidewaysEvery carrier site had logged us out overnight. The system confidently quoted $0. Great price. Not real.
Before the day gets going, check that every door still opens.
It went well. It really did.
Where it went sidewaysWe paused the automations for the demo, including the morning due-today report. Next morning: no report. Nobody noticed.
When you turn something off, write down what it was doing for you, and then go do that part by hand.
August, and the first time we started over.
A real web app, logins and all. Our second agency signed up as customer number one. (We know a guy.)
Before it touched anything real, we let four attack agents loose on it. They found 29 ways in. We closed all 29.
Passing your own test doesn't make you safe. You let somebody else take a swing at it.
Just a landing page, but it was a flag in the ground.
Nobody pressed send on this one.
Where it went sidewaysSomething moved that nobody told to move. The script behind it had been opened, never run.
Nothing should move unless somebody asks it to.
We boxed up the whole thing in one afternoon and wrote on the lid: please don't come back here.
Starting over isn't the same as giving up. Sometimes it's just the honest thing to do.
Sometimes you've gotta tear the whole thing down to find out you knew how to build it all along.
August into September, rewrites two and three.
One screen that stays empty until a human is actually needed. Turns out boring is very hard to build.
A control panel for the service team. Then we measured it honestly. Humbling.
Where it went sidewaysThe big Run button ran nothing. Four tries. Zero cases.
A button isn't a feature until you've watched it do the work.
The day the system started quoting live for the agency. Our counter starts here.
Where it went sidewaysIt could barely reach its own tools. Like hiring someone and hiding their keyboard.
Build the tools into the engine itself, not off to the side.
The software isn't the expensive part. The thinking is. Every test, every rewrite, every 'one more time' runs the meter.
Where it went sidewaysOne wrong setting flipped us from a flat plan to pay-per-use. Real bill, every day, zero clients.
Know what each run costs before you start it. Building this is a real line on the budget, not a weekend project.
The Console and the Desk shut down the same day. Everything they taught us came along for the ride.
September up to now, rewrite number four.
A nightly job kept two systems in step and reported back every morning: all good.
Where it went sidewaysSomeone had changed a password. For days it said all good and did absolutely nothing.
A green light isn't proof. You go check that the work actually moved.
Everything moved off one computer and onto its own servers. Nobody babysits a laptop overnight anymore.
One real case, first email to last step. Then we packed up the old system.
Where it went sidewaysIt left behind 391 launch checks nobody ever ticked.
Done is something you check, not something you feel.
The system isn't allowed to guess. When it isn't sure, it asks one plain question. So we hired a licensed person whose whole job is answering them.
It sorted the agency's mail on its own. Anything it wasn't sure about stayed in front of a person.
Unanswered questions and wrong-looking answers used to pile up. Now they go straight to the owner, and that client's file stays locked until it's sorted.
Our second agency moved onto the same desks, same phone line, same team. One crew, two agencies, zero tab-switching. That's when DouxProcess stopped being a tool and became how we work.
We broke it, wrote it down, and built it again. Turns out that's most of the job.
We've rebuilt just about everything along the way, but we never took the person out of it. Before anything leaves the agency, somebody who knows the client takes a look, and we figure that's how it ought to be.
Live, from the agency where it was born. Running DouxProcess since Aug 24, 2026.
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