The context
Dissertation Editor helps PhD candidates and academics get their most important work across the finish line — and it does it with 100% human editing, a promise at the center of the brand. Behind that promise sits a genuinely complicated operation: a specialist workforce of editors and statisticians matched to projects that vary enormously in length, subject, formatting standard and deadline.
The business didn’t have a problem with its records. It had built its customer system carefully and the team trusted it. What was missing was everything that had to happen around it — turning an enquiry into a quote, a quote into a booked consultation, a consultation into the right editor holding the right files, and finished work into a paid invoice. All of that lived in email, spreadsheets, and people’s heads.
The challenge
- Editors had no home base. Assignments, instructions, documents and deadlines were scattered across email and shared drives.
- Quoting and booking were done by hand, which made them slow and easy to get wrong.
- The workflow was unusual. Some stages of a project matter to the editor; others are purely internal. Any system had to know the difference.
- A hard constraint: don’t replace what already works. The team depended on the system they had, so the job was to build around it, not move them off it.
- The brand promise had to hold. Automation could touch everything around the editing, but never the editing itself.
The approach
I build on top of the tools a business already owns rather than ripping them out, and this was a textbook case. Their existing system stayed the single source of truth. Around it I built the parts that were missing: a way for clients to get a quote and book time, a place for editors to actually do their work, and a clear view over all of it for the people running the company. They had a rough version to push on within weeks rather than months, and it has been hardened and improved steadily ever since.
A word on how one person delivers something this complete. I use AI agents to do the execution — including testing the software the way a real person would use it, over and over, until it genuinely holds up — and to write the documentation that on most projects never gets written. I make the judgment calls: how the business really works, where the truth lives, and what should happen when something goes wrong. To be clear, that’s how the software was built. The editing this company sells is entirely human. I automated everything around it.
What I built
Instant quotes from the client’s own document.
A client uploads their manuscript and gets an itemized quote straight back, priced consistently every time instead of by someone’s best guess — across line editing, copy editing, proofreading and formatting. Pricing accuracy is checked continuously against known-good examples.
Consultations that book themselves.
Editors publish when they’re free, clients book against it, and everyone gets the invitation, the video link and their reminders without an administrator touching anything.
A home base for the editors.
One sign-in, and an editor sees exactly the work that’s theirs and active: the files, the instructions, the deadlines, messages with the office, and their own pay. No more chasing details through email.
A clear view for the people running it.
Assigning work, managing the roster, setting rates, reviewing quality and approving pay — plus the ability to see the platform exactly as any editor or client sees it.
A job board that always tells the truth.
When a project moves forward, the board updates itself. It knows which stages are real editor work and which are internal back-office steps, so an editor only ever sees what’s genuinely on their plate — and never sees anything they shouldn’t, pricing included.
Email that actually arrives.
Every automatic message is set up to land in the inbox rather than the spam folder, with unsubscribes and undeliverable addresses handled properly.
The details that make it trustworthy
Anyone can wire up a form. What makes a system safe to run a business on is the unglamorous part:
- Editors see exactly what they need and nothing more — internal information, pricing included, never crosses the line.
- It stays fast and dependable even when the systems it depends on are having a bad day.
- Nobody gets double-booked, double-charged, or sent the same invitation twice.
- Time zones are handled properly, so a reminder arrives at the right moment for the person receiving it rather than an hour off.
- Two brands run on one foundation — clients see the right one, while the shared team works in a single place.
- It runs in the client’s own account. Their data stays theirs, backed up, and updates land without taking the system down.
Results
- Live and used every day by the core team and the full editing roster.
- A first working version in weeks rather than months, then improved continuously ever since.
- Editors now handle their whole pipeline themselves — work, files, schedule, messages and pay — instead of chasing it across email and spreadsheets.
- It grew to run a second, UK-facing brand on the same foundation.
- The team kept the system they rely on, and finally got the operations layer it never had.
What this shows
Dissertation Editor is a fair measure of what I do: take a genuinely unusual business, build the operational platform it’s missing around the tools it already trusts, and get it into real use — tested, documented and dependable — fast enough and lean enough that a company this size can actually afford that kind of care. And then keep improving it, all the way to a second brand.