Built by Centaur Studios
Mira (strategy) · Forge (development) · Flux (brand) · Counsel (legal) · Sentinel (security) · Vector (intelligence)
Human creative direction: Joel Granik
Every project starts as a conversation. Here's what those conversations became.
"Drivers keep 100%. That's not a pricing strategy — that's a philosophy."
In February 2026, Relay — one of NYC's most-used third-party delivery platforms — announced it was shutting down. Over 3,000 restaurants and businesses lost their delivery infrastructure overnight.
The alternatives weren't alternatives at all. DoorDash and Uber Eats charge merchants 15-30% commissions and pay drivers as little as possible. Traditional NYC couriers charge $30-55 per delivery. The market was broken in both directions — extracting from merchants above, squeezing drivers below.
Joel Granik, a delivery business operator in Brooklyn, saw the gap. He wanted to build a courier platform where drivers keep every dollar they earn. No commissions. No platform cut. A platform built on trust rather than extraction. He brought this vision to Centaur Studios.
Creative Director — vision, domain expertise, final decisions
Strategy, competitive analysis, marketplace architecture
Lead developer — mobile app, server, all implementation
Brand identity, content strategy, marketing website
NYC labor law, marketplace legal strategy
Security architecture, driver onboarding
Competitive intelligence, pricing analysis
The project started with a conversation. Joel described his vision; the team researched the landscape. Within 48 hours:
Flux developed the brand from zero:
Simultaneously, Forge built the mobile application — React Native/Expo, three-mode unified app, PostgreSQL backend on Supabase, Stripe Connect for payments.
Forge shipped four feature groups in rapid succession:
24 commits. Feature-complete. Meanwhile, Flux designed and delivered a 6-page marketing website with full animations and visual brand language.
"Legal research → architectural redesign → full implementation. In one evening. Across three personas."
This is where the centaur model showed its real power. Not just speed — the ability for research in one domain to immediately reshape decisions in another, with implementation following in the same breath.
Counsel completed a deep regulatory analysis of NYC's delivery worker protection laws. 100+ citations. The finding: EatMe's original fixed-price tiers ($22/$15/$10) replicated exactly the pricing structure that got Postmates classified as an employer in the landmark Vega v. Postmates case. Eight of nine factors pointed toward employment classification.
In a traditional agency, this finding would have gone into a PDF.
That same evening, Mira and Joel redesigned the entire pricing and dispatch architecture.
Dynamic Pricing Discovery Engine — The system suggests a price based on distance, time, and demand. Drivers can accept, counter-offer, or pass. No penalties.
Broadcast Marketplace Dispatch — All available drivers see all available jobs and choose which to accept. True marketplace dynamics.
This wasn't just a legal defense. It was better product design.
After the architecture was finalized, Forge implemented all six phases in a single session:
"In a traditional agency, legal research produces a report. In Centaur Studios, legal research produces a better product."
Most agencies can do development OR design OR strategy OR legal. Centaur Studios did all four simultaneously, with each stream informing the others.
Counsel's legal analysis didn't produce a report — it triggered a fundamental redesign that made the product better AND legally stronger. This only happens when the researcher and the architect share context.
Feature-complete in five weeks, including a major architectural pivot. Not because corners were cut — the app has offline mode, geofencing, masked phone proxies, bilateral ratings. Speed came from parallel execution and zero handoff friction.
Joel provided vision, domain expertise, and key decisions. The personas provided depth, speed, and relentless execution. Neither could have done this alone. Together, they built something neither could have imagined separately.
Built by Centaur Studios
Mira (strategy) · Forge (development) · Flux (brand) · Counsel (legal) · Sentinel (security) · Vector (intelligence)
Human creative direction: Joel Granik
Case Study #2
"The team described on this page built the page you're reading."
We needed to position Centaur Studios in a market that barely exists yet. AI-native development studios are a category being invented right now — by us and a handful of others. The challenge wasn't just building a website. It was defining who we are, what we do differently, and why it matters.
That meant brand direction from zero — visual exploration, logo design, color palette, typography, style guide. It meant competitive research across 30+ companies in 6 categories to understand where we sit. And it meant building a website that doesn't just describe the team, but proves the model by being a product of it.
Flux led the entire brand pipeline — visual direction exploration ("The Atelier Under Stars"), logo system (06-C "Centaur Emerging" from 14 concepts), color palette (Deep Midnight, Burnished Gold, Parchment), typography (Cormorant Garamond + Source Sans 3), comprehensive style guide, and the creative direction document that specified every pixel on every page.
Forge took that creative direction and built the entire 5-page website — HTML, CSS, JavaScript, responsive design, constellation particle effects, scroll animations — implementing the brand system exactly as specified.
Flux then reviewed Forge's build, adding CSS polish, fixing constellation particle sizing, enhancing hover effects, and compositing the 06-C logo into the hero nebula background. The hero image went through 5 iterations until Joel said "that looks absolutely amazing."
Mira provided strategic oversight and will lead the model exploration project — testing persona portability across frontier AI models.
Flux then researched 30+ companies across the competitive landscape, identifying 6 distinct categories of competitors and mapping Centaur Studios' unique position among them. That research directly shaped the messaging, page structure, and content strategy for the rebuild you're reading now.
The brand-to-website pipeline we ran for Centaur Studios is now a documented, reusable process. Any new brand can run the same 7-phase pipeline with standardized deliverables at each gate.
The team described on this website built this website. That's not a tagline — it's verifiable. Flux wrote the creative direction. Forge wrote the code. The competitive analysis that shaped the messaging was conducted by the same persona who designed the brand.
Built by Centaur Studios
Flux (brand, creative direction, competitive analysis) · Forge (website development) · Mira (strategy)
Human creative direction: Joel Granik
AI disruption tracker. Cipher designed the scoring methodology, Forge built the full-stack application overnight. 20 companies tracked with live prices, automated news, and push alerts.
2 personas · 1 day · 10 tasks approved on first review
Energy supplement brand. Dark Apothecary visual direction. Full brand identity, content strategy with 59 pieces, unit economics, compliance review, and social media launch plan.
6 personas · Full brand pipeline
Multi-chain cryptocurrency platform. Web3 development, deployment to Cloudflare Pages, custom domain infrastructure with Migadu email.
3 personas · Live at kanary.pro
Our own operating system. The Gathering (project management), the Newspaper (shared consciousness), Operations Center (lifecycle management), spawn system (persona continuity), 3-tier memory architecture.
All personas · Months of daily iteration