O3 World's managing director replaced $35K-a-year SaaS with an app he built himself

A digital product consultancy stuck with software that didn’t fit

For more than 20 years, O3 has brought strategy, design, and software engineering together to build digital products and experiences for mid-market and enterprise clients. Its work has ranged from reimagining IRONMAN’s online experience for athletes and fans to helping Vertex strengthen its position as a global tax technology company, alongside work for brands including AmeriGas and La Colombe.

Today, the roughly 50-person consultancy works across three brands: O3 for digital product work, O3XO, its AI strategy and implementation practice, and 1682, its annual AI and innovation conference. But whether O3 is running its own business or building for a client, it kept hitting the same wall: off-the-shelf software and traditional development timelines were expensive and couldn’t keep up.

Within their business, that meant settling for tools that solved only part of the problem. With their clients, it meant reserving real customization for a client’s biggest deliverables because anything more cost too much time and money to build by hand.

Justin Handler, O3’s managing director, saw an opportunity to change that. Rather than wait for another vendor to build a better fit, he started building the software O3 needed himself.

Turning 19 years of spreadsheet estimating into 5% better margins

Justin started experimenting with Lovable and quickly realized he could move from an idea to a working digital experience without needing to design every technical step himself.

One of the first problems he tackled was project estimating. For nearly two decades, O3 had relied on what Justin calls a “big gnarly spreadsheet” packed with calculations and formulas. If someone needed to change a rate, cost, or resource, the request often came through Justin. Formulas broke, changes took time, and Justin became the gatekeeper for a process that needed to move quickly.

He rebuilt it with Lovable in three days. O3’s costs and calculations are built into the app, so team members create and adjust estimates without routing every change through Justin.

O3 estimates the app now saves five to 10 hours each month. Project margins have also improved by more than 5%, with Justin crediting better estimating as one contributor.

“The financial aspect is important, but having an app that works for us and is catered to how we need it to work is the ultimate benefit,” he says.

Building the resource planning software O3 couldn’t buy

Estimator gave Justin confidence to tackle a much bigger problem. O3 was paying for resource planning software that only partly fit the business. The team relied on workarounds and data exports and when they needed a new capability, they had to wait for the vendor to build it.

Justin teamed up with James Clair, a senior project manager at O3, to build an alternative called Dialed. Dialed brings O3’s resourcing, project financials, pipeline, and hiring forecasts into one app, connecting with systems including HubSpot, Harvest, Slack, and its HR tools. The app gives employees access to their schedules, provides finance with reporting and forecasts, and brings project managers’ weekly resource allocations into the same system.

Because O3 owns the app, it can also change as quickly as the business does. After one meeting with the team surfaced three or four improvements, Justin was able to have them live within an hour.

“We don’t have to submit a request and hope it fits someone else’s product roadmap,” says Justin. “When our team identifies something that would make us better or more efficient, we can act on it right away.”

Dialed now saves O3 approximately $35,000 per year and growing, plus an estimated five to 10 hours each week across project management and finance. Just as importantly, the work itself has changed: project managers no longer rebuild and post weekly allocations by hand, and O3 can respond to what its team needs without depending on an outside vendor to make it happen.

The approach is already spreading beyond O3’s core operations. For 1682, its annual AI and innovation conference, the team built a management hub that brings together speaker, sponsorship, logistics, and planning information, instead of managing it across spreadsheets and Google Drive. The team can also track sponsorship dollars and targets in the same place, giving it a clearer view of both event planning and the revenue behind it.

Making custom client experiences faster to build

Once O3 saw what its team could build internally, the same approach reshaped client work—changing what O3 delivers, who gets access to that level of craft, and how fast it comes together.

As a certified Lovable Solution Partner, O3 is now creating custom digital experiences for its clients. Business reviews are now interactive products instead of static slide decks. Intake and feedback tools are structured experiences instead of generic forms and spreadsheets. Analytics products replace static reports, turning performance data and insights into something clients can explore rather than just read. That level of customization can now extend to more of O3’s client work.

“With Lovable, clients are getting something that feels intentionally designed for them and that specific moment in the relationship,” says Justin.

That ability to bring more craft to more client interactions is especially relevant to Milos Milosevic, who leads AI growth and partnerships at O3/O3XO. For him, the opportunity is to extend that quality more broadly without diminishing the expertise behind it.

“Lovable doesn’t replace craft. It makes craft economically viable in places where it previously wasn’t. The ceiling still depends on judgment and taste,” says Milos.

That level of customization is also faster to deliver. O3 estimates it can get from an idea to a usable first version of a custom client experience 50 to 70% faster, often producing something interactive in hours rather than days. Certain client-facing work also requires 30 to 50% less design and development effort, with O3 estimating that it saves one to two days on a major business review or reporting cycle.

For O3, that means more ideas can make it past the idea stage, teams can validate concepts earlier, and a higher level of polish and customization becomes practical across more client work.

What O3 builds next can come from anywhere

For James, one of the clearest signs that this new way of building is taking hold is what happens when people see an app working and begin recognizing other problems they could solve the same way.

“The best marker is when someone responds positively to what we’ve built without knowing how it was generated,” says James.

That shift has already taken O3 from one estimating app to software supporting resourcing, finance, events, and client delivery. But the bigger change is who can act on an idea. The people who understand a problem firsthand can now play a much bigger role in building the solution.

“We’ve gone from asking whether we can build something to looking across the business and asking what we should build next,” says Justin.