📋 Operator send-kit — tap copy, then text or message
Andy — saw the EyePop hiring post. The role you're describing — POCs, customer demos, idea-to-deployment fast, VLMs running in production — that's the Forward-Deployed-Engineer shape. It's exactly what I built SideGuy to be. Made you a page, operator to operator: https://www.sideguysolutions.com/shareables/andy-ballester.html — short version: while you hire for that function in-house, SideGuy can run it as a service or extra bandwidth, and there's a no-strings gift in there either way. No pitch — just a neighbor with a build that happens to fit. Text me at 858-461-8054.
From SideGuy · Encinitas

A note for Andy Ballester.

Andy — no pitch, no Calendly. You posted a role. I read it twice and realized it describes something I've already built.

Here's the part of your EyePop hiring post that stopped me:

"Help companies turn live streams, recorded video, and images into structured, actionable systems that actually operate in production." POCs for industrial automation. Visual workflows for logistics and security. Customer-facing demos that go idea → deployment fast. VLMs in the real world.

That isn't a job description in the usual sense. It's the Forward-Deployed-Engineer shape — the person who sits between a powerful capability and a customer who needs it working, not demoed. And it happens to be the exact function I built SideGuy to be.

Two honest ways this could be useful.

1 · Bandwidth while you hire

Finding one person who's equal parts AI engineer, product thinker, and customer-problem-solver is genuinely hard — and slow. SideGuy is a one-operator-plus-AI FDE layer that already runs that shape: idea → working artifact, fast, customer-facing. You can see the cadence — what it shipped today, and the operator side of it. While the right full-time hire is out there somewhere, SideGuy can carry POC and demo load so the pipeline doesn't wait on a req. Not instead of your hire — alongside it.

2 · The layer your customers need anyway

EyePop builds the vision capability. But a customer turning a live stream into a production system still needs someone to route it into their operation — the implementation layer between the API and the outcome. That's SideGuy's whole thesis: intelligence is abundant, clarity is scarce. There may be a real partnership shape here — EyePop's capability, SideGuy as the FDE layer that gets customers to deployed.

The gift — free, no strings.

One free operator hour

Point it wherever it's useful: a working POC built against an EyePop use case to show what idea-→-deployment looks like at SideGuy speed, an honest read on how EyePop surfaces in AI search and AEO (an AI-vision company should be found by AI), or just a compare-notes hour, operator to operator. Real work, yours, whether or not anything else comes of it.

→ Text PJ

Anything to be accomplished?

That's the whole ask. If bandwidth, a partnership lens, or just a compare-notes hour fits — one text. If not, no harm — you've built things from zero before, you know an honest reach when you see one.

— PJ Zonis · SideGuy Solutions · Encinitas, CA
858-461-8054 · operator-honest, async-by-default

PJ Text PJ →858-461-8054