About
I'm Gio. I co-founded an AI firm, ran product for it, and sold it a year after we started.
Everglade Systems was an AI consulting and development firm in Miami. My co-founder Andres Diaz built the systems; I found the problems worth building for, scoped the work, and owned the outcomes. On August 20, 2026, the company was acquired by a private equity firm. I'm now looking for a product management role.
$750K
Total revenue
73%
Profit margin
20
Clients
4
People at exit
The Everglade story
We started Everglade Systems in 2025 with a simple observation: small and mid-sized businesses were being sold AI tools they didn't need, and nobody was helping them figure out what they actually needed. Big companies had teams for that. A 30-physician group or an 18-person law firm had a vendor pitch and a guess.
So we did the figuring-out first. Every engagement began with a free assessment: a conversation about how the business ran and where the time and money went. Sometimes that ended with "AI won't help you here." When it didn't, we scoped a first version, agreed on the number we'd measure, built it, and stayed on to support it.
The split was clear from day one. Andres owned engineering: architecture, models, integrations, the systems themselves. I owned everything before and around the build: discovery, problem definition, scope and sequencing, success metrics, and the client relationship. On a two-founder team, that meant I was effectively the product manager for 20 client builds in a year.
By mid-2026 we were 4 people, had done $750K in total revenue at a 73% profit margin, and had results we could publish: a physician group that stopped paying compliance fines, a law firm that grew 30% without hiring, a real estate company that added $2.3M by handling the leads it already had. On August 20, 2026, a private equity firm acquired the company.
This site is what I kept: the case studies, the numbers, and the record of how we worked. The industry pages and articles from Everglade's operating years are archived here as well.
What a year of building taught me
Four things I'd bring to any product team.
The stated problem is rarely the problem
"We need AI" was the opening line of almost every conversation. The work was turning that into something specific enough to measure. The cases where we did that well are the ones with the big numbers.
Sequence is a product decision
What ships first decides whether a client trusts the second thing you ship. Fixing what cost money first, even when it was the least exciting feature, is why the exciting features got adopted.
A number agreed on before the build is worth ten after
Every engagement started with the client and me writing down what "working" meant. It made scoping honest, made the retrospective possible, and made the case studies on this site real.
Small teams win on judgment, not headcount
Four people, 20 clients, 73% margins. That came from saying no to most of what we could have built and being right about what we did.
The founders
Two people, one clear split. Everything on this site was built by the two of us with a small team.
Giovanni Ruizmanrique
Co-founder · Product, discovery, and client outcomes
Ran the assessments, defined the problems, scoped and sequenced every build, set the success metrics, and owned the client relationships.
Andres Diaz
Co-founder · Lead engineer
Designed and built every system: AI agents, integrations, private on-site deployments, and the architecture that made custom builds reliable enough to run a business on.
Let's talk about your team.
I'm looking for a product management role. If you want to walk through any of the case studies, the decisions behind them, or what the numbers don't show, I'm easy to reach.