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Standard Deviation

Two practices

Standard Deviation has two practices that work as one operator.

Standard Strategy

The marketing-strategy practice. Three service lines that map directly onto the three modules of StandardOS:

  • StandardGraph (Brand Intelligence) — voice, visual identity, audience, AI-search visibility, social sentiment, competitive context. The substrate everything else reads from.
  • StandardPlanning (Campaign Strategy) — Frequency-First media planning. Strategy, audience, investment, phasing — drafted from your brand graph, sized to outcomes.
  • StandardCreative (Asset Generation) — brand-grounded creative production: image, video, copy. Pre-test scoring, content calendar, format optimization, library.

Service lines can be hired individually (managed delivery on one module — Graph-managed, Planning-managed, Creative-managed) or bundled into a Strategy retainer that covers all three plus a senior strategist on retainer.

When to hire Standard Strategy

  • You have a marketing budget but no strategic spine. You’re churning out content without a coherent narrative.
  • You have a strategy but execution is too slow or too expensive. You’re paying premium agency rates for what should be 80% AI-assisted output.
  • You want a senior strategist embedded part-time, working through StandardOS so the work is also auditable and the next person can pick it up.

How a Strategy engagement runs

  • Monthly retainer (typical envelope: $5,000–$15,000/mo)
  • StandardOS Full Service tier is bundled
  • Weekly working session + async support
  • Output lands in StandardOS where the client team can see and use it — Graph entries, Planning artifacts, Creative library

Standard Studio

The development and infrastructure practice. Builds we ship, end-to-end:

  • Marketing sites + booking systems — the Ocean Pro SBH shape. Next.js + Stripe + Calendar + Resend. Production-ready in 1–2 weeks.
  • Custom CRMs + internal tools — Cloudflare D1 / Postgres-backed. Auth, dashboards, workflows. Built around the actual process, not a SaaS template.
  • Agent integrations — LLM-powered automations that talk to your tools. Drafts, summaries, agent workflows in the actual systems your team uses.
  • Infrastructure builds — deploy pipelines, monitoring, secrets management, environments. The plumbing that makes everything else reliable.

When to hire Standard Studio

  • You need software built and you want it scoped tight (fixed deliverables, fixed timeline, fixed fee).
  • You’re paying agency retainers for hosting + minor edits and the math has stopped making sense.
  • You want a build that can be handed off — code is yours, infrastructure is yours, runbook is yours.

How a Studio engagement runs

A Studio engagement is a fixed-scope project. Six phases (see Engagement flow):

  1. Conversation — what you need, why now, what success looks like
  2. Scope — fixed deliverables, fixed timeline, fixed fee, signed SOW
  3. Build — per-client sandbox at [client].standard-dev.com, weekly demo
  4. Launch — ships to your own domain; DNS, SSL, monitoring all wired
  5. Maintain — monthly retainer; hosting, monitoring, small enhancements
  6. Evolve — when something bigger comes up, scope a new project

How they interact

A retainer client on Strategy often needs a custom tool or site (Studio). A Studio client often discovers, mid-build, that they need ongoing strategy work (Strategy). The two practices ship as a unit — same operator, same software, same Slack channel. The boundary is for operational clarity, not for separation.

Where to go next