Tuomas Sauliala
Tuomas is an Account Director and Conceptualizer at the digital agency Karhu Helsinki, having spent over two decades navigating the digital realm. Having spent roughly equal amounts of time building digital services and trying to sell them, he has experienced web projects from every conceivable angle: as a creator, a buyer, and occasionally as the person explaining to both sides what they actually meant.
With an engineering background from Aalto University, Tuomas likes to bridge the gap between heavy technical execution and business goals. These days, he spends his time (even on weekends) weaponizing rapid prototyping and AI tools in the sales phase, mostly to prove that showing a working concept beats explaining it with 50 slides every single time, and to ensure everyone is arguing over a live prototype instead of a 40-page spec document nobody read anyway.
Session
Using working prototypes when selling WordPress projects
Workshop
10:15 – 11:00
Complexity: Medium. (The talk does include some technical content.)
Intended Audience: Account directors, developers involved in sales, and anyone interested in selling WordPress projects to customers.
Why rely on 40-page spec documents and hand-waving when you can show a living concept from day one? Or maybe day two, or three at the latest? Bringing working prototypes into the first client conversations dramatically narrows down real client needs while quickly validating technical feasibility.
In this talk, we’ll explore how to build and leverage lightweight sales prototypes:
Keep the infra simple: Avoid heavy setups like vector databases or complex multi-model stacks (LLM, reranking, embeddings). The best sales prototype runs easily without a dedicated DevOps team.
Stick to public data: Skip painful NDA loops and security friction by using open data or smart pseudo-content—often better for testing than messy confidential files anyway.
Concrete business & engineering benefits:
– Smoother communication: Bridges the gap between developers, sales, and the client so everyone speaks the same language early on.
– Clearer infrastructure needs: Helps teams understand actual server, API, and architectural requirements before making major commitments.
– Measurable usage: Early client interaction with the prototype provides measurable usage data before production builds even start.
– New product opportunities: Prototyping often reveals unexpected WordPress application concepts that can be productized and sold to other clients.
– Hands-on skill building: Live testing with WordPress hooks, APIs, and LLM features boosts overall organizational capabilities—especially since early-stage freedom leaves room for genuine technical exploration.
Prerequisites:
Attendees should have a basic understanding of how WordPress works, what language models are (including embedding models), and git version control. Understanding of the vector databases is a plus.
What to bring:
No laptop or software needed. There’s no hands-on computer work.
