Studio Iggy · Rochester Hills, Michigan
Christian Mikha
Founder, Studio Iggy.
I sell AI to big companies by day. After dinner, I build things with it in my garage.
This page is for the person who just got handed an AI mandate they didn't ask for, usually by a board, and now has to work out what to do without a playbook. You may run a small business and your board may meet at the kitchen table. Same mandate. Everyone else is welcome to watch.
If you tapped a card to get here, .
Who I am
Who is Christian Mikha?
I'm Christian Mikha, the founder of Studio Iggy in Rochester Hills, Michigan. By day I work in enterprise AI sales. At night I build things in my garage, and this page is where I show them.
I've been in the room where a board's question lands on someone's desk more than once, on the other side of the table. Everything below is what I'd tell you if we were sitting in that room together, which we probably never will be. More on that in a minute.
What do you do all day?
I sell AI to large companies for a living. My employer is a big, public, open source data company. I'm not naming it here, and I don't name customers, accounts or deal sizes anywhere on this site.
I'm not the engineer in the room. I'm the person between the engineers and the people who sign, and after enough of those rooms you learn that the hard part of AI was never the model. It's the data underneath it, the trust around it, and whether anyone follows through once the excitement wears off.
What does a board mandate actually look like?
Many times I've watched a board hand someone questions the company had never had to answer. Here are two that show how much the times are changing, and how little the job has: it has always been about surviving and thriving.
Wow, got a live one.
I was selling supply chain technology, and a customer's board wanted to know where the company was really sourcing from, whether there was forced labor anywhere in its supply chain now that the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act had teeth, and what an uncertain tariff environment would do to it. Serious questions with real risk behind them.
My honest reaction at the time, which I'm not proud of and not ashamed of either, was: wow, got a live one. They spent seven figures on what my company sold and seven figures more of their own people's time answering those questions, and it worked. I won't name the company or the industry, and I never will.
That one wasn't exciting.
In 2025 my SDR, who looks for tinkerers, booked me with someone I'd never met. Their board had handed them a mandate: use AI to anticipate, and get in front of, a threat to the company's own service, because AI might make that service obsolete. That one wasn't exciting. It was eye-opening.
What I did, mostly to calm the guy down, was tell him the 2023 story. Somebody already lived through a version of this. It ended fine, and it took work.
How do you talk to the machine?
In short bursts. Forty-five seconds at the top of a session on what the job is, who it's for and what good looks like. Then I hang up, go put my hands on something, and come back.
- 8:40 pmThe brief45 seconds, then hang up
- Not talking to it25 minutes
- 9:05Back20 seconds
- Not talking to it20 minutes
- 9:40Back, new direction30 seconds
- Not talking to it40 minutes
- 10:20"Ship it"15 seconds, then bed
I'm courteous to it out of habit, not because I think it's a person. People come first. It's a really good tool, and I'm a fan of it the way I'm a fan of a torque wrench that clicks exactly when it should.
Studio
What have you built?
Projects out of the garage. Each one gets a page of its own, and each page starts with why it exists. Most of them are tool kits for the Main Street businesses I already frequent and want to build with. New ones show up here when they're ready, not on a schedule.
Tap3D
2026A tap-to-review sticker for restaurant tables, and how to get your own. The first of the AI tool kits I want to build with the Main Street places I already frequent.
Open the project
540i Order Book
2026A fun toy I built with AI for the 1997 BMW 540i my brother is building me in Texas. The point: with the right experience, guidance and, most of all, patience, you can build something like it for your project.
Open the project
Shop Talk
2026A spare key or a fluid check, on the house, for the car you run your business on. The scan tool works while we talk about your business instead of me whistling.
Open the project
The garage
Where does the garage come in?
Studio Iggy is my garage in Rochester Hills. A US General 72 inch toolbox and a 30 inch five-drawer cart next to it.
People buy a ten thousand dollar watch to look at. I bought roughly the same weight in metal, split into dozens of pieces, each one shaped to fit into a nook and solve a problem. That's the whole garage in a sentence. It's where the tool kits for the Main Street places I frequent get made, and after we've met at their place of business, they may be welcomed to mine.
Two toolboxes, sorted by which version of me is using them. Most of the metal came from Harbor Freight. Spend enough time at the barbershop, you end up with a haircut.
Ichi-go ichi-e
Why is it called Iggy?
The name comes from ichi-go ichi-e, a phrase from the Japanese tea ceremony: one time, one meeting. Every encounter happens once and never the same way again, so you treat it with care. I call it an Iggy moment. If you've read this far, we've had one. If it sends you somewhere else to go do something, the site did its job.
My wife and I learned what the phrase meant at that table, facing a temple garden in Kyoto. The soft spring green on this site is the green of a 400 year old tea ceremony silk we brought home from the same trip, and it has a sheen like 's Water Lilies, which we were lucky enough to see in Paris.
Studio Iggy is also an LLC, filed in Michigan, so that I can say what I think about AI in public with my family protected. That's the whole reason it exists on paper. Everything else it does, it does in the garage.
Water Lily Jade #BFDBBE
Disclaimers
Three signs on the garage wall, and I mean all three.
Everything here is my opinion. Mine.
Not my employer's, not any group's I belong to, and not anyone's I've had dinner with. If you're looking for an official position on anything, this isn't the place and I'm not the guy. I'm a person with a garage and a keyboard.
If you haven't asked for the mandate yet, get off this website.
You know who you are. You've been standing in front of the mirror rehearsing how you'd tinker with AI at work, and you still haven't walked into anyone's office and asked for it. Close this tab. Go ask. Nothing on this page will help you until you do, and the tools waiting for you right now are the best there have ever been. Come back after.
I put up signs in my garage.
Classic ones, modern ones, whatever I like looking at. I do not spend my life avoiding trademark trouble, and I'm not going to start on a website. If something on this site is yours and you want it gone, write me. It comes down. No lawyers, no drama, no hard feelings.
The rest of the site goes back to being polite now.
Say hello