Amir Hessabi · Founder · Austin, TX
The studio
We build the AI that runs your business.
Yikes Dude is a small Austin-based studio. We orchestrate data, deploy agents, and write the software around them, for businesses that have a real problem to ship, not a deck to fund.
We started as a place for one founder to ship the work that did not fit anywhere else. We’re still a small surface area: founder-led, careful with who we take on, and proud of the four platforms we operate today.
The founder. Amir Hessabi moved from Tehran to Houston at 14, studied robotics at Southwestern University, and spent seven years inside the operating room of B2B SaaS. At BigCommerce he went from inbound SDR to Team Lead, Enterprise Solutions Engineering, named Solutions Engineer of the Year in 2021 and the global Sales MVP in 2020 after personally winning 300 of the 350 opportunities he pitched as the primary SE.
After BigCommerce came Clyde (acquired by Cover Genius), where he ran Mid-Market and Enterprise SE through launches with Dyson, SharkNinja, TheRealReal, Fossil, Bissell, and Karcher. Then Crave Retail, first as Principal Solutions Engineer (closing and launching Macy’s, Old Navy, Gap, Foot Locker, Victoria’s Secret, and River Island), then as Director of Strategic Growth & Partnerships, where he built the Technology Partner Program from the ground up and earned Crave’s first-ever placement in Zebra Technologies’ 8-partner elite global tier.
The lesson he kept across the arc: start where you can, outwork the room, earn your way to the table. The studio inherits that DNA.
From robotics to AI
The studio’s technical instincts started in a robotics lab. Amir holds a BA in Robotics from Southwestern University, where he built a humanoid robot from scratch and was hand-picked by Microsoft as one of 500 developers worldwide for early Kinect SDK access. He took second place at the Microsoft Kinect Hackathon in New York City as the only undergraduate in the field.
The line from servos and SDKs to agents and orchestration is shorter than it looks. Robotics taught us how to reason about sensors, state, latency, and failure modes long before LLMs were a category. That instinct is why we build AI systems that live in production, not demos.
2016
BA · Robotics
Southwestern University · Georgetown, TX
2014
Humanoid build
Solo end-to-end robotics platform
2014
Kinect Hackathon · 2nd, NYC
Only undergraduate in the field
Where we spend our days
Amir leads Strategic Growth & Partnerships at Crave Retail, where smart fitting room technology ships into stores for Macy’s, Old Navy, Gap, Foot Locker, Victoria’s Secret, River Island, and others. He’s also helping architect the next generation of AI-driven in-store retail experiences for major brand pilots launching in 2026. Not a Yikes Dude project, but the field where the studio’s retail and enterprise-sales instincts get sharpened every week.
Partners we work next to · Zebra · Elo · Direct Source · Apple iOS Garage · Dell NativeEdge · Nedap
Principles
- 01
Ship the thin slice.
Week one ends with something live in staging that you can click. Roadmaps that never reach production are vanity work.
- 02
Real businesses over hype cycles.
We build inside dental practices, dispatch offices, and national nonprofits. The constraint is the point.
- 03
Names matter.
We will take the pain of renaming 130 endpoints if the noun was wrong. The vocabulary is the architecture.
- 04
Trust is the AI layer.
Agents that work in a demo do not work in production. Audit logs, evals, and observability are what earn the next agent the right to run.
- 05
Build what we’d want to maintain.
Every line of code is a future bug. We pick frameworks and patterns we’d be happy to inherit ourselves.
- 06
Tell you when we’re not the right studio.
There is more work than there are good studios. Recommending the work we can sell over the work that should be done loses your trust forever.
Stack we ship in
- Next.js 16
- React 19
- TypeScript
- Tailwind CSS 4
- FastAPI · Python 3.12
- PostgreSQL · Cloud SQL
- Cloud Run
- Vercel
- Vertex AI · Gemini
- Anthropic Claude
- OpenAI
- Stripe
- Resend
- BigCommerce
- iOS native + Capacitor