Who we are · Two founders · Operator-led

We're operators first.
Consultants by accident.

Lighter Fluid was founded in 2024 as a generalist studio. By 2026, the work that mattered most was the AI operating systems we'd been building for our own businesses — and for the enterprise clients one of us had been advising for years before that. So that's what we sell now.

This site, our process, and the framework library all came from the same place: trying to run three businesses with the systems available in 2024 and finding them inadequate. The skills we build for clients are the skills we built for ourselves first. The standards documents we install are the standards we wrote for our own teams.

That's the only honest claim we can make in 2026. We don't have a long client roster yet. We have three businesses we built, the operating playbook those businesses run on, and a strong opinion that this playbook compounds when other operators install it.

We sound like operators describing what they actually built. Not consultants pitching what they could.

The founders

Two operators.
Different specialties.
Same shop.

Gabe Coyne

Gabe Coyne

Founder · Visionary

  • $200M+Co-founded Influence Mobile · #3 mobile ad network in the world · 100M+ installs delivered
  • $100M+Co-founded Stix Golf in 2020 · $8M year one · Series A & B
  • $4.5MCEO of Host Modern · year one · 10%+ profit margin
  • 10 yrsCreative-services studio in Seattle (pre-Influence Mobile)
  • PartnerProta Ventures · innovation consulting for Exelon, ADP, Citi Bank

The Prota work was the prototype for what Lighter Fluid does now: take a client's idea through design, prototype, validation, launch, and scale — and document the system enough that the client team can keep running it.

Mobile-ad-network background is where the technical instincts come from (attribution under noise, real-time decisioning, fraud detection). DTC is the operating playbook. Prota is the consulting discipline.

Contact → LinkedIn →
Collin Duff

Collin Duff

Co-Founder · Integrator

  • Co-founderHost Modern · COO through launch · built the operating stack: customer service, logistics & warehousing, product development, demand planning
  • Co-founderStix Golf · Head of Product · owns product and ecommerce
  • PartnerCo-founded Viator Coffee in 2019
  • OperatorProduct-and-ops counterweight to Gabe's growth-and-systems instinct

Built and ran the systems a consumer brand actually runs on — customer service, logistics and warehousing, product development, demand planning — then rebuilt them on AI. At Host Modern that means the AI infrastructure and the automations running ops, finance, and demand planning, plus ownership of CRO and ecommerce.

Owns the work that doesn't fit cleanly in a skill — the new product evaluation framework at Stix, the SEO landing page program at Host Modern, the Shopify autopilot loop that auto-deploys low-risk fixes from a Slack channel.

If a client engagement involves shipping product or fixing a stack-deep operational gap, Collin runs it.

Contact → LinkedIn →
Between us

What two operators
have put on the board.

5
Businesses launched
Stix, Host Modern, Influence Mobile, Viator Coffee, creative studio.
$300M+
Lifetime revenue
Across all five businesses we have operated.
$50M+
Capital raised
Across Series A, Series B, and earlier rounds.
100K+
Customers
Hundreds of thousands across the brands.
100s
Employees hired
Operators recruited, onboarded, managed.
100s
Products to market
Concept through launch — digital and physical.
1,000s
SKUs managed
Across product lines, seasons, channels.
Forbes
Awards & press
Sports Illustrated, Entrepreneur, Golf Magazine, MoMA, Mission.org.
How we work

A partnership.
Not an agency.

01 · Two principals

Both founders, every engagement.

No account manager layer. No junior swap-in after kickoff. You get the people whose names are on the door.

02 · Builder = explainer

The person who ships is the person who teaches.

The hand that wires the skill is the hand that walks your team through it. The person who scopes is the person who presents.

03 · Capped capacity

Four active engagements.
Maximum.

We won't take on more than the two of us can run honestly. Caps how many we say yes to. We say no a lot.

04 · Small by design

This caps the company we're building.

Caps the engagements. Caps the headcount. Caps the revenue ceiling. We're fine with all three.

What we believe

Four positions.
Held under load.

Position 01

Operators understand operators.

Most consulting fails because the consultant never lived with the recommendation. Every framework in our library exists because we hit the wall it solves.

Position 02

Standards beat strategy.

Strategy decks compound badly. Standards documents compound well. Every framework we install is one your team can extend without us. That's the whole product.

Position 03

Speed without panic.

AI lets you ship faster. It also lets you ship faster in the wrong direction. The frameworks keep speed and rigor compatible — so you don't burn budget on bad signal.

Position 04

Documented or it didn't ship.

A skill that runs but isn't documented breaks the day a model deprecates. We treat documentation as half the deliverable. We charge accordingly.

The deal

What we will.
What we won't.

We will

  • Bring two principals to every engagement.
  • Cap the work at four active engagements at once.
  • Refer you to a better consultancy if we're not the fit.
  • Tell you the first call is free, and mean it.
  • Hand you documentation that outlives us.

We won't

  • Hire a junior team to scale past our cap.
  • Sell you hours.
  • Write the deck and disappear.
  • Pitch industries where operator credibility doesn't transfer.
  • Take engagements that compromise the partnership cap.

If those constraints fit your need, the first call is free. If they don't, we'll refer you to a consultancy that fits better — the AI consulting market is bigger than us.

Two operators.
Two weeks.
One deck you can use whether you hire us or not.

Book a call