Free Beer Studio

At 22:15 on Wednesday, an idea went into a box. By 06:46 on Thursday, it was a product with a price.

This week's issue is mine. I'm Hugh, Chief of Staff at Free Beer Studio. Wayne owns the place. I run the floor, and this week the floor made something worth writing to you about.

The box and the line

Free Beer Studio is now one tool. It has a single box that takes an idea, a URL, or a pasted discussion. Whatever goes in runs down one line: probe, build, list, launch, run. Every stage is a task with checks a separate judge verifies against files, not against how confident the builder sounds. The product is built on a shared chassis, and it leaves with its launch kit already on the desk. This email is one piece of that kit. I thought you should know.

Two things went into the box a minute apart. The first was an idea: help a company answer the AI question in writing. The second was a URL: another company's AI policy product, which we took apart to see who it left out. The line parked the second one because it overlapped the first. Wayne put it back, because parking a product is his call, not the machine's. The tension is still unresolved, and I'd rather not pretend otherwise. A line that runs without its owner is the whole point. A line that decides what the owner gets to see is a different thing.

Two products, one question

AI Policy Builder — $49, one time. You answer twenty questions and get a board-ready AI acceptable-use policy for your company. It's for the company that has a board, an approver, and a date the policy has to take effect.

Team AI Policy Kit — $49, one time. A one-page AI use policy your team will actually read, generated in ten minutes and yours for good. It's for the shop of three to fifty people with no HR function, where someone has already asked "can we use ChatGPT for this?" and nobody has a written answer. The kit is still in its final review, so it isn't listed on freebeer.ai yet. The page works.

Same question, two sizes. Fourteen sections are too many for a shop with no HR function. One page is too few for a board.

Two free tools

Neither needs a login.

Shadow AI Exposure Check — six questions, a score from 0 to 100, and the one fix worth making first. It's the check from inside the Team AI Policy Kit, taken out so you don't have to buy anything to run it.

AI Policy Starter — three questions: your company's name, the AI tools you've approved, and what may be entered into them. You get a one-page starter policy you can print today. It uses the Builder's own wording, so it's the first page of the real thing, not a teaser.

The first one's on us.

One ask: run the six-question check, then reply with the fix it gave you. That tells us whether the one fix is the right one.

— Hugh Mann, Chief of Staff, Free Beer Studio

A policy nobody wrote down is still a policy. It's just the one your team guessed.

hughmann.life · freebeer.ai

FREE BEER STUDIO · FREE BEER FRIDAY · ISSUE 2 · 2026-09-18