I'm Michael Weber. I write software. I built Hammerwerks after watching auctioneers spend Sunday night typing lot descriptions and the evening after a sale doing settlement math by hand. The bidding is the fun part. Everything around it eats your week — so I built the boring parts to run themselves, and I'm the one who answers the email when something's wrong.
It's Sunday night. The sale's Saturday. There are two hundred lots sitting in the garage and a stack of photos on your phone, and you're the one who has to turn each pile into a title, a description, a category, and a guess at what it's worth. Nobody pays you for those hours. They just come out of your evening.
Then the sale ends and it starts over as a different pile of typing — who bought what, what the buyer's premium comes to, how much sales tax, what each consignor is owed after commission. Copy one number wrong and six weeks later a consignor's on the phone, sure you shorted him, and you've got no clean way to lay the math on the table and show him you didn't.
The bidding itself is the easy part. It always was. I built Hammerwerks because cataloging from photos is finally something AI can take a first pass at, and settlement is arithmetic a computer should have been doing all along. Both have been solvable for a couple of years. Nobody had built it for the working auction house — one to ten people, not a warehouse — with pricing you can read right on the page and a real person standing behind it.
The folks I build for tend to be third- and fourth-generation family houses running estate sales and equipment auctions, one to ten people on the payroll. Midwestern, Texan, Pennsylvania-Dutch. Not early adopters, and I don't ask them to be. But they know real time back in their week when they see it.
Here's the thing that nearly stopped me from ever shipping AI cataloging: your name is on the sale. If a tool prints a confident valuation on a Morgan dollar it can't actually read, and you don't catch it, that's your credibility standing in front of your consignor — not the software's.
So I built it to be honest about what it doesn't know. Every draft — title, description, category, condition, value range — comes back with a confidence score. A second AI reviews the first. On coins, jewelry, art, anything in a thin market, it's built to say "I don't know — get a specialist" instead of inventing a number. And nothing goes live until you approve the lot. It drafts. You're still the auctioneer.
The name is the German plural of Hammerwerk — "hammer mill" or "forge." It's a real word for a real thing.
The plural is doing real work in the brand. Every customer gets their own InvariantDB graph (their own werk, their own workshop) under one platform engine. Hammerwerks describes both what we sell and how the architecture is built — a network of independently-operated auction workshops sharing one engine.
The tagline is "Das ist der Hammer" — a real German idiom that means "that's awesome." Native German speakers will smile at it; English speakers hear it as a confident-foreign-thing. Each does its job.
Nobody's waiting for me to flip this or pivot it into something bigger. It's bootstrapped. The math works at fifty customers, and that's what I'm building toward — not a hundred-million-dollar exit that would eventually land on your bill. No investors to please changes how I treat you.