Anicca’s spin-off, Anicca AI & Insights, celebrates its 1st birthday, with the launch of Armadello Analytics & AI Insights

We started building our AI apps in our spare time. Now, as Anicca AI & Insights celebrates its first birthday, we are launching Armadello Analytics & AI Insights. This is a look back at the last eighteen months, how we got here, what we are launching now, on our first birthday, and where we are heading next.

How our obsession with
AI-powered marketing all started

Back in 2021, I started noticing marketing products with AI baked in, we tested some of them, for example Jasper, still called Jarvis then, and Copy.ai. Then ChatGPT was launched in November 2022, and the impact was enormous. I knew instinctively that marketing, agencies and the way we all work were about to change for good. I did not know when, only that I wanted to be ahead of it, an early adopter and a trailblazer, testing, building, speaking, teaching anyone who would listen, until people started coming to us as the ones who actually knew what they were talking about on AI.

That instinct led me to sign up, in November 2024, to a seven-month AI Generalist course starting that January, taught out of India, every Saturday and Sunday: no-code automation, how large language models actually work, voice agents, and a great deal more besides. Out of that same period, I built the C10 AI framework, a structured way of classifying AI challenges and how AI adoption could actually be implemented in a business, rather than chasing AI software or shiny objects. By March 2025, Darren and James were both learning n8n and how to build AI automations, and we decided to go further than experimenting. We launched Anicca AI as its own service, and started promoting content automations, voice agents, training and bespoke AI automation solutions.

What is Secret Agents, and why we pivoted to Armadello Analytics & AI Insights

For most of the last year, we were building two things at once.

The first was Secret Agents, an AI agent marketplace we built on n8n and took to market with roughly two hundred beta users and Stripe payments live. Every automation was triggered by completing a structured form, which served as a prompt to produce well-written output, including blog posts, meeting notes, keyword research, and more.

The second was Armadello, an analytics package originally designed as an ecommerce app. It has evolved significantly since we first discussed the idea two years ago and is now ready to launch.

The reporting gap Armadello Analytics & AI Insights was built to fill

Armadello started with a conversation. In March 2024, I met Lucia Dello at Digital Women Live. She had built an analytics platform for Shopify with her developer partner, Paul Hudson, at a time when almost nothing else existed, featuring well-designed graphs using data directly from the Shopify platform, backed by data-science thinking. It was genuinely impressive work.

At the same time, Anicca’s technical team were considering alternatives to Looker Studio, tired of slow-loading reports and how much of the team’s time went into rebuilding the same dashboards from scratch rather than reusing one.

When Lucia showed me what she had built, I told her the truth. All the fundamentals I would want as an agency owner, SEO, GA4, Search Console, Google Ads, were missing. I asked how they planned to take it to market, or whether they were just going to put it in the Shopify store and hope.

We worked out that if we joined forces, we could bring Anicca’s experience of creating marketing reports, plus help with customer acquisition, to produce a much better product, one more likely to succeed on Shopify and as a separate platform. In reality, it became another passion project, with Darren, James and me helping with report design.

By August 2025, the five of us had been working together for over five months, so we decided to formalise the relationship and launch a new company, Anicca Insights, now Anicca AI and Insights, with Lucia contributing Armadello, named in her honour, and our own team contributing Secret Agents.

Built in our own time, alongside running Anicca Digital

Every part of our AI app development, right back to the first version of Secret Agents, has been built in our own time, alongside still running Anicca Digital day to day. It was a passion project before it was ever a business plan, which is exactly why it became its own company rather than living inside Anicca Digital.

Across 2025, I spoke to around four thousand people at events and webinars about what we were building, and found that roughly eighty per cent of them were still using the free version of ChatGPT. It was not always an easy sell. We kept building anyway, and in April 2026 we launched Thursday AI Club, our own fortnightly workshop, now with more than twenty members turning up every other week to learn alongside us.

Rebuilding Armadello with Claude Code

Progress on Armadello was slower than any of us wanted. Paul and Lucia brought a strong, traditional data science approach. In parallel, Darren had started experimenting with dashboards of his own, and by February this year, once we had proper training on Claude Code, everything accelerated.

Around the same time, Tony Hancock, previously a client of ours as Director of Skintique, started rebuilding many of his Shopify apps. He had already decided he was not going to keep paying for Shopify apps he thought he could build himself. When OpenCLAW launched in January this year, he showed us the sort of dashboards and apps that could be built with no-code (vibe-coding), and started showing the rest of us exactly what was possible.

By April, Paul and Lucia had decided the AI-led direction was not the path they wanted, and we parted ways amicably. Tony stayed on. Since then, the four of us, Ann, Darren, James and Tony, have built Armadello and C⁴ in earnest.

What Armadello Analytics & AI Insights does today

A year of R&D later, Armadello has over eighty prebuilt reports, proper chart building, and stored, blended data across multiple platforms for genuinely fast rendering. We have also built an AI agent, thanks to Tony, called Arnie, plus SEO and Google Ads product-scraping for pricing intelligence, which will in time feed into C⁴ as well.

The fifteen-minute Armadello demo (6th August 26).

If you would rather see it running than read about it, live demo sessions are bookable with me this week, and a three-month beta onboarding is bookable with Darren, who can usually get a new account live within the hour, plus four to eight hours while your data imports.

Why you need Armadello

Most reporting today, free or paid, leaves you short in the same three places. Here is what Armadello actually gives you instead.

What free and paid tools both miss

• Google Analytics on its own is a nightmare to work with, and shows you nothing blended.
• Looker Studio or Power BI fix the separate-logins problem a little, the exact issue we hit with Looker Studio ourselves, but you are still building the same dashboards by hand every time.
• Most paid tools open to a blank dashboard you have to build yourself, or pull your data live every time you load the page, slow, and still poor at blending properly across platforms.
• None of them show you profit by channel or competitor pricing.

Where we are taking this

The real reason to get in now rather than later. The Business Suite we are building, part-funded through the Innovate UK application, adds the harder problem, for every product, which channel is actually profitable after that channel’s true cost, not just revenue, so you know where to sell it next.

• Per-product profit across every channel, your own website, Amazon, eBay, retail media, after that channel’s true cost. As Google traffic shrinks and paid search gets dearer, more retailers are pushed onto marketplaces, and that decision matters more every month.
• Competitor price intelligence, in the same build.
• Full lead generation attribution, through into your CRM.
• Financial information, linked into the systems you already run.

Beta users shape that build. Get in now, and you get a say in what it becomes, plus the advantage while almost nobody else has it.

Beta access for the launch is free for three months, then fifty per cent off your first year after that.

What is next for Armadello Analytics & AI Insights

We are still early, and we want to be upfront about that. The first two packages are ready and available for beta testing and purchase, though we have more plans for the Business Suite package. We have submitted an application for Innovate UK funding, and applied to the Leicester Startup Accelerator and the Female Founders Rise Accelerator too. Alongside that, we are working with Founder Catalyst on our SEIS submission, and raising angel investment. All of it goes toward the full-fat version of Armadello, extra functionality, and the wider build of C⁴, our company-wide AI operating system. What we need most now is real beta users, people willing to try it and tell us honestly whether they love it as much as we do.

If you run an agency, this applies to you too. The multi-tenant version of Armadello is available now, so agencies can run it across their own clients, and we are looking for agencies willing to test it with us straight away. If that is you, get in touch.

See it for yourself

Three ways in, whichever suits you. Demo store is the one to lead with, that is the actual success metric for this launch.

See the full feature list and pricing at armadello.com/pricing, or the Armadello site itself at armadello.com.

Frequently asked questions about Armadello Analytics & AI Insights