Rea Hailley (she/her) is the CEO and co-founder of New Idea Machine, a Calgary custom software and AI company. She brings 20 years of experience in B2B strategy and business development, including growing a Shopify e-commerce portfolio to $90M in one year and building the revenue division at Calgary Comics & Entertainment Expo. Rea is not a developer, and that is the point: she works with technology the same way her clients do. She teaches business owners to build with AI in New Idea Machine's AI for Business bootcamps, rebuilt the company's own website with AI and wrote about the playbook on the blog, and runs her days with Hermes Ear, the on-premise AI agent that takes her meeting notes.
Articles by Rea
- App Developer Keeps Delaying Deadlines? What the Pattern Means (August 2026)
- Software Development Running Over Budget? Where the Money Went (August 2026)
- AI Agents for Business: What Two Real Builds Taught Me (August 2026)
- How We Rebuilt Our Own Website for AI Search (August 2026)
- Rebuild or Repair? How to Tell If Your App Can Be Salvaged (July 2026)
- How to Get Your Code Back From a Development Agency (July 2026)
- My App Developer Disappeared. Now What? (July 2026)
- The Vibe Coding Trap: Why Agencies Dismiss AI-Built Products (and Why They Are Wrong) (July 2026)
- She Spent $150,000 Before Finding Us (July 2026)
- We Built a Clone of a Lawyer. Now He Is Semi-Retired. (July 2026)
- They Predicted $75 Million. Here Is Why You Should Run. (July 2026)
- How to Validate Your App Idea Before You Build It (2026)