Jared Kleinstein was running his creative production agency, Fresh Tape Media, when he spotted a gap: standout creative work was appearing on social media, yet the people behind it were not receiving proper credit. He responded by building Gondola, a platform designed to help creatives present what they have made, demonstrate its impact, and convert that work into their next opportunity.
For Gondola's small staff, the main bottleneck was how much product and operational work it could absorb. Even minor experiments had to compete with core product priorities for engineering time, and locating information or preparing drafts meant digging through multiple tools and systems.
The team now relies on Codex to convert more ideas into software and on ChatGPT to streamline everyday operations. According to the company, monthly engineering output has risen 25% across the team and 50% for its lead engineer, while revenue has more than doubled year over year. For Kleinstein, that shift has redefined what the team believes it can attempt.
"Using OpenAI has increased the ambition of what we think a company our size can build," said Jared Kleinstein, founder and CEO of Gondola.
Letting business teams build alongside engineers
Many of Gondola's product ideas originate in customer conversations and in operational problems witnessed directly by the business development and leadership team. Previously, those ideas required a written definition of the need and formal requirements, followed by a wait until an engineer had the capacity to produce a first version.
With Codex Cloud, the same team can now explore the codebase, prototype an interface or workflow, test assumptions, and frequently reach a functional first version before an engineer becomes involved. Kleinstein and Jojo Hesketh, Gondola's Creator and Client Partnerships Manager, have each merged their first code contributions into the main codebase.
"A product manager doesn't need to stop at a written product requirement anymore. They can bring engineering a working prototype," Kleinstein said.
One case in point is Programs, a tool Gondola created so companies can find creatives, review applicants, manage projects, and track budgets, with plans to extend it to coordinating contracts and payments. Hesketh sponsored Programs and used Codex to prototype its workflows before engineers refined and released them. Development began with GPT-5.4, was carried out mainly with GPT-5.5, and drew on GPT-6.1 for later features, optimizations, and bug fixes.
Kleinstein estimates Codex saved days, if not weeks, of development time, and that Programs shipped with fewer bugs than it would have if written entirely by hand. "The Programs feature benefited from our ability to rapidly prototype, throw away things that didn't work, and keep the things that did," he said.
Gondola's engineers work with Codex through the command-line interface and editor tools to speed up implementation, and inside GitHub to review pull requests. Codex is connected to the company's repositories, development environments, and Slack so that product context can feed into development, while engineers remain accountable for architecture, security, data handling, and production readiness.
Building quickly for a time-sensitive customer need
Before Codex, ideas tied to a deadline could sit in the backlog waiting for engineering resources while the window of opportunity closed. In the summer of 2026, Codex allowed Gondola to build and test a World Cup Creator Map while the need was still current. The team used Codex to quickly turn data it already possessed into an experience aimed at an immediate customer requirement: a map through which brands, teams, and agencies could locate photographers and videographers in World Cup host cities.
Hesketh sponsored the Creator Map as well and produced a fully working prototype with Codex, which engineers then polished for release shortly afterward. Kleinstein calls the build "incredibly quick," crediting its small, self-contained scope and hard deadline. He believes both the Creator Map and Programs went live with fewer bugs and more polish than they would have without Codex.
Running the business with ChatGPT
Product development is only part of Gondola's workload. The team also uses ChatGPT to prepare proposals, manage schedules, surface information across company systems, and automate tasks.
Using ChatGPT, Gondola built a daily report template that employees can consult first thing in the morning to plan their day. It pulls together Google Workspace services, including Gmail, Calendar, Sheets, and Drive, along with Asana, Slack, QuickBooks, weather data, and other sources to present a full picture of the day ahead. Kleinstein says assembling an equally thorough report by hand would take "hours and hours of work," while the ChatGPT setup produces it quickly. A person still checks consequential output before it is sent externally or used in a business decision.
More capacity for the founding mission
Since Gondola adopted Codex in early 2026, its lead engineer's monthly shipping output has grown by about 50%, measured in merged changes. Team-wide output is up about 25% with no change in engineering headcount, the changes being shipped are larger, and pull request review time has held steady.
The company reports that revenue has more than doubled year over year without added payroll costs or significant overhead, and that it has helped brands hire 2.5 times as many creators as in the previous year.
"OpenAI gives product people more ability to build, engineers more time for difficult engineering, and our business team more time to spend with customers, partners, and creatives," Kleinstein said.
Going forward, Gondola wants AI to take on more of the work that links companies and creatives. For Programs, that could mean reducing the coordination involved in finding talent, managing budgets and approvals, handling contracts, and getting people paid. The company says it intends to keep expanding what its small team can deliver in service of its founding mission: helping creatives receive credit for their work and turn it into their next opportunity.