I build the tools I wish existed.
I'm Fred Thomas. I spent ten years building the systems behind technical support teams, four of them inside Zendesk, and Arcus Studio is where that turns into software I actually use. Some of it ships to the public.
Built for myself first. If it earns a place in my week, it ships.
What I've built.
A cigar app, a synth editor, and a Zendesk tool have nothing in common, except that I needed all three. Two came from things I love. One came from the work I do.
HumiVault
My humidor, instrumented. Sensors watch the conditions, the smoke journal records what a cigar was stored in when I rated it, and the taste profile gets sharper every session.
View HumiVault →
Motif XS Remote
Yamaha stopped developing for the ES and XS boards, so the desktop editor those players relied on went away. This is that tool again. Voice browsing, deep editing, 16-part mixing, and plain sysex backups.
View Motif XS Remote →
Keel
Zendesk shows you every setting and none of the connections. Keel maps triggers, automations, and views to what they touch, so before you commit an edit you can see everything downstream that is about to move.
About Keel →Why I build
Ten years inside support systems taught me what it feels like to work in software that almost fits. Close enough to adopt, wrong enough that you build workarounds around it, and after a while the workarounds are the job. That's the gap. I know where it is because I lived there.
Alongside the products, I consult on support operations.
Most support organizations are measured on how fast they close tickets. That's exactly why the same ticket keeps arriving. The work I consult on is the other half: reading what the queue is telling you and getting it fixed upstream, before the next hundred people hit the same wall.
Zendesk architecture
Multi-instance administration and the operating surface itself, built to hold up as the org scales, informed by more than ten years administering Zendesk and four working inside the company.
Governance at scale
Ownership models, workflow and SLA standards, and the guardrails that keep a support platform coherent across teams and instances.
AI strategy, pilot to production
Ticket deflection and Tier-1 automation done right, deployed without breaking what already works.
Incident & cross-functional workflows
Event-driven flows connecting your tools and telemetry, plus real alignment across Support, Product, and Engineering.
At NextRoll, as Senior Manager of CX Systems:
Scaling a team, modernizing Zendesk, or deploying AI without breaking what already works. That's the work.
Let's talk.
Questions about what I'm building, early access to something that isn't out yet, or help with your support operations. Send a note. I reply within a business day.