Zero to v1.0 for products that need to be taken seriously on day one.
A senior team that designs, builds, ships, and operates - from first wireframe to the Monday after launch.
You’ll recognise it if -
- -You have a validated idea, funding, or a strategic mandate - and a real launch date.
- -You need a team that can ship end-to-end without hand-holding on product decisions.
- -The product has to look and behave like it belongs at its price point from day one.
- -You don't yet have an in-house team, or yours is stretched keeping the current product alive.
- -You want operational hygiene - CI/CD, observability, incident response - baked in from the start, not bolted on later.
By the time we leave -
- A shipped product in the hands of real users, on the launch date you committed to.
- A codebase a new hire can read end-to-end in a day, with tests and documentation that match.
- A deploy pipeline that ships multiple times a day with instant rollback.
- Analytics, error tracking, and observability wired up so you see what is happening before the users tell you.
- A clean handover - or an ongoing retainer if you would rather keep us on.
5 steps, in this order.
Every engagement follows roughly the same shape. The details change with your situation; the order rarely does.
- 01
Discovery
One to two weeks: we talk to the stakeholders who will use, pay for, and operate the thing. You get a written product brief, a shipping plan, a risk log, and a realistic timeline. If the plan is wrong, you will hear it before we start building.
- 02
Design + spike
Design and engineering work in the same loop from day one - no hand-off purgatory. We ship a technical spike in the first two weeks to de-risk the hardest part of the build.
- 03
Iterate in public
Weekly demos to your team, fortnightly to stakeholders, all in a staging environment that matches production. You see progress in the product, not in slide decks.
- 04
Launch
A launch plan written before the code is. Feature flags, observability, a rollback plan, and a quiet beta with real users before public launch.
- 05
Hand over (or stay)
Your internal team can take over the day we leave, or we stay on retainer to keep shipping. Either is fine; we just want you to have the choice.
From the inside.
A typical mid-engagement week. Details shift with the project; the rhythm does not.
- Monday
Weekly priority setting. The PM (yours or ours) reviews the backlog for the week, engineering estimates it, designer confirms what needs to be ready when. Nothing on the list is there without a reason.
- Tuesday
Build day. Engineering pairs on the hardest surface of the week. Design pushes the next screens into the staging environment for real review, not Figma review.
- Wednesday
Mid-week check with your stakeholders. We show what is in staging, not slides. If the feature is not ready to show, we say so and explain what is in the way.
- Thursday
Integration day. Third-party APIs, billing, auth, whatever has an external dependency. Bugs caught here are cheap; bugs caught in week ten are expensive.
- Friday
Cut the weekly release to staging. Write the release note. Write what we learned. Send next week's plan to you before we log off. The team that ships on Friday trusts its own pipeline.
A week-long discovery we charge for separately. You own the output regardless of whether the full build follows.
A small senior team, embedded with yours.
No pyramid, no rotating juniors, no partnership-level engineers who never open the editor. Everyone on the engagement ships code, writes the runbook, and answers the 3am page.
We size the team to the work, not the other way around. If you need fewer people, you get fewer. If the scope grows, we tell you - and you decide.
$40k – $300k+ per shipped v1.0
Product builds span the widest range on this page. A focused v1 for a validated niche SaaS can ship for $40–80k. A fintech product with licensing, multi-currency, heavy compliance, and iOS + Android can cross $300k. The range in your quote will be tighter - but it is only honest after the discovery week.
- 01Surface area - web only, mobile only, or both
- 02Compliance and licensing scope (payments, KYC, data residency, App Store review)
- 03Design complexity - is there an existing design system we can extend
- 04Integrations - third-party APIs, existing backends, payment providers
- 05Timeline pressure - launch dates under 12 weeks cost more than under 20
Things we’ll tell you no to.
We’d rather lose the sale on Monday than lose the trust by month three.
- No.01
You need the cheapest MVP possible. We are not a cheap-MVP shop - if a rough prototype is what you need, we will point you at builders who specialise in that.
- No.02
You do not yet know what you're building. Discovery with a senior team is expensive; a product coach or a founder-led paper sprint is usually the better first step.
- No.03
You need a team to execute tickets without pushback. We will push back - it is the single biggest thing you are paying for. If you want pure execution, a staff-aug firm is a better fit.
- No.04
The product is a clone of an existing one with no meaningful change. We build things we can stand behind; we turn down straight clones.
Questions & answers.
Can you work with our existing designers / PMs?
Yes, and it is usually better when we do. We bring engineering taste and shipping discipline; if you already have strong design or product leadership, our team folds in. If you do not, we bring a designer.
How is this different from a dev shop?
Dev shops execute tickets. We write the shipping plan, push back when the plan is wrong, and own the outcome. Every engagement is staffed by engineers who have owned a production incident at 3am. There is no pyramid of juniors.
What if we want to switch our stack mid-build?
We will ask why. If the reason is good, we do it - we have rewritten a critical path inside of an engagement more than once. If the reason is "someone on Hacker News said X is faster," we will tell you that too.
Can you build mobile-only, or web-only?
Yes. Most product builds are one or the other. Cross-platform products are possible but we will push for doing one surface really well first.
Other engagements we run.
Tell us what you’re shipping.
30 minutes, no pitch deck. We’ll ask what you’re building, what hurts, and whether we’re the right fit. If we’re not, we usually know someone who is.