Cut the scope
A week on what the product must prove and the shortest path to proving it. Output: a scope, a design direction and a fixed price.
MVPs for startups
An idea and no product is a normal place to start. We cut the scope to the single flow that tests whether anyone wants it, ship that to real users in four to eight weeks, and build it so the next version is an extension rather than a rewrite.
What we build
Most first products fail for one of two reasons: they took a year to build and the market moved, or they launched with nine features and none of them good enough to judge. Both are scoping failures. The hard, valuable conversation at the start of an MVP is about what to leave out.
We look for the single path through your product that tests the actual bet — the one where, if users complete it and come back, you have learned something real. That flow gets built to a standard you would be happy to charge for. Everything adjacent to it gets stubbed, deferred, or done by hand behind the scenes until volume justifies automating it.
Week one is scope and design. From week two there is a demo you can click every week, on a staging URL you can send to anyone. The first release is a fixed price agreed before we start, so the budget conversation happens once, at the beginning, when it is still a decision rather than an invoice.
There is a version of "move fast" that leaves you with a prototype you cannot build on, which is a bill you pay later with interest. We keep it boring and conventional instead: a standard stack, a real database with sensible schema, authentication done properly, and a deployment pipeline from day one. It is barely slower and it means version two extends the code rather than replacing it.
Sometimes the right answer is that you do not need an MVP yet — a landing page and ten conversations will tell you more, for less. We would rather say that than take the money. And if you are pre-funding, we will say plainly what can and cannot be built for the budget you have, before you spend any of it.
How it runs
The first one is where the money is saved.
A week on what the product must prove and the shortest path to proving it. Output: a scope, a design direction and a fixed price.
Weekly demos on a staging URL you can share. You use the thing while it is being built, so it changes while changing is cheap.
Live to real users with analytics on the one flow that matters, so the next release is decided by behaviour rather than opinion.
Selected work
Every one of these started as somebody’s bottleneck. See all eleven projects.
Questions
We quote a fixed price for the first release after a scoping week, so you approve a number before anything is built. The honest driver of that number is how many flows you insist on keeping — which is exactly what the scoping week is for.
Four to eight weeks for most products. Anything we estimate beyond that is normally two releases wearing one name, and we will propose splitting it rather than quietly running long.
No. We design as part of the build, working from your references and the flow itself. If you already have a designer or a design system, we build to it.
Not if it is built conventionally, which is the point. Standard stack, a real schema, proper auth, a deploy pipeline. We have never had a client need a ground-up rewrite of something we scoped this way; what they need is more of it.
Yes, and it is a good arrangement. We work in your repository with normal pull requests and reviews, so your developer is inside the work rather than receiving it at the end. Plenty of engagements end with us handing the codebase over entirely.
No. We are a software studio, not an investor, and an equity deal makes us a stakeholder in decisions we should be advising on rather than owning. Fixed-price releases keep the incentives clean.
More of what we do
Most projects need more than one. They are in the same team, so nothing waits on a handover. See all services.
Custom web applications, platforms and internal tools, from first wireframe to production.
ExploreVoice and chat agents, document pipelines and workflows that do the repetitive work.
ExplorePipelines, warehouses, dashboards and models built on the data you already have.
ExploreInfrastructure as code, CI/CD and monitoring, so deploys stop being an event.
ExploreDocumented, versioned APIs and connections to the systems your business already runs on.
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