Build less, sooner
Every first version we have seen fail failed the same way: it tried to be the finished product. Six months in, nothing shipped, money gone, and no one had learned anything from a real user.
A first version exists to learn. It has to be small enough to ship in weeks, real enough that people use it for its actual purpose, and built well enough that the second version does not mean starting over. Getting those three things to agree is the work.
Foundations: four to eight weeks
Before anything is built, we work through the problem with you:
- Who it is for, and what they are doing today. Often the answer is “WhatsApp and a spreadsheet”, and that is useful: it tells you what the product has to beat.
- The flows that matter. The three or four things a user must be able to do, end to end, for the product to be worth their time.
- What to leave out. Everything that can wait for version two goes on a list. The list is not lost; it is just not now.
- The stack. Boring, stable, and chosen for the second version as much as the first.
- The plan. What the first 60 to 90 days look like, and what it costs.
You leave foundations with something you can act on, with us or without us.
The build: 60 to 90 days
Short cycles, visible progress. Every week ends with something running that you can click. Design happens inside the build, not before it. Real users see it before it is finished, because that is where the feedback that matters comes from.
We build it properly even though it is a first version: clear structure, clear names, tests where they earn their place. An MVP built as a throwaway becomes the thing you are stuck with.
What happens next
Users tell you what to build next. We keep going with most partners from here, phase by phase, as their product and engineering team. If you need to pause, you own the code, the accounts and the data, and the documentation is written for whoever comes next.
Read before you start
Product foundations: what to build in your first 60 to 90 days is the long version of how we think about this. Choosing a software development partner is the list of questions we would want you to ask us.