Startups & SaaS
Founders don't need a committee — they need someone who can ship the v1, hold the brand line, and hand everything over clean when the first eng hire lands. We operate as a fractional tech-and-design team for startups in their first 24 months.
Ship v1 in weeks, hand it over clean.
We build MVPs, internal tools and first-year product surfaces for pre-seed to Series B teams. Clean codebase, sensible stack, real tests, proper CI — so the first engineering hire inherits a foundation, not a liability.
What we ship
MVP build
A production MVP in 6 – 10 weeks: auth, payments, dashboard, the core workflow. Scoped tight, shipped live, instrumented for real usage — not a prototype you have to rebuild.
Product sprints
Two-week sprints on an existing product to ship a specific feature, fix technical debt or validate a bet. You get velocity without hiring, and you keep the codebase healthy.
Marketing + docs site
A fast, SEO-strong marketing site (Next.js + MDX) with a proper blog, changelog, and docs surface. Ships alongside or ahead of the product.
AI features
Chat, embeddings, RAG over your data, structured extraction. We know which problems to throw LLMs at and which to leave alone — so you don't burn runway on a chatbot no-one asked for.
Internal tools
Admin panels, ops dashboards, data pipelines — the scaffolding that lets your team move without eng help. Retool-fast, first-party-quality.
Hand-over & hiring
When you hire your first engineer, we hand over the repo, the infra, the decisions — and we sit next to the new hire for two weeks so ramp-up is measured in days, not quarters.
Plays we run
- 01
Seed-round v1
Ten weeks to a launched, billable product with three paying beta customers — so the seed round is raised on traction, not a deck. We own delivery while you own conversations.
- 02
Pre-hiring platform hardening
Before your first senior eng hire lands, we spend 4 weeks turning a duct-taped MVP into something inheritable: tests, CI, observability, docs. Saves a quarter of on-boarding.
- 03
AI side-quest without runway burn
A 3-week time-boxed prototype for an AI feature with a clear pass/fail success metric. You get a decision document at the end — ship it, shelve it, or scope v2.
Typical stack
A brand investors take seriously.
You shouldn't need a branding agency to put out a landing page — but the Notion doc look is also how you end up ignored. We ship a working brand (identity, type, voice, product surface) fast enough to not slow the launch, rigorous enough to not need a do-over at Series A.
What we ship
Founder brand sprint
A 2-week sprint: name, logo, type system, colour, voice, one-page site. Enough to register the domain, ship the landing and send investor emails that look right.
Product UI system
A component library + design tokens your engineers (or ours) actually use — built on a sensible base (shadcn, Radix, Tailwind) so the first PM can add a screen without a designer.
Pitch deck + data room
An investor-ready pitch deck in a template system you can edit yourself, plus a data-room layout that doesn't embarrass the CFO at diligence.
Launch & PR assets
A full launch kit: screenshots, social cards, press-release header, product-hunt graphic, founder headshots briefing. Ship launch day without scrambling.
Brand refresh at Series A
For teams that scaled faster than the brand. A measured refresh (not a rebrand) so the brand survives the PR moment without the founder going MIA on Twitter.
Content & voice guide
A short, unpretentious voice guide so marketing, sales and support sound like the same company — and so the founder can hand off writing without losing the tone.
Plays we run
- 01
Pre-seed brand in 14 days
From a one-line pitch to a working identity + landing page in two weeks. Enough to take a pre-seed check seriously without looking like it was done on Canva.
- 02
Launch-day kit
Everything a founder needs for a product launch — social cards, press-kit, product-hunt banner, investor note template — shipped three days ahead of the launch.
- 03
Series A touch-up
A disciplined brand update that brings the marketing site, deck and product voice into one coherent language — in time for the board meeting, not a year after.
Design deliverables
Common questions
We're pre-revenue. Is this going to cost too much?
We have explicit seed-stage engagement models that cap scope and budget — often a 6 – 10 week MVP build for a fixed price paid in milestones. We want you to raise the next round; a blown budget hurts us too.
What happens when we hire our first engineer?
We plan for it from week one. The repo, infra and decisions are documented as we go. When the engineer starts, we run a 2-week hand-over — paired work, walk-throughs, a runbook — so they ship by week three.
Can you work equity-in / reduced-cash?
Occasionally, for founders we're genuinely excited about and where the economics make sense. We're honest: most engagements are paid cash. We'll tell you quickly if it's not a fit.
Do you just do design, or just do tech?
Either. Plenty of founders bring us in only for brand + landing page, or only for the technical MVP. We sell one discipline per engagement where that's what you need.
Building something new?
Send us the one-liner and the current state — idea, prototype, or about to raise. We'll reply within one business day with a shape, a number, and an honest "fit" read.