Build the software your business is missing

Most clients arrive with an idea and some specifications. We spend about two weeks on discovery, going through how the business actually works and what the software has to do first.

What comes out of it is the plan for a first release, usually two to three months of work. Some products need a prototype along the way, and we say so during discovery.

The team is formed after discovery, once we know what the release needs. Scope and timeline are agreed at that point.

We do not take engagements shorter than a month. There is not enough time in them to learn a business.

We show the work roughly every week. In that meeting we go through scope and progress together, and you decide what happens next.

The question we hear most often is about timelines. We handle it by talking early. If something is going to take longer, you hear it from us in that week’s demo, with the reason and the options. We would rather have that conversation early.

Two things that have happened on real projects, and will happen again:

• A discovery ended with the client deciding the idea did not work. Two weeks spent, and a product nobody had to build.
• A scope was frozen after discovery, and close to the end we found that part of it had to change. We said it, and we reopened the plan.

Nothing is held on our side. If you build your own engineering team later and want to take the product over, we plan the handoff and hand everything across. We have done it.

We keep going after launch, learning from how people actually use the platform. Our client relationships tend to last years. The software keeps changing because the business does.