Real products. Real founders.
Real results.

Sarah’s first hire was a boutique development agency that came highly recommended on LinkedIn. They quoted 12 weeks and $35K. It seemed reasonable.

Six months later, she had burned through $40K and had nothing to show for it. The prototype crashed during her biggest investor demo. The code had no tests, no documentation, and the agency’s lead developer had quietly left the company two months in. When Sarah asked for a handoff, they sent her a ZIP file with no README.

With her runway shrinking and her next board meeting 8 weeks away, Sarah needed a team that could actually ship — not just talk about shipping.

We didn’t start by writing code. We started by sitting in Sarah’s kitchen in Boston for two days, watching her walk through the actual clinic workflows on a whiteboard. We mapped every user journey, identified the 6 features that would validate her business model, and cut everything else.

Then we built. Every Friday, Sarah got a working demo on staging, a Loom walkthrough, and a live call. No surprises. No “we’re almost there.” Just working software, every single week.

The core analytics dashboard — the product that investors had funded — was built by a previous CTO who left six months earlier. It was a monolithic PHP application running on a single EC2 instance. No tests. No CI/CD. Manual deployments at 2 AM.

Every time traffic crossed 5,000 concurrent users, the dashboard crashed. Customer support tickets tripled. The database had 200,000+ financial records with no backup strategy and no migration plan. James’s engineering team of four was spending 60% of their time fixing bugs instead of building features.

His Series A investors were starting to ask uncomfortable questions about the technology. James knew that if the next quarter didn’t show dramatic improvement, the Series B conversation would be dead on arrival.

The scariest part wasn’t building the new system — it was migrating 200,000 financial records without losing a single transaction. We designed a parallel-run architecture: the old system kept serving users while the new one was built alongside it, with every database write replicated to both.

We built the new dashboard with WebSocket connections for real-time updates, Redis caching for sub-200ms queries, and a microservices architecture on AWS Lambda that auto-scales with demand. James’s existing team worked with us daily — we didn’t replace them, we empowered them.

Lena had everything except the one thing investors wanted — a working product. Three school districts in Brandenburg had signed letters of intent. She had a detailed product spec. She even had paying customers ready to go. But every agency she talked to quoted 6+ months and €80K+ for an MVP.

Her pre-seed budget was €30K for development. Half the agencies laughed her off the call. The other half wanted to build a “simplified version” that stripped out the multi-tenant architecture she needed from day one — which meant she’d have to rebuild everything when she scaled.

Lena was running out of runway and patience. She needed a team that understood how to build for scale on a startup budget.

Most agencies would’ve told Lena to “start simple” and bolt on multi-tenancy later. We didn’t. We designed the database schema to be multi-tenant from the start using Supabase’s Row Level Security — which cost nothing extra and meant she’d never have to rewrite her data layer.

We prioritized ruthlessly: every feature was ranked by one question — “Will this help Lena raise money?” Student progress dashboards? Yes. Custom themes? No. Real-time notifications? Yes. Admin analytics? Later. The result was a focused product that did 6 things brilliantly instead of 20 things poorly.