How we work

We start with your pain.
Then we build the painkiller.

Every engagement begins with the same question: what's costing your team their evenings? From there we run five phases, discovery, proposal review, pilot, production, and ongoing care, designed to take busy work off your plate fast, and keep chipping away at it long after the first ship.

Walk through the phases →
Principles

Four ways we do this
differently than an agency.

The process below is the mechanical part. These are the non-negotiables that shape how it actually feels to work with us.

Ship early, ship often
A clickable prototype in weeks, not a polished deck in months. We'd rather show you something half-built than describe it for an hour.
Fixed scope, flexible detail
The shape of what we build is agreed up front. How each screen looks, what the copy says, which edge cases matter, that stays open for the craft.
One team, one pair of eyes
The same person you scoped with is the same person you'll be texting at 11pm. No account managers, no handoffs, no telephone game.
Your code, your call
Everything is delivered to a repo you own, on infrastructure you own. If you fire us tomorrow, you keep the whole thing.
The five phases

Five phases,
then ongoing.

Every engagement follows this shape. The content inside each phase changes per project, the shape doesn't.

01
Discovery

We figure out if this is even the right thing to build.

The first call is 30 minutes. We're trying to answer three questions: what are you actually trying to change, what would "done" look like, and is the thing you think we should build really the thing we should build. A fair number of discovery calls end with us sending you somewhere else; that's by design.

What you get
  • A 30-minute discovery call, no deck, no salespeople
  • An honest read on whether we're the right team for it
  • A written follow-up within two business days
What we need from you
  • 30 minutes of your time
  • A rough idea of the problem (we refine from there)
  • The budget range you can spend
02
Proposal review

You see what we'd build before you commit to building it.

We come back with a written scope and a clickable prototype, the actual screens and flow of what we'd build, not a deck about it. On the call we walk through it together, you push back, we adjust. By the end you know the problem we're solving, the shape of the solution, the timeline, and the fixed price. No decision on the call; we send everything through for you to sit with.

What you get
  • A clickable prototype of the proposed solution
  • A written scope: problem, solution, timeline, fixed price
  • A walk-through of two or three possible shapes before picking one
  • A clear go/no-go, we say no to ~25% of projects
What we need from you
  • 60 minutes for the review call
  • The right people in the room to say yes or no
  • Pushback, the prototype exists so you can redirect us before we build it
03
Pilot

We put a working version in your hands.

Whatever the shape of the engagement, the first milestone is the same: something you can click on, try with your team, and push back on. For a Custom Build this is typically the core workflow end-to-end with placeholder edges. For an AI Agent it's the agent doing the real job on sample data, inside your real runtime.

What you get
  • A working pilot deployed to a staging environment you can log into
  • Weekly check-ins with demos (we record them if you can't attend live)
  • An open Slack or Teams channel with the whole team
What we need from you
  • A nominated product owner on your side, one person, not a committee
  • Access to the systems we're integrating with
  • 30 minutes a week for a demo call
04
Production

We take the pilot from 'works on my laptop' to 'works for your whole team.'

This is where the 80% that people underestimate happens: edge cases, error states, permissions, activity logging, onboarding flows, training materials, migration from whatever you were using before. We resist the temptation to add features in this phase, we finish the thing.

What you get
  • Production deployment on your infrastructure with SSO
  • Migration plan and rollout schedule
  • Training materials, short videos, and written runbooks
  • Handover session with your internal team
What we need from you
  • Rollout windows agreed with your team
  • Final copy/content signed off
  • Any data migration decisions made (we advise, you decide)
05
Ongoing care

We don't walk away.

Software that ships but doesn't get cared for slowly rots. Most of our clients fold ongoing care into a working-with-AI retainer, a predictable monthly rhythm for bug fixes, small improvements, and the next round of features. Not required, but usually the right call.

What you get
  • Monthly retainer (three tiers)
  • Uptime monitoring and alerting if we host
  • Quarterly roadmap review
  • First right of refusal on any future builds
What we need from you
  • Decision on retainer tier
  • A named contact who owns the relationship
The fine print

What makes a project
actually move.

Most stalls aren't technical. They're decisions that nobody on your side is empowered to make. We'd rather have this conversation up front than in week seven.

One product owner
A single person on your side who can make yes/no calls without escalating. Not the CEO (usually too busy), not a committee (too slow). Ideally the person who feels the problem most.
Decisions, not approvals
We'll present options with trade-offs. We need someone who can say 'option B, because of X' inside 48 hours, not schedule a review three weeks out.
Access on day one
The systems, accounts, SSO, data rooms. The single biggest delay on every project is waiting for IT tickets. We can help you write them, but only you can file them.
The other options

How this compares
to the alternatives.

Dimension
Dev agency
In-house hire
Incredible
Who writes the code
Offshore team you don’t meet
One engineer, no team to slow them
Senior engineers on every project
First clickable prototype
8–12 weeks after signing
Whenever they finish their day job
2–3 weeks from kickoff
Scope changes
Change requests, re-estimated
Shoulder tap, no paper trail
Built into the retainer rhythm
Code ownership
“We host it, you license it”
On a dev laptop somewhere
Your repo, your cloud, from day one
When things break
Support ticket queue
Whoever built it left six months ago
Retainer covers it, same team answers
Who writes the code
Incredible
Senior engineers on every project
Dev agencyOffshore team you don’t meet
In-house hireOne engineer, no team to slow them
First clickable prototype
Incredible
2–3 weeks from kickoff
Dev agency8–12 weeks after signing
In-house hireWhenever they finish their day job
Scope changes
Incredible
Built into the retainer rhythm
Dev agencyChange requests, re-estimated
In-house hireShoulder tap, no paper trail
Code ownership
Incredible
Your repo, your cloud, from day one
Dev agency“We host it, you license it”
In-house hireOn a dev laptop somewhere
When things break
Incredible
Retainer covers it, same team answers
Dev agencySupport ticket queue
In-house hireWhoever built it left six months ago
Process FAQ

The questions
that come up every time.

Custom Builds are fixed-scope projects, quoted after scoping. AI Enablement and ongoing care run as monthly retainers. AI Agents are scoped per-agent. Every proposal we send has the number on the front page, no day-rate mysteries.

Yes. Standard. Send yours through at scoping or we'll send ours. We've been through procurement at mid-market and enterprise, it's rarely an issue.

You tell us, we rework or kill it. Pilots exist specifically so you can find out cheaply whether the thing we're building is the thing you need. That's the whole point of the phase.

You do. Delivered to a repo you control. We retain the right to talk about the engagement in broad strokes (case studies, conference talks), and we'll ask before naming you.

We're Australia-based and work remotely by default, with on-site kickoff for bigger builds and travel when it makes sense. Most clients prefer it this way, we get more done.

Smallest recent: a Claude Skill for a single internal team, two weeks, $12k. Below that it's usually an AI Enablement retainer, not a Custom Build.

Get started

Ready to free yourself
from busy work?

A 30-minute discovery call, no pressure. We'll map one workflow with you and tell you honestly whether we can help.