What we build
One major operational system, defined by what it does for your business rather than what software it uses. Past examples:
- An inventory reconciliation layer that keeps Shopify, your 3PL, your warehouse, and your spreadsheet in agreement
- A post-purchase workflow that handles exceptions automatically and surfaces what it can't to a human, with full audit trail
- A reporting layer that turns raw Shopify and 3PL data into the actual numbers your team needs daily, weekly, and monthly
- An order routing logic that handles multi-warehouse, multi-channel, and exception cases without manual intervention
- A returns automation that processes refunds, exchanges, and inventory restocking through one reliable workflow
- Custom middleware that fills the gap between two apps that don't talk to each other quite well enough
The list isn't exhaustive. If you have an operational problem that fits into a four-to-eight-week scope, we can probably build it.
What you receive
A working system, in production, doing the job. With it:
- The full source code, in a repository you own
- Documentation written for the engineer who'll inherit this in two years — explaining not just what it does, but why each design decision was made
- Operational runbooks for your team: what to do when something looks wrong, who to alert, how to recover
- Monitoring and alerting, configured to your actual on-call situation
- Thirty days of post-launch support included, for the inevitable real-world edge cases that only show up in production
When the engagement ends, you don't need us. The system runs. The docs explain. Your team can extend it. That's the deliverable.
How we work
Most builds start with an audit, either from us or from your own team. The Build engagement begins with a written scope: what we're building, what we're explicitly not building, what assumptions we're making, and what the success criteria are. That scope is the basis for the quote.
From there, the engagement runs in weekly increments. Every Friday, we share what we shipped, what's in progress, and what's blocked. You see working software, not slide decks.
Communication runs through a shared Slack channel for day-to-day, with a thirty-minute call each week for direction-setting. We don't book status meetings. We don't run discovery sprints. We don't ask for retrospectives. We build the thing and ship the thing.
What it's not
It's not a hosting arrangement. We build it, ship it, and hand it off. If you want us to keep operating it, that's a Retainer engagement.
It's not staff augmentation. We're not a body to add to your team's standup. We're a focused engagement to deliver a specific system.
It's not open-ended. The scope is the scope. If new requirements emerge mid-engagement, we write them up as a change order — what's added, what's removed, what the new timeline and price are. You decide whether to proceed. No surprises.
Who this is for
Teams that already know what needs to be built and want it done well, the first time. Often a Build follows an Audit, where the audit identified the right system to prioritize. Sometimes a Build comes in directly because the team has been living with a specific operational problem for long enough to articulate it precisely.
The clearest fit: when you can describe the problem in three sentences, you've already tried the obvious solutions, and you don't have an in-house engineer to execute the non-obvious one.