YOUR TECHNICAL PARTNER

Building great ideas into successful businesses

Here's how

Prototype fast and then iterate

We believe that the least risky way to achieve your product goals is to stand up a prototype quickly so you can gather data from customers in the real world. We hone our products out of this data, methodically testing assumptions until we know for sure what works. In short: Digital product creation has become a science.

1. Prototype

Stage goals
  • Focused on defining the initial customer value propsion and mission
  • Identify the minimum build to get feedback from real customers
  • Build to minimise cost-to-market
What it's like
  • It's an all-out race to create a proof-of-concept
  • Frequent demos of work in progress as components come together
  • Majority of product and technology decisions prioritise "just enough" or "minimising cost"
Team
  • 1-3 Senior Developers working full time in partnership with your leadership team for typically a couple of months
  • Strategy consultancy as needed but focused on standing up a build
  • Communication is focused the work in progress build, and how we can deliver faster

2. Iterate

Stage goals
  • Focus on customer's feedback to find "product market fit"
  • Refine business model as you learn from experiments
  • Build to minimise cost-of-learning
What it's like?
  • Lots of discussions about customer feedback and where to invest effort
  • Balancing new ideas against enhancements
  • Building skills & knowledge within a dedicated team
  • Establishing shared practices to direct the flow of effort against shifting priorities
Team
  • Stable development team of up to 5 with supporting roles as required
  • Maintenance of a live application typically needs 1 day a week minimum
  • Providing input into recruitment for product focused roles
  • Communication is focused on customer outcomes

3. Scale

Stage goals
  • Focus on growth strategies (e.g. improve conversion, partnerships, etc)
  • Stabilise the product, deal with bottlenecks
  • Build to deliver on strategy
What it's like?
  • Growing pains! Teams will be upgrading rudimentary components that have reached their limit, cutting waste from processes, and trying to squeeze in a few interviews for new hires
  • The planning horizon increases to quarterly or yearly
Team
  • Increasingly consulting on long-term technology decisions and architecture
  • At the point where team size is a limiting factor, SH can both scale up and help recruit your in-house team from developers up to CTO level
  • Communication still focused on customer, incorporating strategy and goals

Services

Consultation

  • Leaders often need a technical sounding board to better define a problem but do not have the relevant specialisms in their own network.
  • Entrepreneurs at the idea stage need to find a realistic concept for their available budget. Often a product idea can be validated without writing any code.
  • Larger organisations often need support to define a technical approach before committing internal resources.
  • We can also help identify the business processes needed before evaluating software solutions including tailoring off-the-shelf products or custom builds.

Technical Architecture

  • Recommend technology strategy based on your goals and how the industry is evolving. Knowing which technologies are shifting from custom-build to off-the-shelf, or which engineering skills that are shifting from expensive to source to replaceable with AI.
  • Craft release plans and development roadmaps that harmonise your long-term vision and short-term revenue goals.
  • Lead multi-organisation engineering teams in turning high level plans into build plans.

Build

  • Provide senior engineers across many technical disciplines capable delivering on technology strategy regardless of the languages and tools.
  • Collaborate with detail oriented developers who understand human-centered design principles and take joy in making beautiful experiences.
  • Establish high performing teams and help you recruit your own team into key roles.

Maintaince

  • Ensure the stability and security of your digital products with an evolving maintenance process.
  • Establish monitoring processes and alerts to catch issues early on.

Work

Bettersaver
Bettersaver

Sanderson Howe built Bettersaver from an initial prototype into a fully fledged product that analyses over 180 funds to advise on better KiwiSaver funds. Created with modern web technologies including Angular2+, Go Cloud Functions, Google Cloud Platform, Hugo and Firebase.

Roles
+ Automation
+ Consultation
+ Maintance
+ Prototyping
+ Software architecture
+ Solution architecture
+ Team building
+ Web development
PixPix
Pixpix

Order high quality digital photo prints from your instagram or Photo Library account; delivered in under 72 hours. Available on Google Play Store and Apple App Store. We built PixPix using the Flutter framework, that lets us create cross-platform apps from a single codebase.

Roles
+ App development
+ Software architecture
Business sorter
Business sorter

Business Sorter is a cloud-based tool that provides content for making a comprehensive, live business plan you can share and track, to get real results.

Roles
+ Consultation
+ Maintance
+ Software architecture
+ Web development

Clients

bettersaver
elive
Logmate
Pixpix