How We Work / MVP Development
Get to a working product, not a working slide deck.
An MVP-with-Byond is a small senior team — typically a product manager, a designer, and two engineers — building a real, instrumented product over eight to fourteen weeks. Weekly demos. Real users in front of it before the end. Not a discovery phase. Not a pitch deck. A working product.
The MVP problem
Most MVPs fail not because the team can't build, but because they build the wrong thing in the wrong order. Senior experience is the difference between an MVP that earns its next round and one that becomes a sunk cost.
What an MVP-with-Byond looks like
Concrete shape, real numbers.
A typical MVP-with-Byond runs 8–14 weeks, with a team of four — a product manager, a designer, and two engineers. We demo every week, get the product in front of real users before launch, and hand back a backlog of validated next steps. The numbers are real. The team is small on purpose.
The phases
4 stages, in this order.
- 01
Frame
1–2 weeks
What we're building, why, and what success looks like. We work through the assumptions worth testing first and the ones we can defer.
- 02
Prototype
1–2 weeks
A clickable prototype, in front of real users, before any production code is written. We'd rather find out we're wrong now than in week ten.
- 03
Build
6–8 weeks
Functional product, weekly demos, real data. Senior engineers on the architecture decisions; AI-accelerated where it helps; nothing built that we can defer.
- 04
Launch & learn
2 weeks
In front of users, instrumented, ready to iterate. The engagement ends with a working product, not a handover document.
What you get at the end
Outcomes, not deliverables.
- A working product, deployed and in front of real users
- A small but real user base testing it, with instrumentation in place
- A backlog of validated next steps — what to build next, and what to drop
- Documentation and code you fully own, in your repository, ready for your team
Commercial structure
Engagements are typically priced as fixed-fee phases where the scope is clear, time-and-materials where it's deliberately open. The discovery call always ends with an honest indicative range — before any proposal lands.
The AI angle
AI accelerates the work. People still decide what to do.
AI tooling compresses the prototype and build phases — sometimes dramatically. That matters because it means we can afford to throw away a prototype that turned out to be wrong, and because it means budget that used to go on scaffolding goes on the parts of the product that need senior thought instead. What it doesn't change is who decides what to build, in what order, and which trade-offs are worth making.
One we did
A recent engagement, told tightly.
Questions we hear a lot
FAQs.
- Do we own the code?
- Yes — fully and from day one. Every line we write is yours, in your repository, under your licence.
- What if we want to take it in-house after launch?
- That's often the goal. We document as we go, write code your team can read, and run a deliberate handover. If we've placed people on the engagement that you'd like to hire, we'd rather you hired them than that we kept the contract running.
- What stack do you use?
- Stacks we've shipped in production many times — typically TypeScript, Postgres, a modern web framework, and the AI tooling that fits the job. We won't recommend something exotic for the sake of it.
- Do you work fixed-price?
- Where scope is genuinely clear, yes. Where it isn't, we work T&M and replan in the open. We don't do "fixed price" with surprise change requests baked in.
- What if scope changes during the build?
- It usually does. We replan in the open — what's changed, what it costs, what comes out to make room. No surprise invoices.
- Can we keep the team after launch?
- Often, yes. Many of our MVP engagements roll into a Fractional Team arrangement — one or two senior people part-time, plus the agents we've already built into the product. We'll discuss the shape on the call.
Have an MVP in mind? Let's frame it together.
Liverpool, UK. Available across the UK and remote.