Your founding product and engineering team.

For funded founders who aren't technical — and don't want to gamble their raise on a dev shop or an AI prototype that hits the wall.

We're a VP of Product and a CTO. We build your product strategy with you, build the platform against it, then help you hire the team that replaces us. Faster and cheaper than a traditional dev shop, because we build AI-native. Far beyond vibe coding, because we've spent twenty years learning what good looks like.

Start at Square1 →

The Square1 Discovery Process is a $10,000 fixed-fee engagement. You'll know exactly what you're buying before you spend a dollar on the build.

The two ways founders get burned

You've heard the first story. You may have lived it.

Failure mode 01 — the dev shop

They built exactly what you wrote down. That was the problem.

A founder raises money and hires a dev shop. The shop asks for a spec — from someone who's never built software. The founder writes down their best guesses. Nobody asks why. Nobody digs into the users, the market, or the problem.

Progress updates arrive. The founder has no way to know if what they're seeing is good. "It works" is taken on faith.

Months later they're handed a platform they can't run, can't maintain, and can't extend. Every change needs a new contract. The money is spent, the platform sort of works — but not really — and the months are gone.

Failure mode 02 — the vibe-coding wall

The second story is newer. It ends the same way.

A founder skips the dev shop and builds it themselves with AI. And honestly? They get further than anyone expected. Something real, something demo-able. It's impressive — we mean that.

Then the wall: features that break other features. A codebase nobody can reason about. No way to tell whether it would survive real users, real data, a security review, or growth. No way to even tell if it's 80% done or 20% done.

Same ending: a platform that sort of works, but not really. Except this founder also spent their own months building it.

Both stories have the same root: someone who needs software built, and no one beside them who knows what good looks like. The dev shop exploits that gap. The AI tools hide it — until they don't. We built 1BC to close it.

How 1BC works

One program. Four phases. An exit we design on purpose.

From day one, a defined path to running your platform without us.

PHASE 01

The Square1 Discovery Process — before a line of code

Every engagement starts at square one — deliberately. Square1 is a process we developed to compress what usually takes months of product strategy into roughly 40 focused hours, and it's the reason everything after it works. You bring the vision. We pressure-test it — the market, the users, the actual problem. We'll challenge you, and we expect you to push back; that's the work.

Together we produce the real product spec (problems and users, not a feature list), a prioritized roadmap from MVP through the next 5 years, a technical architecture plan — and a working interactive prototype, built in near-real-time as we talk, so you can react to your product before you commit to it.

$10,000, fixed. If you take the blueprint and build elsewhere, you still got your money's worth — Square1 is designed so that's true.

PHASE 02

Build — against the roadmap, never against vibes

Fixed scope, milestone-based payments — never hourly. We build the platform, the infrastructure, the deployment. Progress reviews are framed in terms you can actually evaluate: what it does for your users, not a demo you take on faith. Builds typically run 2–4 months, $30K–$100K+ depending on scope — you'll know your number before we start.

And when we launch, we don't disappear: the first month of post-launch stabilization — bug fixes, surprises, "it broke" coverage — is included in the build price.

PHASE 03

Transition — we start replacing ourselves at launch

Here's the part no one else says out loud: at some point, we become the expensive way to run your platform. That's by design.

From launch day, two things happen in parallel: we keep the platform stable on a declining schedule — our hours step down on a published glide path — and we recruit the people who'll take over.

If you're ready for a senior hire, we source them, help you hire them, and onboard them against documentation we've been writing since day one. If you can't afford senior talent yet, we recruit a capable developer and stay above them as your fractional CTO and VP of Product — real leadership at a fraction of leadership cost — until you can.

Either way, you always know what the exit looks like. Nobody ever wonders how to get rid of us. We hand you the plan ourselves.

PHASE 04

Advisory — we never fully leave (unless you want us to)

After handoff, most clients keep us at a few hours a month: gut-checks, "should we build this?" conversations, a technical voice for board questions. When you raise your next round and need the next big build, we already know your platform — because we built it and hired the people running it.

The two questions every founder asks us

Ask them. Everyone does.

"How are you different from a dev shop?"

A dev shop takes your spec and returns code. We don't take specs — we build the strategy with you first. Real product leadership, a real roadmap, a prototype you can react to before committing. Then we build against it. Then we engineer our own exit so you're never dependent on us.

A dev shop's business model needs you to keep coming back. Ours needs you to succeed and tell other founders.

"Why can't I just build this myself with Claude Code?"

You can get something running — genuinely, and that's new, and it's impressive. What you can't do without years of engineering scar tissue is know whether what you built will survive real users, real data, a security review, and growth — or fix it when it doesn't. That's not a knock on you. It's the same expertise gap that lets bad dev shops thrive, wearing new clothes.

Here's the honest part: we use the same AI tools you would. That's why we're faster and cheaper than a traditional shop. The difference is what's holding the tools.

Already built something with AI? Bring it to Square1. It's a better starting point than a blank page, and we'll tell you honestly what's salvageable. Usually more than you fear.

Who this is for

We turn away work that doesn't fit.

1BC is built for you if:

  • You've raised — or have committed capital or business revenue funding this build
  • The software platform IS the business, not a side project
  • You want to be challenged in the strategy phase, not transcribed
  • You'll show up personally for Square1 — we co-create with founders, not delegates

We're the wrong choice if:

  • You're pre-funding and hoping to pay in equity — we don't work for equity, full stop
  • You have a finished spec and just want it executed — that's the exact pattern that burns founders, and we won't be part of it
  • You need staff augmentation ("two devs for our team") — good firms do that; we're not one of them

It's how we make sure every client we take gets the outcome we're promising.

Where every build starts
The Square1 Discovery Process
$10,000 FIXED · ~40 HOURS OF THE TWO OF US · SCHEDULED AROUND YOU

Square1 is a process we built and refined for exactly one purpose: making sure no founder spends real money on a build they can't evaluate. It's not a sales call and it's not a requirements-gathering exercise — it's the compressed version of what a founding VP of Product and CTO would do in their first months on your team.

And here's the part we designed on purpose: all of it is yours, with no obligation to build with us. Take the blueprint to another firm. Take it to your own hires. Use it to decide not to build at all — that outcome has saved founders more money than any build ever will. Square1 pays for itself even if we never speak again. We're confident enough in what happens next that we're fine making that trade.

Start at Square1 →

PLACEHOLDER — booking link (calendar or contact form) to be connected.

What you walk away with
  • A product specification built on problems and users — not a feature wishlist
  • A prioritized roadmap: your MVP, and the 5-year trajectory behind it
  • A working interactive prototype you've already reacted to and shaped
  • A technical architecture plan
  • A fixed-scope, fixed-price build proposal
The principals

The people in the room are the people who build.

Product

[FOUNDER NAME]

[PLACEHOLDER — one line on the 1BC role; two–three lines of earned credibility: fractional VP of Product background, kinds of companies and problems; one line establishing they've seen the dev shop pattern from the inside.]

BIO PENDING — principal to supply career highlights
Engineering

Charles [LASTNAME]

[PLACEHOLDER — CTO-level engineer; platforms shipped; scale handled; one line establishing hands-on, no-junior-bench delivery.]

BIO PENDING — principal to supply career highlights

No account managers. No junior bench. The people in the room during Square1 are the people building your platform.