Startup Software Development for UK Founders

MVP development is one stage of this journey: building a focused first release, which our dedicated MVP development page covers in detail. Startup services are everything around it — testing the idea before you build, iterating once users arrive, preparing for investor due diligence and scaling as usage grows.

Yes. We explain decisions in plain English, give you options with the trade-offs spelled out, and never ship anything you cannot see on a staging environment first. We will also help you judge other suppliers’ proposals — and tell you when it is time to hire in-house rather than keep paying us.

Talk to potential customers, write down the one assumption that would sink the business if it were wrong, and find the cheapest way to test it. Sometimes that is a prototype or a landing page; sometimes it is running the service by hand for your first customers. A paid discovery sprint, from £2,000, is where we help if you want support.

From evidence. We set up product analytics and error tracking at launch, agree the few measures that matter at your stage — activation, retention, conversion to paid — and plan each sprint around moving one of them. Feature requests go on a list and are weighed against those measures rather than built on arrival.

Yes. We review the codebase, dependencies, access controls, infrastructure and documentation the way an investor’s technical adviser would, fix what matters most, and produce an architecture overview and an honest list of known limitations. We do not advise on the legal or financial side of the investment.

Usually: that the company owns the code and accounts outright, that a new engineer could pick the product up from its documentation, that the critical paths have tests, and that obvious risks — shared passwords, secrets in the repository, unpatched dependencies — have been dealt with. Few expect perfection at seed stage; they do expect no nasty surprises.

We can help write the role, review CVs and technical tests, join interviews to assess technical depth, and onboard new hires onto the codebase. We are not a recruitment agency and do not place permanent staff — the aim is to make your hires productive quickly, not to hold on to the work.

Often, yes. The first job is recovering access — domain, hosting, app store accounts, repository and third-party services — and making sure each one is in your company’s name. Then we review the code and give you an honest recommendation: keep and improve, partly rebuild, or start again.

Discovery sprints start from £2,000, and builds are quoted as fixed-price projects once the scope is agreed. For ongoing iteration, a dedicated developer starts from £2,900 a month, and smaller pieces of work can be billed hourly from £20 an hour. We will suggest the lightest model that fits the stage you are at.

Yes, on request, before discovery starts. Everything we create for you — code, designs, documentation and the cloud accounts it runs in — belongs to your company from day one, so there is no awkward conversation about ownership when you raise or sell.