We work with early-stage founders at cost — full product team, full stack, full cycle — and take equity in the business as the rest of our fee. You get a senior team you can't afford yet. We bet on you being right.
From the first Figma to the billionth transaction. You don't have to stitch contractors together — we cover the entire product organisation.
Web, mobile, APIs, data pipelines — built to production standards from week one. TypeScript, Python, Swift, Kotlin. Proper architecture, not a rushed MVP that you'll replace in a year.
UX research with real users, UI that converts, a design system your engineers can actually use. We treat design as an engineering discipline.
AWS / GCP / Vercel. CI/CD, staging parity, observability, incident runbooks.
Native iOS and Android if your market is mobile-first. React Native if cross-platform is the right call. Shipped to the stores, maintained properly.
Automated test suites from day 1. You ship weekly without fearing Monday.
Most startups bolt analytics on at Series A and regret it. We wire the event pipeline, the warehouse and the AI layer from your first commit — so by your Series A raise you have real numbers.
We don't do sales theatre with founders. Here's exactly how it works, published on the website.
30-minute call. Deck optional. Tell us what you're building, who it's for, what you've tried. We decide on the call whether we're a fit.
We propose an at-cost hourly rate plus an equity percentage (usually 1–5% depending on scope). No retainer lock-in, clean exit clauses, cap on equity vesting.
Kick-off week. Then weekly demos, shipping from week 2. You own the roadmap; we own the delivery.
We stay on as your internal team grows. When your Series A hires your first 10 engineers, we hand over docs, train them, and step back to advisory — or stay on specific projects.
We're most useful before you can afford to hire a ten-person product org. Once you can, we make ourselves smaller on purpose.
Landing page, working prototype, pitch-ready numbers. Usually 6–10 weeks. Equity takes the place of most of our fee.
Full-stack engineering, design, devops and QA. Weekly shipping cadence. 3–12 months. Equity + at-cost retainer.
Scale the platform for your new customer volume, then bring your in-house team up to speed and step back gracefully. Equity already vested; at-cost for remaining work.
We stick around on the specific projects where it makes sense — new mobile apps, AI features, data migrations — at market rates, as a trusted agency.
We take equity, which means every engagement is a bet on the long game. Some industries we don't bet on.
We like the technology, we don't like the incentive structure. Not a fit.
Casino, sportsbook, loot-box adjacent — anything that monetises addictive behaviour.
We don't build adult-only platforms, period.
Everything else is on the table. Regulated industries (healthcare, fintech, legal) are genuinely our favourite — we do it for Sweede, we do it for the telemedicine platform, we've done it for enterprises. Bring us the hard ones.
Cost-to-us — salaries, benefits, infrastructure and allocated overhead of the people on your project. No margin. Published monthly on an invoice you can audit. Equity makes up the rest of what would normally be our fee.
Depends on scope, stage and your valuation — typically between 1% and 5%. We'd rather take a cleaner 2% with vesting than a fuzzy number with strings. Sample term sheet available on request.
No. We work alongside one, or alongside a technical founder. If you don't have a technical founder yet, we'll be honest about that being a risk — and help you hire for it before we start building.
30 days' notice, for any reason, on either side. Equity-vesting-to-date calculated per the term sheet; all IP transfers to you on stop. No lock-in, no claw-back gotchas.
Yes. We have a standard mutual NDA ready to go — email startups@ussoftware.io.
Short answer: founder quality and problem quality, in that order. We take too much risk to work with founders we wouldn't bet on personally. We've said no to funded startups and yes to bootstrapped ones — and vice versa.
No. We're a product team. We'll make sure your deck has real numbers and a working demo, but we're not your VC intro, your sales team or your marketing agency.
