Capabilities / Digital products
Digital product development.To the first paying customer.
Most of the products we build started as something a business made for itself. Then a customer saw it, asked whether they could use it too, and the question stopped being hypothetical.
Find the smallest thingsomebody will pay for.
The expensive mistake in product work is building all of it before anybody has tried any of it. So the first release is deliberately smaller than you want it to be.
We narrow it down
A product for everybody is a product for nobody. The first version should suit one kind of customer so precisely that they would be annoyed if you took it away.
We ship before it is ready
If the first release is not slightly embarrassing, it went out too late. The only thing that matters at that point is whether somebody comes back and uses it twice.
We watch what people actually do
Not what they said they would do when you asked them. The roadmap comes out of the usage, which is why the second version is always better than the plan was.
What we build here
Three fronts, often all of them.
Most products end up with more than one of these. Which one comes first is a decision about who you need to reach soonest, not about what to build eventually.
SaaS platforms
The thing you sell. Sign-ups, plans, permissions and billing built in from the start rather than retrofitted the week your first customer asks for an invoice.
Mobile apps
iOS and Android, in the stores, still working on a bad signal. For when the people who need it are never sitting at a desk.
Customer portals
Somewhere your customers can let themselves in and see their own information, instead of ringing you to ask for it.
A product is not a project.It does not finish.
A project has an end date. A product has customers, which means it has a Tuesday morning where something is broken and somebody is already waiting for it to be fixed.
Four things are what make that survivable:
It can take money on day one
Sign-ups, plans, upgrades, failed cards, invoices and VAT. The unglamorous half of a product, and the half that decides whether you can charge for it at all.
Built for the second customer
Kept properly separate from the first line of code. Turning one customer's system into a product for many afterwards is the most expensive thing that happens to young products.
You can see what people do
Analytics and error tracking from the first release, so the roadmap comes out of what people actually use rather than out of whoever emailed most recently.
Somebody else can pick it up
Documented, tested and in your own repository. A product only one person understands is not an asset, it is a risk with revenue attached to it.
How it works
Small, then bigger.
A typical first release looks like:
One call
Tell us what you have and who has already asked for it. If somebody has asked twice, that is worth more than any amount of market research.
One release
Scoped down to the smallest thing worth charging for, agreed as one number before anything starts. Everything else goes on a list for later.
Then it keeps going
Products do not finish. Most of ours run on a steady cadence of small releases rather than one big one a year, because that is how you stay close to what people do.
When you are ready
Tell us who has asked for it.
Describe what you have built for yourselves and who wants to buy it. We will tell you what the smallest sellable version looks like, and whether we think it is worth it.
Technologies
Boring where it counts.New only where it pays.
A young product cannot afford to be a science experiment as well. The plumbing gets the proven, dull, well-documented thing so that every interesting decision is spent on the part your customers actually notice.
Where it runs
It has to be up.
The first time a product goes down it stops being software and becomes a phone call. Where it runs is chosen on how fast it comes back, not on what it costs on a day when nothing is wrong.
Vercel
For the parts customers touch. Deploys in seconds, rolls back in one, and serves from close to whoever is asking.
AWS
When there is real scale or a compliance regime behind it. Multiple regions, automatic failover, and a recovery time you could put in a contract.
Krystal
UK based and renewable, for products where the data should stay in the country and the load is steady enough to be predictable.
Before you ask
The questions we always get asked.
We have an idea but nothing built. Where does that start?
With whether anybody has asked for it. If somebody has offered to pay, that is the beginning; if it is still a hunch, the first piece of work is a week of shaping it into something small enough to test rather than a build.
How small should the first version actually be?
Smaller than feels comfortable. One kind of customer, one job they need doing, and a way to pay for it. Everything else goes on a list, and about half of that list turns out not to matter once real people are using it.
What if nobody wants it?
Then it is much better to find that out in eight weeks than in eighteen months, which is the entire reason the first release is deliberately small. We would rather tell you early and be wrong than take the whole build and be right.
Can you take over something that is half built?
Often, and we will be honest about what we find. Sometimes the sensible thing is to keep it and finish it; sometimes the previous decisions cost more to work around than to replace, and we will show you the reasoning either way.
Do we need to raise money first?
Not for a first release, and raising before you have anybody using it usually costs more than it is worth. Most of the products we work on are funded out of the business that had the idea.
What happens with support once it is live?
Somebody has to be on the other end of it, and that gets agreed before launch rather than after the first outage. If that somebody is you, we set it up so it can be.
No pitch, no deck
Tell us what isactually happening.
Describe the mess in your own words. We will say what we think is going on underneath it, and whether there is anything we could usefully do about it.
Unovo LimitedSteel City Stadium, Olympic Legacy Park
Worksop Road, Sheffield S9 3TL
Registered in England and Wales, company no. 16375453