Case study · Professional services platform
Compliance consultant, two failed offshore attempts, first real launch.
“Two previous builds never got past demo. This one had customers.”
Situation
A senior compliance consultant with well over a decade in a regulated vertical. Successful services practice. Kept getting asked by peer firms if they could buy the internal workflow he used with clients. Non-technical founder, no engineering team, two prior attempts with offshore-only teams had produced demos that didn't match the actual compliance workflow.
What was stuck
The third attempt was going to fail the same way. The core problem wasn't development capacity — it was that no one had translated domain expertise into a software specification engineers could build against. The founder was sending PDFs and screenshots to developers. The developers were building what they thought they heard.
What we changed
Fixed-scope MVP build with milestone payments. One-week requirements review before scope or price was locked. Chris captured the workflow logic in a shared spec with the founder session by session, function by function, with the founder's approval on every screen. Once the spec was signed off, the delivery partner built the MVP in four milestones over 14 weeks. The engagement included a 30-day post-launch stabilization window for bug fixes at no additional cost.
Result
MVP launched on schedule. The founder closed paying customers inside the first quarter post-launch. The product moved onto a managed retainer for v2 feature work and is still running.
Stack
- Next.js
- Supabase (Postgres + auth)
- Stripe
- Zapier
- Custom document generation
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