The brief is the deliverable
Most agency engagements get into trouble before any code is written. The brief is fuzzy, the success criteria aren't in writing, and three weeks later everyone is having a different conversation about whether the project is on track.
We treat the day-one brief as the deliverable. It's a one-pager. It lists every screen, every feature, every integration, and the launch date, explicitly. Anything not on it isn't in scope.
If we can't write it down in 1,500 words on day one, we don't take the project.
The cadence is everything
Two weeks isn't a long time. We've learned that the only way to launch is to be brutal about synchronous overhead. One meeting at the midpoint. Everything else is async, Slack, Loom, Linear.
Founders we work with consistently say the cadence is the surprise. They expected to be in meetings; instead they get a daily Loom and a Linear board that updates in front of them.
14 days, scheduled
Here's exactly how the two weeks break down:
Discovery call.
30 minutes. We scope, we agree, we sign.
Shared everything.
Slack, Figma, Linear, repo. You meet the people who build.
Wireframes, fast.
Page list + low-fi. Decisions, not options.
Hi-fi design.
Pixel-level. Every state. Components & tokens.
Mid-sprint sync.
The one synchronous meeting. We adjust direction here, not after.
Build.
Next.js front-end, Nest.js API where needed. Two people on it, async.
QA + content.
Real copy, real images. Edge cases. Lighthouse audit.
Stage review.
You walk through with us. We fix in hours, not days.
Launch.
Push to prod. Handover doc. 30-day support clock starts.
What we trade away
Speed isn't free. We don't do bespoke illustration. We don't write 60 pages of copy. We don't debate three logo directions. We pick one, and we launch it.
The founders who hire us are usually relieved by this. The ones who aren't shouldn't hire us. We tell them so on the discovery call.
When it doesn't work
Twice in 32 projects, we missed the launch date. Once because of a CMS migration that was outside our scope and we'd under-estimated. Once because a stakeholder wanted to redo the homepage on day twelve.
Both times we kept building until we cleared it. Both times we ate the overrun. Both clients are still with us. It's not a great margin business, but it's an honest one.