Startup Tech Consulting
Same side of the table as your engineers.
We sit on the same side of the table as your engineers. No vendor pitch, no upsell - just honest technical advice from people who have built and scaled startups themselves. We have helped founders choose stacks, architect MVPs, prepare for due diligence, hire their first engineers, and navigate the transition from scrappy prototype to scalable platform. Our goal is always to make ourselves unnecessary as fast as possible by building your team's capability, not creating dependency on ours.
What we deliver in this practice.
MVP architecture
We design architectures lean enough to ship in weeks but solid enough to scale when traction arrives. This means choosing the right abstractions early - proper auth, clean data models, API boundaries - so you are not forced into a rewrite the moment you land your first enterprise customer.
Technology selection
Framework, cloud provider, database, auth system, payment processor - every choice we recommend comes with a written rationale, alternatives considered, and migration cost if you need to change later. We optimize for your team's existing skills and hiring market, not for what is trendiest on Hacker News.
Cost-optimized infra
We design infrastructure that starts at $50/month and grows with your revenue, not ahead of it. This means using managed services over self-hosted, serverless where it fits, and reserved capacity only when your traffic patterns are predictable. Every dollar of cloud spend should be justifiable.
Technical due diligence
Investor-ready architecture documentation, security review, scalability assessment, and technical debt inventory. We prepare the materials that technical due diligence partners at VCs will ask for, and we make sure the answers reflect a well-run engineering organization.
Team building
Hiring plans with role definitions, leveling frameworks, interview question banks, and take-home exercise design. We help you write job descriptions that attract strong engineers, structure interviews that evaluate real skills, and set up engineering culture practices - code review, on-call, retrospectives - from the start.
Scaling strategy
Database sharding, caching layers, CDN configuration, read replicas, and microservices decomposition plans for when your monolith starts hitting limits. We build the scaling roadmap before you need it, so you are executing a plan under growth pressure rather than firefighting.
This service is a good fit when…
You are a non-technical founder or a first-time CTO who needs experienced guidance on technology decisions without the cost of a full-time senior hire.
You are preparing for a fundraise and need your technology stack, architecture, and security posture to pass investor due diligence.
Your MVP is gaining traction and you need to plan the transition from prototype to scalable product before growth exposes the cracks.
You are hiring your first engineers and want help defining roles, structuring interviews, and establishing engineering practices that will scale with the team.
Whatever gets you to market fastest.
Four phases. No discovery deck purgatory.
Discover
We spend a week understanding your product vision, budget constraints, current technical landscape, and team composition. This is a no-commitment phase - you get a written assessment of your current state and our recommendations regardless of whether you engage us further.
Strategize
We deliver a written technology roadmap with architecture diagrams, cost estimates at multiple growth scenarios, and a phased implementation plan. Every recommendation includes the tradeoff analysis so you can make informed decisions. Your team reviews and we iterate until the plan reflects your priorities.
Execute
Hands-on guidance where it matters most. We write code alongside your team, review pull requests, pair on complex problems, and unblock engineers who are stuck. We embed in your workflows - your Slack, your standups, your sprint planning - so the feedback loop is minutes, not days.
Scale
As you grow, raise funding, or expand your team, we adapt the roadmap and help you hire the right people to take over. The engagement winds down as your internal team builds capability. We stay available for periodic architecture reviews and advisory as needed.