The order is deliberate: decide, then build. Most of the money is lost in the other order.
Start with a conversation, not a project
We begin with a second opinion, by the hour or the day. You bring the idea, the code, the spreadsheet, the pitch deck. We take it apart. Who pays, for what, at which price, what the smallest provable version is, what it costs to run, and what has to be true for it to work.
You leave with one of three things: a launch cost and a plan, a narrower version worth trying, or a no. The no is a deliverable. It is the cheapest one we can give you.
That session is an offer in its own right, not a prelude: second opinion, one to one, ending in a written decision rather than a report.
Then two weeks, spread over two or three months
If the plan survives, the usual shape is a short engagement: roughly two weeks of work spread over two or three months, whenever you need me. Not a project with a status meeting. A person who already knows your product, available when a decision has to be made: the schema, the deploy, the pricing, the contractor who is drifting.
What we bring besides advice
We run our own businesses on our own infrastructure, so the answers about hosting, backups and running costs come from carrying them rather than from reading about them. The model gateway behind our products runs on our machines, keeps nothing of yours, and is one endpoint instead of five vendors. The application you need can live there from the first week.
We also run the whole product function for an investor-backed product business: development, deployment, testing, and the market side. The advice is not a theory about someone else’s constraints.
What we will not do
- Work through an intermediary. We speak with the person whose money and business are at risk, or not at all.
- Flatter the idea. A plan built on a polite lie is the most expensive thing on this page.
- Sell you a stack. The tools follow the problem. Naming them first is how the problem gets hidden.
The way in
Most work arrives by referral. If someone sent you, name them — it is the shortest introduction there is, and it tells me what you were told about me.
If nobody did, write to isaak@overbring.com. A paragraph about what you are working on is the whole introduction; a compliment is not needed and will not help.