Satyam Saxena Book a call

Idea to production

Technical partner for founders

We decide what to build first, what to postpone, what needs to be production-grade now, and how to avoid wasting time or budget before the core is proven.

How longTwo days a week, ongoing.

The work

What this looks like

Marked up the way I would send it back.

An example build list, not a client's.

  1. User accounts, teams, roles and permissions Ship

    Ask Satyam

    Accounts yes. Teams and roles almost never, not before you know how customers actually organize themselves. Most pre-revenue products carry a permission model built for a company shape none of their users have.

  2. Admin dashboard with usage analytics Defer

    Cut Satyam

    You need an admin view on day one because you will be operating this by hand. You do not need analytics in it: for the first hundred customers, a query and a spreadsheet answer the same question in a tenth of the time.

  3. Stripe billing with plans, seats and proration Ship

    Ask Satyam

    Take money on day one, yes. Seats and proration are a pricing decision you have not made yet, and every one of them written into the schema now is a migration later.

  4. Multi-region deployment for launch Never

    Cut Satyam

    Pick the region where failure is survivable and launch there. Multi-region is a real requirement about six orders of magnitude later than most launch plans assume, and it doubles the cost of every debugging session until then.

  5. AI assistant in the product Defer

    Cut Satyam

    Run it internally first, against your own support queue, where being wrong is cheap. If it earns its place there it earns a place in the product, and you will know what it is actually for.

Same idea, same runway. Two of those lines leave the quarter entirely and one of them leaves the product, which is usually the difference between shipping in this quarter and explaining in the next one why you did not.

How it runs

What we decide first

For founders holding an idea or a prototype who need a fractional CTO rather than a full-time hire: senior engineering judgment on what to build first and what to leave alone, before a quarter of runway has gone into the wrong half.

  1. 01

    Decide the build order

    What ships first, what waits a quarter, and what never gets built. That last category is where most of the money is saved, and it is the one nobody writes down. You leave with a list you can hand to anyone, including a team you have not hired yet.

  2. 02

    Draw the production line

    Some of this has to be production-grade now: whatever touches money, identity or data you cannot recreate. The rest can be held together for a year without anyone getting hurt. Knowing which is which is the difference between a prototype that can be extended and one that has to be thrown away.

  3. 03

    Build it with you, in the repository

    Scope, architecture, implementation and review, working with whoever you already have. Not a document about the work, and not a team you have to manage on top of everything else you are managing.

What you end up with

  • A build order: what ships first, what waits, and what never gets built
  • The parts that have to be production-grade now, and the parts that do not
  • Something running in production, not a document about it

Where this has been done

Two products co-founded and built from nothing: hyperlocal delivery in Delhi with live driver tracking, a decade before Blinkit, and zero-knowledge encrypted storage in Berlin.

Bring me the thing you are about to build.

Book a discovery call

Thirty minutes, and a straight answer on whether this is the right path.