You have the expertise. We build the whole company.
About $200,000 of work — product, brand, go-to-market, financial model, infrastructure. You pay 15% in cash and 15% in equity. Then we stay and run it with you.
The idea was never the problem. The next step was.
You got the quotes. Ninety thousand. A hundred and fifty. One firm said a quarter million and eight months. So you closed the tab.
You rebuilt the deck. Twice, maybe four times. You mapped the workflow, wrote the specs, asked a friend who knows a developer. That was a year ago. Possibly five.
The idea is still good. You're just no closer to it existing.
Everyone quoting you a quarter million is quoting you their cost structure — a team of eight, billed by the hour. We're two operators with a fleet of AI agents. Same output. Different arithmetic entirely.
Ten weeks. One client. An entire company.
Kyle Moore is a Georgia trial attorney with a settlement-valuation method he'd kept in his head for twelve years. On May 29 the repository was empty. He had no code, no brand, no infrastructure, and no team. Ten weeks later he had a company — and he'd made us co-founders.
Itemized at $200/hr market rates
About 13¢ per dollar of market value
Straight from git. Peak day: 89
Platform, site, investor deck, law firm
We published the whole ledger — seventeen workstreams, priced line by line, plus exactly what he paid in cash and what he gave in equity. Most agencies show you a logo and a testimonial. Go read the invoice instead.
Read the full ledgerNot a prototype. A company.
Most shops quote you screens. Screens aren't a business. Here's the full scope of what gets built — the same six workstreams that made up the SettleSmart ledger.
The product
The actual software. Real accounts, real data, real payments. Front end, back end, database, APIs, admin tooling — deployed to staging and production with monitoring and zero-downtime releases.
The brand & the site
Name, identity, marketing site, copy. The thing you send to a prospect that makes them believe this is a real company, because by then it is.
Go-to-market
ICP definition, channel strategy ranked by acquisition cost, referral and partnership plans, outbound infrastructure, ad accounts, analytics. We mine the data and build the sequences.
The money story
A 36-month financial model generated from code, not guessed in a spreadsheet — plus an investor deck and a live presentation app if you ever want to raise.
The infrastructure
CRM, transactional email, analytics, search console, QA tooling and test data. Running on our stack, at our cost — roughly a tenth of what the equivalent cloud bill would be.
The judgment
Before any of it: a full validation report scoring the opportunity out of ten, and an honest answer about whether to build it at all.
One team ships all six. No hand-offs, no account manager.
What $302,000 actually bought
One real engagement · at $200/hr market ratesA typical build runs about $200,000. You pay $30,000 of it.
Plus 15% of a company that doesn't exist yet. That's the whole trade. This one ran well past typical — $302,000, because he became a partner rather than a client, and he paid about 13¢ on the dollar.
Lines from a real engagement, published in full at /labs/settlesmart. Yours will differ in the details — the shape doesn't.
And then it costs almost nothing to run.
We build on infrastructure most teams don't know how to operate. That isn't a one-time saving on the invoice — it's a cost that never enters your P&L, every month, for as long as the company exists.
Over three years that exceeds what you paid us to build the thing. You also get the run of our tooling — roughly 150 subscriptions — without buying a single seat.
One deal. 15 and 15.
We deliver about $200,000 of work. You pay 15% of that in cash and 15% in equity. That's the whole model — no tiers, no calculator, no menu.
of work, itemized at $200/hr market rates
cash, staged across the build
you keep majority control, always
They're the same number on purpose. We're asking for exactly as much of the company as we're taking off the invoice.
That squiggle is doing real work.
A bigger build costs more. A smaller one costs less. We'd rather show you the number we start from than hide behind "contact us for pricing" — but it is a starting point, and four things move it:
Napkin sketch or half-built?
How much company is there to build?
How big is the thing at the end?
How much do we want to build it?
This is where the conversation starts — not where it ends.
The dial
More cash buys the equity down. Less cash moves it up. Same framework, different mix.
If you'd rather write a bigger check and keep more of your company, say so. If cash is the constraint and you'd rather trade upside, say that instead. Both are normal.
What lands on your cap table
Not a faceless agency line item. Two named operators and a small vesting slice — that's it.
Held personally, not by the agency. Vests when the build is delivered.
Held personally, not by the agency. Vests when the build is delivered.
Shared across the Badge partner network — the reason our other founders show up for you.
Nothing vests on signature. The first ten percent is earned the day we hand you a working company — if we don't deliver, we don't own any of it. The remaining five vests monthly across two years, so we keep earning it long after the build is done.
When you pay
Three payments, tied to milestones rather than dates — so finishing early costs you nothing.
Scope is agreed in writing and work starts the same week.
Not a mockup — the real thing, in your hands, that you can log into and click through.
Every deliverable in the scope, shipped and handed over.
Want to know your number?
Tell us what you're building and where you are. We'll scope it honestly and put the cash and the equity in writing before you commit to anything.
First we spend thirty hours deciding whether to.
Before a line of code, we build a full validation report on your idea — long enough that you'll read it over a weekend rather than skim it in a meeting. It costs you nothing. It costs us about thirty hours, and it's the most important thing we do.
It's free, and it isn't a favour
Nine out of ten startups fail. We only take one or two partners, so our entire job is picking the ones that won't — and this report is how we do it. It's our diligence, done in the open, and you get to read it. By the end we both know whether this is real.
What's in it
- The idea, pulled apart and pressure-tested
- The market — real size, not the TAM slide
- Competitor teardowns, product by product
- Acquisition channels, ranked by what they cost
- What already exists that we can reuse
- Every route to build it, with time and effort
- Where the IP and the differentiation actually sit
How it gets made
- Our systems run for hours and draft it
- Then we read every page and argue with it
- We test the hypotheses and attack the assumptions
- Anything vague gets rewritten in plain English
- Thin sections go back for deeper research
- The machine drafts. We judge.
It ends in a score out of ten — and five ways to move it
A six isn't a no. It's a question about which lever to pull. Most ideas aren't good or bad, they're mispositioned — and the fix is almost always one of these five.
Change what it does
Change how it's sold
Change who carries it
Change how it earns
Earn more than one way
Sometimes the answer is no.
Occasionally nothing moves the score, and we'll say so. You'll have found out in a few weeks, for free, instead of in year two for a quarter of a million.
And sometimes it's no about us.
We're brutal with ourselves about whether the two of us can genuinely carry a build, or whether it's simply too ambitious for our size. If we can't pull it off, we tell you — anyone can go hire people, and that defeats the entire point.
It's as much about you as the opportunity
Half of what we're assessing isn't the market — it's whether we'd work well together. Which is why we don't run these on request. We run them after a conversation, once we think you might be one of the two.
We don't hand you a repo and disappear.
There's no clean stopping point where software becomes a business. Once you're live there's always more — a bug, a customer request, a channel to test, a feature the pilot asked for. So we stay on a monthly retainer, and it scales with what you actually need.
~15 hours a month, used however you want, for the first three months after launch. For when revenue hasn't arrived yet and cash is tight — then it steps up to the working rhythm.
Part-time technical partner. Active feature work, weekly sessions, direct Slack access.
Dedicated capacity. We own the roadmap and execute it, and we support hiring and infrastructure as you grow.
And then we phase ourselves out
That's the point. As the business stabilises and you can afford to hire, we help you build the team — starting with a junior engineer we manage and put on a path to becoming your CTO, not an expensive senior hire whose hardest work we already did. Then we step back to advisors. We keep the equity. You keep the company.
Experts with a network and a problem they can't stop seeing.
You don't have to quit your job and you don't have to call yourself a founder. Most of our partners are still working. The question we answer isn't "how do I build this" — it's "how does this get built and run without me?"
Domain expertise
Ten or twenty years inside an industry. You know something about how it actually works that no software person could know exists.
Distribution
You can pick up the phone and reach people who'd buy this. Your association, your conference, your former colleagues. That's worth more than the code.
A defensible wedge
The idea survives a competitor teardown. Either the market isn't crowded, or you have a real reason you'd win in it.
The person
Responsive, direct, generous with what you know, honest about what you don't. We have a strict no-asshole policy and we enforce it.
There's a fifth ingredient, and it's about us: can the two of us actually pull it off? If we'd have to go hire people, we pass.
This isn't for everyone.
We've learned to spot the ones that don't work. Save us both the time:
"I don't really have anyone to show it to."
Your network is the go-to-market. Without it we're two strangers guessing at a market you were supposed to already own.
"I'll know it when I see it."
You're the product owner here. If you can't say what good looks like, we'll build something competent that you'll never be happy with.
"I want to keep 95% and pay almost nothing."
Then you want contractors, and you should go hire some. We take equity because we're building at a fraction of what this costs — the two facts are the same fact.
"I've been through five developers already."
Sometimes that's bad luck. Usually it's a decision-making problem, and we'd be the sixth. We don't take projects run by committee.
"Can you just add a few engineers to hit the date?"
No. It's the two of us or it isn't us. Subcontracting is what everyone else does and it's why their work is worse.
Simple process. Clear deliverables.
A 20-minute call
Tell us the idea and who you think would pay for it. We'll tell you straight whether it's something we can do and whether we want to.
The validation report
Free, and about thirty hours of our time: the market, competitor teardowns, acquisition channels and their costs, build pathways, IP position — scored out of ten. If it comes back a six, we'll show you which levers move it to a nine, or tell you it doesn't have any.
We put the deal in writing
Exact scope, exact cash, exact equity, exact timeline. Nothing starts until you've read it and agreed to it.
Ten weeks
You'll get a constant flow of work to review — over Slack and Google Docs, most days. You're the product owner; expect to be busy. Then you have a company.
We take one at a time.
During our last build it was both of us, most of the day, most days, for ten weeks. That is the only way the work comes out the way it does — and it means we can't run two.
We're looking for one or two more partners like him. After that we start the fund and this stops being something you can buy.
If we're mid-build when you reach out, we'll tell you, and we'll tell you when we're free.
Frequently Asked Questions
Still thinking about it?
Twenty minutes. Tell us the idea, who'd pay for it, and what's stopped you so far. We'll tell you honestly whether this is a fit.
// No pitch deck. Just a conversation about your idea.