Product design & MVPs
Product strategy, UX/UI design, and engineering from one senior team. Tandem Studio takes startups and small businesses from a problem worth solving to a working product in a single sixty-day Jump, for a flat fee.
The problem
Most products fail before they're built: months on a spec, a design, and a codebase for something nobody turns out to pay for. The second-most expensive mistake is building the right thing with a team that hands you a prototype and leaves.
A first version should be small enough to ship fast and real enough to learn from. That takes strategy, design, and engineering in the same room, which is the one thing a chain of freelancers and agencies can't give you.
What you get
Product, design, and engineering are three of the five disciplines in the room on every Jump, with content and growth alongside them when the product needs an audience as much as it needs code.
Diagnosis, the customer worth building for, and a fixed-scope brief in week one.
A design system and the screens that matter, built for the product and the brand at once.
A production-ready build in your own repository and cloud, not a throwaway prototype.
The first version of the engine that gets the product to paying customers.
How it's faster
Every discipline is a senior operator who has shipped at scale, working with AI for research, first drafts, scaffolding, and documentation. That's what lets five people do in sixty days what a larger team takes a year to plan, and why you leave with something you can keep building yourself.
Proof
Cherry Draft, a screenwriting application we designed and built, is open to a first group of writers by invitation. The agent on our home page, and the ones we've built for clients like Legendary Stakes, came out of the same process. A look inside the studio.
Questions
Q. What do you need from us to start?
A problem you understand and the people who live inside it. You don't need a spec, a deck, or a design. Week one of the Jump produces the brief and the fixed scope with you in the room.
Q. Will it be a real product or a demo?
A real one. The MVP ships into your own repository and cloud, with a design system and the documentation to keep building on it. If the first version proves the idea wrong, you find that out in sixty days instead of a year.
Q. What happens after sixty days?
You own everything and the paying stops. You get ten months of direct access to the team with no retainer. If the product warrants it, we can align on revenue-share or equity for what comes next, but that's a choice, not a condition.
Q. Do you only work with funded startups?
No. We work with founders and operators at startups and small to mid-size businesses, funded or bootstrapped. The fit question is whether there's a real problem and a real customer, and we'll tell you on the first call if we don't think there is.
Next
You don't need a spec. A senior operator reads every message and replies within one to two business days.
Tell us what you're building