MVP development for UK pre-seed founders. We take the sketch on your napkin, audit it for a week, build it for four, and hand it over in week six — with a real customer paying a real invoice on the MERN stack.
Thirty-four MVPs since 2019. Same shape every time, same reason it works. The thing we ship in week six is the thing your customers pay for and your next CTO inherits.
Agency one quoted £42K for a discovery phase, then handed back a forty-slide brand deck and a Figma file. Agency two quoted £78K for a build: four months later, a half-finished React app, no auth, no payments, a senior who’d quit. £120K gone.
He was 34, nine months of runway promised to his wife, three months left. We audited the brief on a Monday, signed the scope on a Friday, started building the next Monday. Six weeks later he had a working marketplace and three landlords paying on it.
A one-page deck and a live product did the rest. Imran raised £750K seed eleven weeks after launch. This page is for founders who recognise themselves in that paragraph.
We don’t reinvent the cadence for every MVP development project. We’ve shipped this shape thirty-four times. The dates change, the shape doesn’t.
We sit with you for three days, strip the sketch, cut the features that don’t belong, pick the stack. You sign the scope on Friday.
Repo live, auth wired, MongoDB schema written, CI green, staging up on AWS. The one flow that defines the product, clickable end to end.
Stripe, or GoCardless for UK Direct Debit. Transactional email, SMS where it matters, tax and GBP invoicing. Real money flow.
Onboarding tuned, error states real, Mixpanel + Sentry wired. By Friday your first customer is paying you in production.
Architecture brief, runbook, ADR set, repo tour, investor one-pager. We brief your next hire and stay on call for 30 days.
This is what 34 MVP development sprints have hammered into the studio. Not a brochure. The reasons founders sign a second contract.
The engineers who sign your scope are the engineers who ship. No bench, no junior offshoring, no bait-and-switch.
Your CFO sees one number on Monday and one on day forty-two. Change requests are written. Nothing built off a Slack message.
Every MVP handover includes the one-pager VCs ask for, plus the architecture brief your next CTO inherits without apology.
Mohit reads every brief personally. A real reply, not a calendar link, inside one working day. London time.
Payments are not a v2 feature. By Friday week 5 your first customer pays you in production, with real reconciliation in Xero.
Every MVP founder who emails us is fighting one of these eight things. Each is fixable on day one of the build. None gets cheaper later.
“We have nine months of runway and the last agency took four of them.”
Six-week fixed sprint, milestone payments. Audit week 1, build weeks 2-5, handover week 6. 25% milestone billing means you never pay more than 25% ahead of working software.
“We have an investor demo on June 18 and we can’t miss it.”
Demo-ready core in week 3. Week 3 Friday is the demo-ready milestone. You have a live URL to walk an investor through three weeks earlier than they expect.
“The last MVP was built in PHP and we can’t hire anyone to maintain it.”
MERN + AWS, the biggest hiring pool in 2026. MongoDB + Express + React + Node.js on AWS. Your next hire is fluent on day one. London alone has 14,000+ Node engineers on LinkedIn.
“My co-founder thinks of something new every Monday. Every change wrecks the timeline.”
Written change requests with a delta quote. No verbal scope changes. Every change goes into a written request, we quote the delta, you decide. Six weeks stays six weeks unless you sign for a different number.
“Last agency took the deposit and disappeared. How do we know you won’t?”
Milestone billing + 30-day walk-away. 25% on signed scope, 25% staging up, 25% production live, 25% handover. Plus a walk-away clause both ways. You’re never more than four weeks at risk.
“What if your senior quits halfway through and we lose all the context?”
Two seniors paired, ADRs daily. Two senior engineers on every MVP, paired daily, every decision in an ADR by the same evening. In seven years, two handovers inside 48 hours. Neither client noticed.
“The product is up, but nobody’s actually paying us. The demo means nothing.”
Stripe + GoCardless live by Friday week 4. Payments are not a v2 feature. By Friday week 5 your first customer pays you in production. Real money, real reconciliation in Xero.
“Once you hand over, who maintains this? I don’t have a CTO yet.”
Architecture brief + 30-day on-call + optional retainer. Three paths post-MVP. Brief your first engineer hire, stay on a monthly retainer, or get acquired first. All three run off the same handover pack.
We don’t publish prices on a page. Every MVP development project is different. Pick the shape that fits and Mohit will send your real number inside 24 hours.
Fixed scope, brief to launch
Fixed GBP, from £25K–£42K
“Two agencies took five months and £120K and didn’t ship. Empyreal took six weeks. By Friday week 5 a real customer was paying us. We raised £750K eleven weeks after launch.”
One week, fixed cost. We strip the brief, pick the stack, write the architecture, hand you a signed scope with line-item GBP. No commitment to build.
Six weeks of fixed-scope, fixed-GBP shipping on MERN + AWS. Two seniors paired, 30-day walk-away both ways, IP assigns on every commit. First paying customer by Friday week 5.
After handover. Monthly retainer for a senior engineer plus architectural advisory from Mohit while your first in-house hire ramps up. Pause and resume any month, 30-day notice both ways.
25% on signed scope, 25% on staging up, 25% on production live, 25% on handover. You never pay more than 25% ahead of working software, and you’re never more than four weeks at risk.
What seven years of MVP development sprints looks like for UK founders since 2019. Names are codenamed; numbers are real.
Real MVPs, not prototypes, since 2019. Names are codenamed by request; the numbers are real.
Two agencies took five months and £120K and didn’t ship. Empyreal took six weeks. By Friday week 5 a real customer was paying us.
Pain-first, soft-second.
We don’t price by salesperson mood. The audit week is fixed at £8K. After that, every MVP development sprint is line-itemed: audit, spine + auth, core flow, payments + comms, polish, handover. You see the cost of each piece and can cut any piece. Most six-week MVP sprints we sign land between £25K and £42K. If we can’t hit your budget, we tell you in week one and you walk away with the audit brief, no commitment.
Three things make this hard to fake. The 30-day walk-away clause goes both ways and refunds the unused portion. Payments are milestoned: 25% on signed scope, 25% on staging up, 25% on production live, 25% on handover, so you never pay more than 25% ahead of working software. And we’ve been shipping since 2019 with 100+ projects, listed on Companies House, UK VAT registered. You can check us before you sign.
Yes, with 14 days’ notice. The engineers move to other projects, your repo stays where it is, your spend pauses. Pick it back up with 14 days’ notice and we restart at the same sprint board, same engineers. No cancellation fee, no restart fee. We’ve done this six times in 2025. Two clients paused for four months. Both came back. Both shipped.
For an MVP with one or two core flows, yes, if the audit week is honest. Where it stops being enough is when the scope hides a second product inside the first. The audit week exists to surface that before you sign anything. If we don’t think six weeks is enough, we tell you in the audit and price the longer scope. Better that than three months in.
Every MVP development project has two senior engineers paired, not one. Every decision goes into an ADR the same day. Every commit goes through Mohit’s review. If one engineer leaves, the other has full context the next morning. In seven years, two engineers have left mid-project. Both handovers were inside 48 hours. Neither client noticed in their sprint.
We ship every MVP on the MERN stack (MongoDB, Express, React + Next.js, Node.js) with AWS for infra and Flutter for mobile. As of 2026, that’s the biggest hiring pool in the UK and globally. London alone has 14,000+ Node engineers on LinkedIn. Any senior frontend or full-stack developer your future CTO interviews will be fluent on day one. Boring on purpose, hireable on purpose.
You do, from the first commit. The repo lives in your GitHub org. IP assigns on commit, not on final payment. The contract has an exclusivity clause: we don’t reuse, resell, or repackage anything we build for you. Every dependency we pull in is open-source or licensed to your org. If we walked away at the 30-day mark for any reason, you keep everything we’ve built and own it outright.
NDA signed inside 30 minutes via DocuSign. Mutual NDA template is on hand and pre-reviewed by our solicitor. From signed scope, audit week starts within 7 working days. The fastest signed-to-staging we’ve hit on an MVP development project in 2025 was 19 calendar days from first email to first deploy.
Sketch to a product investors fund — the surface your first paying customers actually use.
Tell us the sketch, the runway, and the customer you want using it by week 5. Mohit replies inside 24 hours: a clear yes, a clear no, or the one question that decides it.
Yes, no, or the deciding question. Straight to your inbox.
We strip the sketch, pick the stack, hand you a signed scope.
Live, instrumented, real money in production, in your GitHub org.