§ 04 / 04 Product Studio
Product Studio · DVS-CS-0104
Building a multi-tenant SaaS product from an idea and a waiting list
A domain expert with customers and no engineering team needed a real product, not a prototype that would need rewriting at the first hundred accounts.
Engagement record
- Discipline
- Product Studio
- Sector
- B2B software
- Duration
- 18 weeks
- Client
- Confidential
- Stack
- TypeScript · Next.js · PostgreSQL · Stripe · Cloudflare · GitHub Actions
The problem
The founder understood the problem better than anyone and had a waiting list to prove it. What they did not have was a technical partner who would push back — the offers on the table were agencies quoting a demo and calling it an MVP.
What we did
- 01 Cut the first release to the single workflow customers had already said they would pay for
- 02 Built tenancy, authentication, billing, and audit logging properly in the first sprint, because retrofitting them is where these products die
- 03 Instrumented the product from day one so iteration ran on usage data rather than opinion
- 04 Shipped to a closed cohort at week nine and rebuilt one core screen based on what they actually did
- 05 Left the founder with a documented system and a hiring specification for their first engineer
Outcome
Live with paying customers, a billing system that has not needed to be replaced, and a codebase their first in-house engineer could take over. The founder owns every account and every line of code.