Engineering for early-stage teamsMVP TO HANDOVER
Build the smallest thing
that answers the question
- MVP scoping
- Build now, defer later
- Cloud setup
- Debt you can see
- Handover to your team
You don't need the whole product yet — you need the part that tells you whether to keep going. We scope hard, build fast, and write down what we deferred so the shortcuts stay decisions you made, not surprises the next engineer inherits.
- Scoped to one question
- Deferred work written down
- Readable by whoever comes next
- AWS
- React Native
- AI & ML
Scope is the whole job
Most early products fail on scope, not on code. The first release tries to cover every user, every edge case and every integration someone mentioned in a meeting, and by the time it ships the market has moved. So the first conversation we have is about what to leave out. We agree the one question the release has to answer, cut everything that does not help answer it, and put the rest on a list you can see. Then we build: a stack your future hires will recognise, a schema that can take the next three features, tests where a bug would be expensive, and deployment that works from the first week rather than the last. Some of it is deliberately rough — a manual admin step, a queue that is really a database table, a hard-coded pricing tier. That is fine as long as everyone knows it is rough and why. When you hire your own engineers, you get the repository, the deferred-work list, the runbooks and the reasoning, so their first sprint is building rather than archaeology.
What we build first
Six things worth doing before Series A
Not everything on this page belongs in your first release. Pick the two or three that unblock the next decision, and defer the rest on purpose.
MVP scoping and build
We start by arguing about the cut list. One question the release has to answer, the shortest path to answering it, and an explicit note of what we are not building yet — then two-week sprints against that.
- Written cut list
- Clickable prototype first
- Two-week sprints
ScopingMVPIterationInfrastructure sized for now
One environment, managed database, a deploy that runs from a merge. No Kubernetes for a service with forty users. We pick primitives you can scale up later without rewriting the app around them.
- AWS / Azure / GCP
- Deploy on merge
- Room to scale later
AWSAzureDevOpsAnalytics you'll actually read
A handful of events that map to the decision you're about to make — activation, retention, the step where people drop out. Warehouses and dashboards come later, when there is enough data to justify them.
- Events tied to decisions
- Funnel and retention views
- Warehouse when it earns it
AnalyticsBIMLMobile when mobile is the product
Native with Swift and Kotlin, or one codebase in Flutter or React Native. If the app is a thin client over your API, cross-platform usually wins; if it lives on the camera or the sensors, it doesn't. We'll say which yours is.
- iOS & Android
- Cross-platform in Flutter or RN
- Store submission
SwiftKotlinFlutterSecurity you can't retrofit cheaply
Auth, secrets, encryption in transit and at rest, and a sane permission model go in early — those are expensive to bolt on. Pen tests and formal review come when you have customers who ask for them.
- Auth and permissions early
- Secrets out of the repo
- Designed to support GDPR duties
SecurityGDPROWASPGrowth plumbing
The unglamorous half of acquisition: pages that render fast and index, App Store metadata, attribution that survives a redirect, and events wired so you can tell which channel actually paid for itself.
- SEO & ASO
- Attribution that holds up
- Campaign instrumentation
SEOSEMContent
Not sure what belongs in version one?
Tell us the deadline and the budget. We'll come back with a scope, a cut list, and what we would defer.
How we work with founders
Move fast
without boxing yourself in later
Speed and a codebase someone else can maintain are not opposites. The difference is whether the corners you cut were chosen and written down, or found later by whoever inherits the repository.
Runway is the real deadline
Every scope call is also a burn-rate call. We size the release against the months you have left, not against a wishlist, and say plainly when a feature is worth another sprint and when it isn't.
Spend that matches the stage
Fixed, hourly or retainer, and infrastructure sized for the users you have. Paying for capacity, tooling and process you won't need for a year is the most common way early budgets disappear.
Automate before you hire
Onboarding steps, invoices, report generation, the spreadsheet someone updates by hand every Monday. Automating those buys you months before headcount does — and they are cheap to build early.
Built to hand over
Conventional stack, readable structure, a README that gets a new engineer running locally, and decisions recorded where they happened. When you hire in-house, the first sprint is features, not archaeology.
You hear about problems early
Weekly demos on real environments, an open backlog, and a direct line to the people writing the code. If something is slipping you find out in week two, not at the deadline.
Debt on the record
The manual step, the hard-coded tier, the missing index — we keep a written list of what we deferred, why, and what it will cost to fix. Nothing on it is a surprise, and none of it has to be paid off before it matters.
Choosing the stack
Pick the technology that earns its place
Each of these is the right call for some products and an expensive detour for most. Here is how we work out which yours is.
Cloud Computing
Start managed, scale later
Managed database, object storage, one deploy target. Serverless is cheaper while traffic is spiky, containers win once it is steady — we pick by the shape of your load, and keep the app portable enough to switch.
- AWS
- Azure
- GCP
- Serverless
Blockchain
Only when trust is the product
Smart contracts on Ethereum, Solana or Polygon earn their cost when users must not have to trust you — custody, settlement, provenance. For everything else a database is faster, cheaper and far easier to fix.
- Ethereum
- Solidity
- DeFi
- Web3
Machine Learning Features
Hosted model first
Most early AI features are a hosted model, your own data, and careful handling of what goes in and comes out. Fine-tuning and self-hosting come later, once you have evaluation examples and enough volume to justify the bill.
- LLMs
- NLP
- Computer Vision
- AutoML
IoT and Device Data
The fleet is the hard part
Sensors and dashboards are the easy half. Provisioning, over-the-air updates and devices that behave when the network drops are what decide whether the product survives its first few hundred units in the field.
- GCP IoT Core
- MQTT
- Sensors
- Real-time
Virtual Reality Builds
Prototype before you commit
Headset and spatial work is expensive to build and expensive to change. Better to put a rough Unity or WebXR prototype in front of ten users than spend a quarter polishing an interaction nobody asked for.
- Unity
- WebXR
- AR/VR
- 3D
The rest of the build
Unglamorous pieces that decide how much the second year costs
Progressive web apps
Installable and offline-capable on the web — often enough to test demand before you commit to two native codebases.
Auth and access control
MFA, roles and an audit trail put in early, because retrofitting a permission model across a live schema is a rewrite.
CI/CD from week one
Tests and deploys on every merge. Set up in a day at the start; a fortnight of untangling if you leave it until launch.
Product analytics
Events named consistently and stored where you can query them later, so the funnel question you ask in month six is answerable.
Chat and voice assistants
Support and onboarding flows handled by an assistant, with a clear route to a human the moment it is out of its depth.
Multi-tenant SaaS
Tenant isolation, subscription billing and plan limits designed once — the pieces most painful to introduce after your first ten customers.
How the build runs
From a rough idea to something users can touch in six steps
No proprietary methodology, no ceremony you have to attend. Six steps run in the open, each ending in a decision you can see — what we built, and what we chose to leave for later.
Typical MVP
8–12 weeks
Sprint cadence
Two weeks
Handover
Repo, docs, runbooks
Deferred work
Written down
Scope and cut list
We work out the single question the release has to answer, then go through the feature list marking each item build, defer or drop. You leave with a scope and — just as usefully — a written record of everything that is not in it.
Design the screens that matter
Flows and a clickable prototype for the two or three screens the product lives or dies on. Settings and empty states get wireframes. Polish is cheap to add later and expensive to add early.
Architecture and deliberate debt
Stack, schema and API contracts chosen for what your next three features need, not your hundredth. This is where we decide what to fake — a manual step, a table standing in for a queue — and write down what unfaking it will cost.
Build in two-week sprints
Working software on a real environment at the end of every sprint, demoed rather than reported on. Scope moves between sprints because reality does; the cut list is what we move it against.
Test where a bug would be expensive
Payments, auth, data loss and anything a user cannot undo get real coverage. The rest gets smoke tests. Chasing full coverage on a product that might pivot next month is not the best use of your runway.
Launch, learn, hand over
Monitoring and error reporting from the first deploy, then a few weeks of watching real usage and fixing what it exposes. When you hire in-house, you get the repository, the deferred-work list, the runbooks and the reasoning behind both.
Where we build
The first release looks different in every market
How much you can defer depends on the sector. Regulated markets need more in version one; consumer products can leave out almost everything except the core loop.
- 8 sectors
- MVP first
- Built to hand over
- Remote delivery
Fitness & Wellness
Tracking, streaks and the habit loop. Wearable sync and telehealth are usually version two — a manual entry field is enough to learn whether anyone comes back on day eight.
- Wearables
- Tracking
- Gamification
E-Learning
Course delivery, progress and assessment. Live sessions and adaptive paths can wait; the first thing worth proving is that learners finish anything at all.
- LMS
- AI Tutor
- Gamification
Food & Restaurant
Ordering, dispatch and status. Live tracking is the part customers judge you on; the kitchen side can start as a tablet and a printer and still be right.
- Delivery
- POS
- Loyalty
Telecom
Provisioning, rating and billing. Even a small operator has to get usage records and invoices right immediately, which makes this one of the few sectors where the MVP is genuinely backend-heavy.
- VoIP
- BSS
- Billing
Banking & FinTech
Onboarding, ledgers and payments. KYC and audit trails are designed in from the start because they cannot be retrofitted, so the visible product stays deliberately small until they hold.
- PCI DSS
- KYC
- Payments
Media and Creator Tools
Catalogue, playback and subscriptions. Encoding ladders, DRM and recommendations get added once you know which content people actually finish.
- Streaming
- OTT
- Subscriptions
HRMS & HR Tech
Employee records, leave and payroll runs. Integrations with whatever the customer already uses decide adoption, so we build one of them properly rather than five badly.
- Payroll
- ATS
- Engagement
Market Research
Survey building, panel routing and results. Charts are quick to add; question logic, quotas and clean exports are what the first release is really about.
- Surveys
- BI
- AI Insights
Frequently Asked Questions
The questions founders actually ask
Scope, timelines, debt, handover and money — the questions founders actually ask on the first call. Not here? Ask us directly.
Vetted by the vendor, not just by us.
A partner badge is granted, not claimed. These came from Odoo.
- Odoo Partner
- Odoo Certified Consultants
Tell us what you're
trying to build
The problem, who it's for, and where you are now. That's enough for us to come back with something useful.
hello@aryavos.com
HQ
Noida, India & New York, USA
What happens after you send it
A developer reads it, not an auto-responder. Expect questions about scope and constraints first, then a suggested way to start.