How does the fixed price work?

Every engagement starts with a short scoping exercise — real questions about who the first users are, what the next milestone has to prove, and what can honestly wait. Then you get a written quote: one fixed price, agreed before any code is written. If the scope changes mid-build — it sometimes does, for good reasons — we quote the change in writing before doing the work, rather than letting you discover it on an invoice.

Do you really take equity?

Sometimes, for the right startup. When we believe in the product, we'll consider a blend of cash and equity — and we say no more often than yes, because equity only makes sense when we'd genuinely bet on what you're building. Whatever the conversation, we'll always quote a pure-cash price alongside it, so the choice is genuinely yours rather than something you were steered into.

Who owns the code and IP?

You do — fully, from day one. The repositories live in your accounts, the infrastructure runs under your name, and the intellectual property is assigned to your company in the contract, not withheld until the final payment. If we parted ways tomorrow, you'd keep everything: code, documentation, deployment pipelines and the credentials to run them. That isn't generosity; it's how this should work.

What happens after launch?

Whatever suits the stage you're at. Most startups keep us on as their engineering partner: maintenance, monitoring, new features, and the scaling work that arrives once real users do. Others eventually build their own team — in which case we do a clean, documented handover and stay available while the new engineers find their feet. Launch is the start of the product's life, not the end of our interest in it.

What stage do you join at?

Anywhere from idea to post-raise, but funded pre-seed and seed is the sweet spot: you've raised money to build a product and haven't yet built the team to build it. That's precisely the gap we exist to close. Earlier than that, we'll be straight about what your budget buys and would rather descope honestly than ship you something half-finished. Later, we slot in alongside an existing team to deliver the thing that keeps slipping.

Why not just hire our own engineers?

You will — eventually, and you should. But building a hiring pipeline before you have a product is the expensive order of operations: months of recruiting and a year of salaries before anything ships, all drawn from a finite runway. We invert it. A small expert team ships your v1 while your raise stays largely intact — and when the time comes to bring engineering in-house, we help you hire and hand over properly.

// cambridge, uk — startup studio

We build startups. Start to finish.

You've raised the money. Now you need the product — and the default route runs through months of hiring before anything ships. We're the other route: a small Cambridge team that builds your v1 for a fixed price you'll know before we start, then stays on as your engineering partner.

Start a conversation

The gap between "we have funding" and "we have a product"

Here's the default path for a freshly funded startup: write job specs, brief recruiters, run three-stage interviews, make offers, lose candidates to counter-offers, wait out notice periods, onboard, and — months in — start building. All of it paid for out of the raise, all of it before a single user touches anything. The pitch deck said the money was for the product. The spreadsheet says most of it went on assembling the people to build the product.

There's another order of operations: come to us first. We scope the product properly, quote a fixed price you know before we start, and a small team that already works well together starts shipping in weeks. You get to your investor demo, your first customers and your next milestone with your runway intact — and you build your own engineering team later, when you have a product for them to inherit and revenue arguments for the hires.

We're not against you hiring engineers. We're against a hiring pipeline being the price of admission to having a product.

// how it works

Four steps. No theatre.

The same shape every time, because it works: understand, quote, build, stay.

// 01 — scope

Scope

Short and real. We ask the questions that matter — who the first user is, what the investor demo has to prove, what can wait — and give you a written, fixed quote. No number until we understand the problem; no build until you've agreed the number.

// 02 — build

Build

Working software from the early weeks, not a discovery phase that produces a deck. Progress you measure by clicking on it: a staging environment from the start, regular releases, and every decision documented in writing.

// 03 — launch

Launch

Production infrastructure, monitoring, backups and the boring reliability work that keeps 2am quiet. Your product goes live under your accounts, on your domain, owned entirely by you.

// 04 — partner

Partner

After launch we stay on as your engineering team: maintenance, new features, scaling when users arrive. Or, when you're ready to build in-house, we help you hire and hand over cleanly to the team that comes after us.

// how we charge

A price you know before we start

We quote a fixed price for the build, in writing, after a short scoping exercise — before any code is written and before you've committed to anything. Not an estimate that drifts, not a day rate with an open end: a number you can put in a board update. If the scope changes along the way, the change gets quoted the same way, in advance, honestly.

After launch, the relationship changes shape rather than ending. Most of our startups keep us on as their engineering partner — maintenance, new features, scaling — under an arrangement sized to the stage they're actually at, not the stage a retainer template assumes.

And yes: sometimes we take equity. For the right startup — one whose product we'd genuinely bet on — we'll consider a blend of cash and equity, and we say no more often than yes. We'll always quote a pure-cash price alongside it, so you're choosing between two honest numbers rather than being steered toward the one that suits us.

// fit

Who this is for — and who it isn't

// right shape

You'll like working with us if…

You're a funded pre-seed or seed startup with a product to build and no team yet to build it. You're a spinout converting research into something a customer can use. You're a founder who wants a product before a payroll — and who'd rather hear "that's the wrong thing to build first" than a comfortable yes.

Bonus points if your product touches hardware, instruments or data with provenance requirements — that seam is where we're strongest.

// wrong shape

We're not the right fit if…

You need a 40-person delivery team, a body shop to absorb headcount, or a vendor who'll build whatever the spec says without asking why. We're a deliberately small, deep-focus studio — few projects, full attention — and that shape doesn't stretch to staff augmentation.

If that's what you need, we'll say so in the first conversation and save us both the discovery phase.

// faq

Startup questions, straight answers

// further reading

We've written a candid guide to MVP development for Cambridge startups — what to build first and what to fake — and 12 questions to ask a software development partner, including the ones that would disqualify us.

Not a startup? We build for Cambridge's wider economy too — see software development in Cambridge.

Spend the raise on the product, not the pipeline.

Tell us what you raised the money to build and what the next milestone has to prove. We'll ask real questions, then quote a fixed price in writing — before a single line of code.

Start a conversation

hello@overclockminds.co.uk