Built with startups

Early-stage product work is the cleanest software in the world. The scope is narrow because nobody has time for the wide version yet, the politics are absent because nobody has hired the politics in yet, and the feedback loop is short because the founder is in the room and the first user might be too. We get to make decisions that survive on merit instead of process. We get to move at the speed the product deserves. That is rare in any other context, and it is the reason we keep saying yes to startups.

We are not the agency that watches the scene from a website. We are part of Startup Supper Austria, the monthly founder-and-operator dinner where notes get traded without slide decks. Before Blax had its own office we worked out of FACTORY300 in Linz, and we still show up for the networking evenings. The people writing your code sit in the same rooms as the founders they build for.

A typical first month with a startup: one short scoping conversation, a written shape of the work, a fixed price for the first slice, and code in your repo by week two. No statement-of-work theatre, no four-week discovery phase, no "we will get back to you with a proposal". You get one of our people in your stand-up if you have one, on WhatsApp if you do not (Matrix or Element on request), and we work async by default so a four-hour timezone gap costs you nothing. The default is flat-rate billing, not hourly, so a founder can plan against a number. Sometimes the work is pro-bono, when an idea deserves help more than it deserves a quote. Either way, when we are building reusable bits during your project the clock stops, and the invoice arrives without surprises.

A founder picking a vendor for an MVP is also picking the patterns the next two years run on. The two strongest commitments we make, real-time by default and packaged into open modules, pay off twice for a startup. Real-time means your product feels alive on day one, which is the difference between "interesting prototype" and "I would pay for this". The OSS catalogue means the auth, billing, scheduling and admin scaffolding for your MVP is already written; you start at week six of an imaginary timeline instead of week zero.

We will not pretend to be your engineering team if you need an engineering team. Body-shopping ten contractors at you and calling it a partnership is somebody else's business model. We will not push a six-figure proposal for something a two-month engagement can answer, and we will not keep billing once the work is genuinely done. If your real problem is "I need a co-founder, not a vendor", we will say so on the call and point you at the people who do that for a living, including our own co-founder arrangement at Clesk where applicable.

The cheapest part of building a product is the first conversation. Send us a paragraph about what you are trying to do and we will tell you whether we are a good fit, whether we know somebody better, or whether your idea wants a different shape entirely. We have done this enough times to be honest about it.