- What it does
- We joined a property-investment platform at seed as their engineering partner, chose the stack, built the product, hired the product team around it, and ran delivery through launch across Europe and South East Asia.
- The control
- The stack was chosen for the team the company would eventually own, not for us.
- Failure
- A codebase the company cannot run, which is what conventional outsourcing ships.
- Unit of work
- The product and the team built together, rather than one after the other.
- Authority
- Named systems
- Node.js · GraphQL · Google Cloud Platform
- Claims
- The intervention: stack chosen, platform built, product team hired, delivery run through launch and handed over. At ten people and a modelled $180,000 to $240,000 fully loaded annual cost per role, a separate capacity model values the standing product function at $1.8 million to $2.4 million a year.
- Non-claims
- Revenue or unit economics. We did not verify them, so we do not claim them.
- Evidence held
- Nine engineers and a product designer at handover, and six markets live across Europe and South East Asia.
- Status
- Handed over
The platform and the scale-up
Build the product and the team at the same time, without the founders losing control of either.
The same ten fields, with the arguments behind them.
A rhythm before a repository.
The first week produced no product code at all. It produced a shared workspace, a stand-up, a sprint cadence and a definition of done, with the client’s founders in the room for every one of them. Everything after that was easier for it.
Map
A joint boot camp, before any code.
Shared workspace, daily stand-ups, sprint planning, with the whole client team in the room rather than briefed afterwards.
Build · Product
The platform itself.
Node.js and GraphQL on Google Cloud Platform, chosen for the hiring pool the company could reach.
Build · Team
The product team, hired in.
Interviewed and decided by the founders, into a codebase that already existed and that they would inherit.
Nine engineers and a product designer
Product and team were built together, because a team hired after launch inherits a codebase nobody in the room wrote
Ship
Launch, then more markets.
Operating across Europe and South East Asia, with delivery still run jointly.
Live in seven months; six markets by handover
Run
Delivery passed to the standing in-house team.
The engagement is meant to end with the company running its own product, and it did.
Delivery run for a further nineteen months before handover
Before and after.
| Measure | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Product | A thesis and seed funding | Live in production in seven months |
| Engineering capacity | No engineers | Nine engineers and a product designer, hired and running |
| Markets served | Pre-launch | Six across Europe and South East Asia |
Deliberately excluded from this page: revenue, valuation and unit-economics figures. We did not verify them, so we do not claim them.
We ended up owning a product our own engineers had written, which is not what I thought we were buying when we started.
Approved testimonial wording · Co-founder at the client
A standing delivery function worth millions, without the dependency.
The case result is the client-owned platform and ten-person product function. At a modelled fully loaded cost of $180,000 to $240,000 per role, that standing capacity represents $1.8 million to $2.4 million a year. The value is not that Esya remained in the middle. It is that the client owned the code, the operating rhythm and the team that could keep changing it.
| Assumption | Model |
|---|---|
| Standing product function | Ten people |
| Fully loaded annual cost | $180,000 to $240,000 per role |
| Annual delivery capacity | $1.8 million to $2.4 million |
| Ownership at handover | Client code, process and team |
This is a capacity model, not a claim about revenue, valuation or the client’s payroll. Those company-performance figures remain excluded.
What this case does not claim.
No valuation on this page. The company reached one and it is on our About page, dated, with the five years of work that surround it. It is not here because a valuation sitting beside a list of what we did invites an inference about cause that neither we nor anyone else has established.
No revenue and no unit economics. We did not audit them.
No dates. What matters to a buyer reading this is how long things took, and that is on the page; when they happened is on the About page, where the history belongs.