Build the smallest product that can prove the right thing.
The usual pre-seed options are bad. Offshore studios ship things you can't maintain. Freelancers disappear when the work gets hard. Agencies staff the engagement with people who are learning on your runway. There is a fourth option.
Founder-led product and engineering support for focused early-stage decisions.
The same practitioners who build and modernize enterprise technology also work with founders directly. The engagement matches the product question, stage, constraints, and evidence the founder needs next.
We keep this practice small on purpose. Today's pre-seed founder often becomes tomorrow's scale-up CTO, and the relationships started here matter for years.
How we work with you
- You start this week. No procurement cycle, no vendor bake-off. A scoped engagement usually begins within days of the first call.
- Every dollar buys practitioner judgment. You are paying for the work itself, not account managers or overhead layers between you and the person doing it.
- Work that holds up under scrutiny. Built to survive a technical co-founder's review, an investor's diligence call, or your first serious engineering hire.
- We name the two or three things that matter. Not a generic audit template. The specific gaps slowing you down, prioritized, everything else left alone.
Three focused ways to move from uncertainty to working product.
If none of these fit, that is useful information. We will tell you so on a free 15-minute call.
Architecture & build review
An experienced practitioner reads your code, talks to whoever wrote it, and produces a written assessment: what to keep, what is technical debt you have not noticed, what to fix before fundraising, and what to ignore.
Good for: founders preparing for a raise, evaluating an offshore vendor's output, or deciding whether a current path can scale.
Roughly $3K to $6K, fixed price.
Technical co-founder days
Fractional engagement where an experienced practitioner works alongside you 1 to 2 days a week. Architecture decisions, technical hiring, vendor selection, code review for whoever is shipping. Acts like a part-time CTO without the equity dilution.
Good for: non-technical founders who need a sanity-check partner, or technical founders who want a seasoned peer for the calls they cannot make alone.
Roughly $6K to $12K per month, monthly contract.
MVP sprint
A small, experienced team builds a specific, well-defined MVP with you, not for you. You stay in the loop daily, own the code from day one, and walk out with something maintainable. We will say no to the build if the scope is unclear or the product question is not yet sharp enough.
Good for: founders with funded seed runway who need a credible v1 to put in front of users or investors.
Roughly $15K to $45K, fixed price after scoping.
Prices are honest ballparks, not a price list. Real scope changes them. We discuss the actual number on the first call.
Founder office hours, every other Friday.
Instead of "book a sales call," we run 15-minute office hours slots for founders. No deck, no pitch, no obligation. Bring one specific question and an experienced practitioner will give you a straight answer, including "you do not need us, here is what to do instead" when that is the right call.
Most office hours conversations don't turn into work for us, and that's fine. Sometimes we point you to someone better suited. Sometimes you walk away with what you needed and no one bills anyone. The conversations that do turn into work come later, after you've already gotten value from the first one.
What founders ask in office hours
- "My offshore team built this, is it salvageable?"
- "How do I evaluate the CTO candidate I am about to make an offer to?"
- "What stack should I pick for v1?"
- "What should my technical due diligence pack look like for investors?"
- "Should I rebuild or keep patching?"
- "How small can my team actually be at this stage?"
It is a long game.
Pre-seed work is not where SkilledHat makes most of its money. Most of our revenue comes from enterprise engagements.
So why this practice? Because today's pre-seed founder often becomes tomorrow's scale-up CTO. And that scale-up CTO is the person who calls a firm like ours when their company hits 200 engineers and the technology operating model starts to break. Helping a founder make better decisions at year zero is how we earn the right to that call at year five.
Stay in touch
Even if we do not work together now, we stay in loose contact with founders we have spoken to. Occasional notes, an alumni list, sometimes intros to people in our network. Low frequency. Easy to unsubscribe.