Hiring a studio shouldn’t feel like buying a sealed box. This is the sequence every project on this site went through — what happens when, what it costs, and what we’ll need from you.
// protocol v9 — revised only when a project teaches us something
You write. We read — properly.
Send the form or an email. Within two working days you get a reply from a founder — a first read on your problem, a couple of questions, and a call slot if it looks like a fit. No discovery-call choreography, no sales deck.
Output: a straight answerWe learn your constraints before your screens.
A week of questions. Your market, your margins if you’ll share them, your support tickets if they exist, the opinions of the people who answer your phones. You’ll know it’s working when the questions get uncomfortably specific.
Output: a brief we both signOne page of strategy, directions you can argue with.
We come back with the project’s spine — positioning, naming territories if naming is on the table, and two or three visual directions pushed far enough to judge honestly. One meeting, one decision. We’d rather hear “wrong” on day ten than in week six.
Output: a chosen directionWork lands every Friday.
Design — and code, when we’re building — arrives in weekly drops in a shared space. You watch the thing grow and comment on the work itself, not on a slide about the work. There is no big reveal; reveals are for magicians.
Output: the thing itself, growingYou own everything.
Source files, fonts licensed in your name, guidelines short enough to be used, the repository if we built one. If you walked away the day after, you’d walk away whole. Hostage files are how studios lose friends.
Output: keys, not leashesWe don’t vanish at launch.
The first weeks after going live are part of the job — we watch how it lands and tighten what needs tightening. Past that, the line stays open. Most of the projects on this site still ping us, and we still answer.
Output: a studio that picks upOne problem, sharply.
A naming, a packaging line, a landing page, an audit with the fixes done. Small perimeter, full attention.
The whole thing, end to end.
Brand or product from context to handover — the shape most of the success stories on this site took.
A studio on call.
For brands we’ve already built: senior design capacity without the hiring, on a monthly line.
// ranges, not quotes — an exact number follows the first call, and it doesn’t move after we shake on it
Committees review. A person decides. Bring one.
Friday drops deserve answers while they’re warm.
Budget honesty buys sharper recommendations. We scope to what’s true, not to what’s polite.
Ten minutes with whoever answers your phones beats ten pages of brand strategy.
You do — all of it, at handover. Files, fonts, code, the lot. We keep the right to show it in our portfolio, and even that is negotiable.
Yes — some of our favorite work started pre-revenue. What matters isn’t your headcount; it’s a real problem and a person who can decide. Sprints exist partly for this.
Good — most clients do. In week one we’ll tell you honestly whether it needs extending or replacing. We don’t bill more for the second answer, so we have no reason to invent it.
Both. This site is ours end to end, and several success stories shipped as design plus code. When your team builds, we hand over specs your engineers won’t have to translate.
Usually two to three weeks out. A sprint can sometimes jump the queue; a full build almost never can — the calendar is the calendar.
Then week two did its job. Killing a direction on day ten costs almost nothing — that’s exactly why the decision meeting sits there and not at the end.
Seen enough? Step zero is one email — a founder reads it within two working days.
TALK TO MONOLITH_