Production-grade
from day one.
For founders starting from scratch who want a real MVP, not a prototype that breaks on the first paying customer. Fixed scope, fixed price. Senior engineering plus a supervised AI pipeline.
You'd rather build it right once than rebuild it twice.
- You're starting from scratch with funding, savings, or commitment to do this right
- You've seen what AI-built MVPs look like at month 6 and you don't want to be there
- You want production-grade from the start: real auth, real CI, real tests, real architecture
- Your timeline is 6–12 weeks, not 1
- You want one senior engineer accountable, not an agency team
If three or more of those land, the scoping call is the next step.
50+ MVPs over 20 years. Half are still running. The other half were sold.
I'm Matt Turley. I've been shipping MVPs to paying customers since 2005, solo, mostly, and for founders who needed someone accountable. Some of those builds are still running unchanged a decade later. Some were sold. None required an emergency rewrite within twelve months. The pattern is not luck. It is choosing the right boundaries up front, building real auth and real CI before real features, and never letting "we'll fix it later" become the architecture.
The pipeline.
Discovery-led, not backlog-driven. Architecture is decided before the first commit. The pipeline runs underneath, but the shape of the build is settled by humans before any agent touches a file.
Scope
Two weeks of discovery. We define the MVP boundary, the must-haves, the explicit nots. Scope locks before pricing finalizes.
Architect
Architecture decided up front: data model, auth boundary, deployment topology, third-party choices. You see and approve every decision.
Build
6–10 weeks of execution. The pipeline runs; I review every diff. Weekly demos, biweekly stakeholder check-ins, daily async progress.
Verify
Test coverage, security review, load test before launch. Real users on staging, not just internal QA. Pentest if your buyer requires one.
Ship
Production deploy with monitoring, runbooks, on-call rotation handed off. Customer-facing day one looks the same as day ninety.
Hand off
Written architecture doc, runbooks, deploy guide, and a 30-day stabilization window. After that, you're independent or we move to Retainer.
Build the right thing in 10 weeks. Not the wrong thing in 6.
The stuff that breaks in month 3 if you don't build it on day one.
Six concrete deliverables that distinguish a real MVP from a prototype. All six are in scope on every build I take.
Auth
Real auth, day oneEmail + magic link or OAuth, RBAC, row-level security where the data model needs it. Session refresh that doesn't race.
CI/CD
Pipeline before productGitHub Actions or equivalent on every commit. Lint, type-check, test, build, deploy preview. Red builds block merge.
Tests
Coverage that mattersUnit on pure functions, integration on the API boundary, smoke tests on the critical paths. Coverage thresholds enforced.
Data
Schema that survives growthPostgres with explicit constraints, real foreign keys, indexes on the queries that matter, migrations versioned and reversible.
Observability
Errors and logs from day oneSentry or equivalent for errors. Structured logs. Dashboards on the three metrics that tell you the system is alive.
Runbooks
On-call playbooks before launchTop 5 failure modes documented with diagnostic steps. The doc that turns a 3am page into a 10-minute fix.
One engagement. Fixed scope, fixed price.
Discovery comes first. Scope locks before the price is final. After that, the price doesn't move.
Full production-grade build, end to end.
Two weeks of discovery, six to ten weeks of execution, two weeks of stabilization. One senior engineer accountable. The pipeline runs underneath. You graduate into a Retainer or you walk away independent.
Book a Scoping Call →- Real auth (with RLS where applicable), real CI/CD, real tests, real monitoring
- Architecture document, runbooks, deploy guide, written handoff
- 30-day stabilization window included after launch
- Weekly demos, biweekly stakeholder check-ins, daily async updates
- All IP yours, all code in your repo, no vendor lock-in
- Optional graduation into AI Dev Pipeline Retainer for ongoing work
MVPs that shipped and stayed shipped.
The work I'm proudest of is not the launches. It is the launches that survived month 12 unchanged.
RelayPlane, my open-source AI proxy, shipped solo with the pipeline.
RelayPlane is mine. Public on GitHub at github.com/RelayPlane/proxy. The same supervised pipeline I sell to clients ships RelayPlane every day. If you want to see what one senior engineer plus the pipeline produces on a real product, the code is public and the commit history is auditable.
What "still running" looks like at year 15.
BizJetJobs, a two-sided business-aviation marketplace I have partnered with for 15+ years. WordPress to a custom platform that runs the entire business. Multiple rewrites navigated, no emergency reset, 2.5x MRR growth across the engagement.
15-year story →The graduation path.
Most MVP builds graduate into AI Dev Pipeline Retainers. The codebase is already wired for the pipeline; you already have the onboarding sunk cost in me. Ongoing execution becomes month 4.
See the Pipeline →Straight answers.
The questions every founder asks before they wire $35K.
Two honest doors.
Pick the one that fits where you are.
If you already have a working build that needs fixing, see Project Rescue. If you have a build that needs ongoing execution, see AI Dev Pipeline.
Matt