Hire a product team without hiring a product team.
A designer, an engineer, an AI builder, and a growth operator — as one engagement instead of four salaries and six months of recruiting.
§01
The math on hiring in-house.
A first product team is at least three hires — design, engineering, growth — each taking months to recruit, each a full salary plus equity, each a bet you're making before the product has proven anything. Pre-launch, that math rarely closes.
The fractional version: one engagement, one invoice, one point of contact, and the team is productive in week one because it has shipped together before. When the product earns a full-time team, you hire one — and you own everything we built in the meantime.
§02
What the team covers.
Six disciplines under one roof: concept and design, MVP and app engineering, AI and agentic systems, automation, custom platforms, and brand and marketing. Not six vendors — one team that has to live with its own decisions across the whole product.
That last part matters more than it sounds. When the person designing the onboarding also answers for activation numbers, the onboarding gets honest fast.
§03
The engagement shapes.
Three shapes. An MVP build: fixed scope, 6 to 16 weeks, milestone billing. A growth retainer: rolling monthly with a three-month minimum, capacity on tap across design, code, brand, or growth. An operated system: we build and run it month to month — outbound, AI workflows, internal tools.
Every shape comes with the same operating system: a co-founder as your contact, weekly Friday demos, and a live staging URL from day one.
§04
When to hire in-house instead.
If you're post-product-market-fit and the product is the company's only moat, start recruiting — a studio should be the bridge to that team, not a substitute for it. We've told clients this on the first call, and we'd rather lose the engagement than become a dependency you resent.
Until then: rent the team, keep the IP, spend the difference on reaching customers.
Questions founders ask
- How do I hire a product team for my startup?
- Two routes: recruit design, engineering, and growth in-house — months of hiring and three-plus salaries — or hire a product team fractionally as one engagement. We're the second. Estimate within 24 hours.
- What is a fractional product team?
- A full product team — design, engineering, AI, growth — engaged as one unit for a build or retainer instead of hired as headcount. You get shipping capacity in week one and keep all the IP.
- How does the cost compare to hiring in-house?
- An MVP build runs $15,000 to $60,000 over 6 to 16 weeks — under the fully-loaded cost of a single engineer for the same period, and it comes with design, growth, and launch included.
- How fast can the team start?
- First call within days, proposal in 3 to 5 days, staging URL on day one of the build. There's no ramp-up because the team has shipped together for years.
- Who do I actually talk to day to day?
- A co-founder. Engineering questions go to the person who wrote the code, positioning questions to the person running go-to-market. No account manager layer — that's structural, not a promise.
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Two paragraphs is enough. We reply with a pricing estimate within 24 hours — before any call, before any deck.