Who you'll be working with.

The gap we work in

Nearly every company in Switzerland is a small one. Almost none of them are the size the software industry is built for.

What they get offered instead is a choice between three things. International software, priced per seat for organisations many times their size and shaped around somebody else’s workflow. An agency, which will do the job properly and will also hand you an account manager, a minimum project size, and a process designed for a marketing department. Or the cheapest developer available remotely, who delivers something that works on the day it is handed over and then stops answering.

A Zürich language school was in exactly that position — renting scheduling software priced for an organisation many times its size in order to book six rooms. We made the build-vs-buy call and delivered a replacement they own outright — and we still maintain it.

That is the gap, and it is not a technical one. The software is rarely hard. The gap is in who will take a small, specific problem seriously, price it honestly, and still be there in three years.

Small, said plainly

We design and build. That is one practice rather than two departments, and nobody is a layer between you and the person doing the work.

Being small is the constraint that makes the rest of this possible. We can take on a project worth a fraction of an agency’s minimum, because there is no agency to pay for. And we cannot disappear behind a team, because there is no team to disappear behind.

When a project needs more, we bring the right person in — a senior software engineer to confirm a deployment, or a specialist for a build that needs one — and the case study says who did what.

Across domains, and across cultures

A small studio is only enough if it covers ground. Ours covers it in two directions, and that is how the gap gets filled.

Across domains. A problem that arrives as one thing usually turns out to be several. A Fatt arrived as a menu design and was really a content system — and the problem behind it later became a piece of software of its own. Research, interface, product strategy and engineering are not four suppliers here, so nothing has to be re-explained when the problem moves.

Across cultures. We work between Switzerland and Asia, and so do our clients. A Fatt serves Malaysian, Chinese and Taiwanese food in Zürich, on a menu that has to explain unfamiliar dishes in more than one language. An international business setting up in Switzerland and a Swiss business selling outward have the same underlying difficulty: the people who understand the market are rarely the people who can build the thing. We have sat on both sides of that, which means the first conversation does not start with explaining the context.

Why design and build in one place

Most projects lose time and money at the handover between design and engineering — a specification goes over a wall and comes back as something adjacent to what was meant. Here there is no wall. The person drawing it is the person building it, in the same conversation, from the first meeting.

It means a design engagement can turn into working software instead of a document somebody else has to interpret. A Fatt asked for a menu; the repeating problem behind it became menuGen. It also means we can tell you when the answer is don’t build this, because we know what building it would cost — and we would be the ones maintaining it.

What you can hold us to

• We scope in writing before anyone commits, and the estimate is a number, not a range that moves.
• We say so when buying beats building — even when building is the larger invoice.
• You own what we deliver. The repository and the accounts are yours.
• We hand over things you can maintain without us, and stay on for maintenance when you want us to.

Practicalities

Based in Zürich, working across Switzerland and remotely, with clients in Europe and Asia.