email@weshipsoftware.com

We Ship Software is a small development agency run by Jarrod Taylor & Richard Rissanen focused on one thing: shipping software.

We’re veterans of the tech industry, hands–on engineers, working to build independent, product–led businesses.

We de–risk development by only working directly with a small roster of clients to build and ship exactly what they need on a predictable timeline for a reasonable rate.

And we’re really fucking good at it.

The Next Big Thing

Your new company just launched the next big thing. Investors are on board, customers are signing up, demand is rolling in. Too much demand.

You hire a development shop to keep up, to grow the team. The first month goes great — kick–off calls, a detailed roadmap, everyone is excited.

Then the slippage begins. Deadlines become “targets”. Estimates balloon. The developers you interviewed disappear, and you’re handed to someone more junior who’s juggling four other clients.

Months later you’ve made little progress. What you have is not quite what you needed, cost twice what you planned, and you’re starting the whole process over with someone new.

The truth is most software projects fail quietly.

Not with a bang — with a slow accumulation of missed standups, vague tickets, scope that keeps shifting, and a release date that everyone stops mentioning out loud.

By the time you realize what happened, you’ve spent more than half your runway and you’re left with something that sort of works, kind of.

It doesn't have to go that way.

Why Most Software Projects Fail

It's not a technology problem. The tools to build almost anything have never been better or cheaper. It’s not even a talent problem. There are excellent engineers everywhere.

The quiet failures:

These failures are rooted in how development shops are optimized — to sell projects, not to finish them. A finished project means a client relationship ends. Scope creep means it continues.

The incentives are broken from the start.

The Thing About Small Agencies

When you hire a fifty–person shop, you’re paying for the account manager, the solutions architect, the QA team, the business development rep who closed the deal, and approximately four layers of overhead you’ll never see an invoice for — but you’ll absolutely pay for.

When you hire us, you’re paying for the people doing the work. That’s it. Which means your dollar goes further, and there’s nobody between you and the people working about your product.

That cuts both ways, to be clear. We won’t have twelve engineers available to throw at your emergency. If you have a hard deadline and genuinely need an army, we’re not the right call. But if you want a small team that’s deeply invested in getting it right — not just getting it done — that’s what we are.

We are not a good fit if you need a hundred–person team, a staff augmentation arrangement, or someone to maintain a decade–old Rails monolith you inherited from an acquisition.

We are a good fit if you have a specific problem, a realistic budget, and you’d rather talk to the person writing code than a project manager relaying messages to someone you’ll never meet.

Why You Will Hire Us

While we are a small agency, just two people, we have decades of experience shipping software used every day by thousands of companies and millions of customers.

We’ve been part of enough growing companies to know what it takes, what to watch out for, where to focus. There are endless tiny decisions that go into development, so we make it a point to understand not just what to build, but also why.

Any good engineering team turn a design spec into code — web apps, internal tools, APIs, mobile apps, data pipelines, A/B tests, metrics, reporting — our real strength is understanding what you’re building.

Talk us through your idea. We’ll figure out how to make it.

What We Will Do For You

Assessment & Roadmap $12,000

For founders with traction: We’ll refactor your technical and social systems to grow your company with confidence.

There’s a patten we’ve seen in many growing companies: short–term decisions made under pressure that create long–term structural risk.

Young companies optimize for survival — shipping fast to stay funded — and defer the foundational work that makes scaling possible. The danger is that by the time the business has resources to fix these issues, the technical problems have become deeply embedded and expensive to unwind.

This is a 2–3 week deep dive into your tech organization, looking at tech debt, knowledge concentration, testing & quality, security, architecture & scalability, devops & infrastructure, and documentation.

You’ll get a detailed report of where your structural weaknesses are with a solid, actionable plan to fix them.

Hands–On, Bespoke Development $4,000/week

For execs with fresh ideas: We’ll translate your business plan into production code and get it out to your customers.

This could be a website that generates better leads, a mobile app to connect with your customers, a process automation that scales your service, or even a completely new product that expands your market.

No worries about hours, no minimum contract lengths, and no need to negotiate scope changes when you come up with a great new idea.

It’s our job to handle all the small details that make sure your project is done correctly from start to finish so you can stay focused on running the rest of your business.

Once the project wraps and you’re happy with our work, we can set up ongoing support for a reasonable rate.

Technical Advisory $1,500/month

For companies not yet ready for a CTO: We’ll add technical guidance and architectural oversight for your tech organization so you can provide strategic leadership.

The core tension most growing companies face is the tradeoff between speed — ship fast, win customers — and quality — build it right, scale later. Getting that balance wrong in either direction is usually what causes the most serious problems.

We’ll be on the lookout for the issues companies rarely see coming — building features customers didn’t ask for, scope creep killing timelines, difficulty saying no to one-off requests, no clear product strategy, culture degrading as headcount grows — and cutting them off before they turn into major problems.

Think of us as your sounding board and sanity check.

We turn down more work than we take on. Not because we’re precious about it, but because we’ve learned that a bad fit costs everybody. We’d rather refer you to someone better suited than take your money and deliver something you’re not thrilled about.

If we’re not the right agency, we’ll tell you. We keep a short list of professionals we trust, covering specialties we don’t have, and we’ll point you there instead.

What we ask in return is that you're straight with us. Tell us the real timeline pressure and what’s driving it. Tell us when something isn’t working.

We’ve found that the best client relationships are the ones that feel more like a working partnership than a vendor arrangement. That only happens when both sides are honest about what’s going on.

If this sounds like what you’re looking for, the best next step is to let us know what you’re working on. No pitch deck, no salesperson. Just a conversation about what you're building and whether we’re well–suited to help.

Click here to send us an email

We’ll answer questions, see if we’re a fit, and kick things off.

Frequently Asked Questions

Where are you located?

West Palm Beach, FL and Nashville, TN.

While we do a good bit of traveling and we’re happy to meet in person, our day–to–day work is always done in our own offices.

Do you outsource?

Only when we think a specialist would be better suited for and only after discussing it with you first. If we say we’re working on something, we are the ones doing the work.

What is your hourly rate?

We don’t have one. Our best work is done over larger blocks of focused time. Hourly billing encourages short–term decisions that cost more in the long run.

Can you work with our existing codebase?

Yes, though we’ll want to spend time in discovery understanding what we’re dealing with. Old code isn’t automatically bad. It’s bad when nobody understands it anymore, or when it’s preventing you from doing things you need to do. We’ll tell you which situation you’re in.

What if the project goes over scope?

One of the reasons we use a flat weekly rate is so no one has to worry about scope changes. We encourage changing your mind mid–project. If there’s a better idea, let’s run with it. We’ll always give our best effort when estimating and keep you up to speed as we go.

There will never be any surprises on our invoices.

Thanks for reading this far. It means you’re probably the kind of person we’d work well with.

— Jarrod & Richard