What we promise
You never prospect again
No cold emails, no proposals, no chasing invoices. Scope is written and the deposit is collected before you're asked to start.
For independent builders
You build. We sell.
You built something real and nobody's paying you for it. That's not a skill problem — selling is a separate profession. We run the pipeline, the proposals, the contracts, and the collections. You do the work.
Applications always open · Admissions in cohorts
60–70% payout
Straight terms
What you keep
60–70% of the engagement
Published bands by tier, not negotiated deal by deal. Paid within fifteen days of us collecting the client milestone — we tell you that up front rather than burying it.
What we don't promise
Work on day one
We admit builders in small cohorts, matched to work we've actually sold. A bench with no clients is worse than no bench, so we'd rather keep you waiting than waste your time.
Why this exists
Selling is a different job.
There are a lot of people right now with a GitHub full of working software, a reel of work nobody commissioned, or a handful of live products — and no revenue. The constraint was never capability. It was that nobody taught them who buys this, or what to call it.
You wrote "built a full-stack inventory app." A buyer reads nothing. The same work described as "you're losing four hours a week to stock counts" is an invoice. Same product, different sentence — and that sentence is a separate profession with its own brutal rejection loop.
Spend fifteen hours a week prospecting and you become a worse builder and a mediocre salesperson at once. Skip it and you ride the feast-or-famine cycle until you take a job you didn't want.
Stay independent · Keep your own clients · Work with anyone else
The gate
We reject most applicants.
That's not posturing. The rejection rate is the only reason a client will hand us a project without interviewing anyone — which is the only reason there's work for you here.
01
Application screen
Shipped work we can actually inspect, two references, your rate, and your real availability. Portfolios without inspectable work don't advance.
02
Work inspection
We look at the artifacts — the repo, the store, the CAD, the shipped product — and ask which parts were yours. Be specific; it's the question that matters most.
03
A real work sample
Realistic work on a real deadline. We're watching whether you ask clarifying questions before you start as closely as we're watching the output.
04
Two reference calls
Fifteen minutes each. Never had a client? A collaborator, a maintainer who merged your work, or a past team lead counts. One question does most of the work: would you work with them again?
The ladder
A path, not just a payout.
Tier is earned on delivered work — client satisfaction and rework are tracked on every engagement — not on how long you've been around or how well you negotiate.
60%
Associate
Cleared vetting, no delivery history with us yet.
- Always paired with a Lead on client work
- Client communication through the firm
- Advance at 2 engagements, 4.0+ satisfaction
65%
Lead
Owns a workstream end to end.
- Direct client contact on delivery calls
- Scores work samples for incoming Associates
- Advance at 4+ engagements, 4.3+ satisfaction
70%
Practice Lead
Owns a discipline. One per practice.
- Plus a share of the practice's margin
- Sets delivery standards and bench quality
- Sits in on sales calls in their domain
Apply
Show us something you shipped.
One link to real work beats a hundred words about it. We read every application and reply either way — usually within a week.
Current cohort
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Before you apply
Make sure the work you link is inspectable — a live site, a public repo, a product we can find, a portfolio we can open. Case-study PDFs describing work we can't see don't advance past the first screen.