Brand narrative and identity
What the product is for, who it is for and what it has to prove before anyone believes it. Positioning, naming and the identity that follows. Scope gets cut here rather than three weeks before launch.
Digital product partner
From brainwave to brand to build
We work with founders who have an idea and need it to become a human centric product. Strategy, design, engineering and the launch itself, all under one roof.
The web is filling up with generated sameness. A visible human hand is turning into the biggest differentiator.
Your customers have learned to spot generated design and generated writing within about two seconds. Once they spot it they stop reading and everything you spent on the page is spent for nothing.
That recognition also works in your favour. A product that shows evidence of decisions, of somebody choosing this word and this measure of space, holds attention long enough to be understood.
Every page we ship is drawn by people who can tell you why each part of it looks the way it does. This one included.
What we do
Four kinds of work. Most projects use two or three of them and we would rather tell you which ones you do not need.
Product design
Interface and interaction drawn for your material rather than assembled from a template. You get a design system your own team can extend, with the reasoning written down beside it.
Tech and MVP development
Ingestion, database, API and front end, built and deployed and handed over with documentation. We work in your stack where you already have one and pick a boring one where you do not.
Launch strategy and content
The narrative, the content system that carries it and the weeks after release when the product either finds its audience or does not. We stay through that part.
How a project runs
The same four stages every time, so you always know which one you are in and what comes out of it.
Define
We read what you already have, talk to the people who use it and write back what we would build, what we would leave out and what it costs.
Design
Identity and interface, drawn and reviewed in the open. You see the work weekly rather than a deck about the work.
Develop
A fixed scope shipped in reviewable increments, on your infrastructure or ours, with tests and documentation as part of the scope.
Launch
Release, the narrative around it and the handover. Either your team takes it with a walkthrough, or we stay on a set number of days a month.
The people you meet in Define are the people writing the code in Develop. Nothing is passed down a chain.
Propello Originals
We build our own software on the same pipeline we build for clients. That is how we know it holds.
Ingest
Running
Exports, spreadsheets, APIs and scraped pages land in one store, normalised, with a record of where every row came from.
in csv, api, pdf, scrape
out one typed store
out one typed store
Analyse
Lumen, in early access
Query your database to get answers and charts. Embeds in a product you already have.
in a question
out answer, chart
out answer, chart
Act
Lumen Actions, coming soon
A saved answer becomes something that runs on its own: a pinned chart, a scheduled digest, an alert on a threshold, a row written back to your system.
in a saved answer
out digest, alert, webhook
out digest, alert, webhook
Client work and our own products run through the same three layers
Ingest
Coming soon
Configurable web scraping, API ingestion and database dumps, all normalised into a single typed store. Feed it once and every layer above it stays current.
Lumen
In early access
This is the analysis layer. Query your database to get answers and charts. Embeds in a product you already have.
Lumen Actions
Coming soon
Seamlessly connect Lumen's output to get automated trend signals, initiate downstream workflows or just write back to your database.
Litmus
Coming soon
A publication on what actually works in global development, with real indicators and cited sources. It runs on Lumen, which makes it the honest test of whether Lumen is any good.
Tell us what you're building
Send the shape of the problem, whatever you already have and when you need it working. We read everything and reply within two working days.
If we are a good fit, the next step is a short intro call rather than a proposal document.
Start a project