What we look for before taking on a SaaS client

We say no to most of the projects that reach us.

That reads like posturing, so here's the actual reasoning: a badly matched engagement costs the client money they won't get value from and costs us a slot we can't refill mid-quarter. Both sides lose, slowly, over several months. It's worth twenty minutes upfront to avoid.

Four things we're listening for.

A problem, stated in some form

"We need a website" isn't a brief. "Our signup flow loses sixty percent of people at the pricing step and we don't know why" is a brief, and everything downstream of it goes faster.

Founders who can't articulate the problem yet aren't disqualified. It changes the shape of the work: we start with research and discovery rather than opening a design file, and we say so before anyone signs anything. What causes trouble is a vague brief treated as a clear one.

The right stage for what's being asked

We work best with early-stage B2C and B2B SaaS, roughly pre-seed through Series A, under fifty people. At that size, UX decisions compound quickly because the product is still cheap to redirect.

A Series C company with an entrenched design system and six product squads needs something we're honestly not built to be. Different problem, different partner.

D2C and e-commerce work runs on a different rhythm, shorter and more execution-heavy, and we take that on a project basis.

Someone who can decide

The engagements that work are the ones where we're treated as part of the thinking. Access to real users or real data. Willingness to answer a hard question with an answer rather than a meeting.

The ones that struggle share a pattern: every decision routes through five stakeholders and nobody owns the final call. Timelines don't slip because the work is hard, they slip waiting for a group to agree. We ask about this directly on the first call, and we care about the answer more than we care about the budget.

Enough clarity to talk about money early

If a brief is coherent, we'll put a range in the first proposal rather than running three discovery calls first. Serious buyers appreciate it and the rest self-select out.

Where we add the most value is narrow and worth naming: early-stage teams making expensive product and UX decisions without a design function in-house, who need something shipped properly and soon. If that's the situation, the first conversation is usually short. If it isn't, we'd rather tell you that than take the project and both of us find out in week five.