The client was a two-person founding team in Dubai building a last-mile logistics platform for SME restaurants. They had early LOIs from four restaurant groups, a seed pitch scheduled in eleven weeks, and no product. A development agency had quoted them six months and $180,000 for a version 1. They needed something investor-ready in six weeks.
The founding team had no technical background. The product brief was strong commercially but undefined technically. Scope control was the first problem to solve before a single line of code was written.
We ran a three-day scoping workshop to separate what investors needed to see from what the product eventually needed to be. The MVP scope covered three things: a web operations dashboard for restaurant managers, a React Native driver app with order assignment and real-time status updates, and a basic analytics view with delivery metrics. Everything else was logged and deferred.
The stack was Next.js and Node.js on the web side, React Native for the driver app, and PostgreSQL on AWS. We deployed to production at the end of week five using the CI/CD pipeline we built on day one — meaning the client had a live system that had been running in production for a week before the pitch, not a staging environment being presented as a product.
