Why the mockup comes first (and the invoice doesn't)

There is a moment, somewhere in the middle of every doomed project, when a founder realises the thing being built isn't the thing they signed off on. Slides looked great. Wireframes were fine. The first staging build is something else entirely.

We've sat on both sides of that table. We thought we could solve it with longer briefs, more meetings, weekly demos. Some of that helped. None of it removed the friction of the signature being far away from the work.

Sign off the work, not the brief

So we flipped it. Tell us what you want, configure it, and the first thing we ship is a real mockup of the homepage. Not a moodboard, not a Figma component dump — the page you'd ship, with copy, with story, with motion. Five working days.

If you don't like it, you walk. You keep the file. We part friends.

What that changes downstream

• Founders sign off on actual work, not on promises about future work.
• Misaligned engagements end before contracts exist, not in week six.
• We get faster at the parts we're actually getting paid for.
• Our portfolio is honest — every case study started with a yes to a real artefact.

The catch (almost)

We pick the projects we want to do. If we don't think a brief plays to our strengths, we say so before designing. Free mockup is generous; it isn't indiscriminate. Half the conversations end without one — sometimes because we're full, sometimes because the fit is wrong, sometimes because what someone needs isn't what we make.

That filter is doing a lot of work. The mockups we do ship are the ones we already believe in.