Telos Labs
MVP Foundry · Built for founders, not billable hours

You validated the idea.
We ship the product in 3–5 weeks.

No delays. No hand-holding. No surprises. Fixed price. Senior team. CTO-grade build.

3–5 wks
to launch
1 team
senior end-to-end
100%
yours from day one
Isometric circuit diagram routing sparks of inspiration into a finished MVP
Who this is for

Founders who have validated the idea and cannot afford to move slow.

You have early demand. Maybe customers lined up. Maybe revenue starting.

Early traction
Customers ready, pilots lined up, and actual demand in front of you
No time to waste
Every week matters. Runway is measured in progress, not planning
Need a trusted partner
A team that moves fast and makes the right calls without constant oversight
Sound familiar?

Where early-stage founders lose months building their product.

This is not the exception.

01

Six-figure dev shop quotes

$40K to $150K. Months of timeline. Layers between you and the people actually building.

02

Freelancers don't align

Different time zones. Misaligned incentives. You are now the project manager.

03

AI prototypes hit a wall

Great for a demo. Breaks when real users show up. Security concerns.

04

You become the bottleneck

Instead of selling or fundraising, you are managing builds and making calls you should not be making.

None of this is necessary. It is just the default path.

How the Foundry works

There is a faster way to build.
From brief to working product in weeks.

One team. Fixed price. Clear deadline. We make the technical calls so you can stay focused on customers.

Week 1

Scope

Two working sessions with the founder. We turn your idea into a clear feature set, architecture, and ship date.

No long specs. No drawn-out planning. One page. Aligned and ready to build.

Weeks 2–4

Build

Senior engineers, accelerated with AI.

You see tangible progress immediately. UI in days. A working product in weeks. Real users testing before the build is even done.

Week 5

Launch

Production-ready deployment. Your code. Your accounts.

You own everything from day one. We support the launch, fix issues, and ensure a clean handoff or keep building with you.

Built for speed and iteration, without unnecessary chaos.

The honest comparison

Three ways to build an MVP. Only one keeps you moving.

Traditional Dev Shop Freelancers Telos MVP Foundry
Time to launch 4–6 months 3–9 months (if ever) 3–5 weeks
Total cost $40K–$150K $20K–$80K + your time One fixed price
Who makes technical calls Account manager You Senior engineers
Founder hours per week 5–10 on status 20+ firefighting ~2 on direction
What you own at the end A codebase + invoices A Slack full of DMs Code, accounts, domain

Ranges from founder interviews and published dev-shop rate cards. Your mileage will vary; ours won't.

What we handle

Every technical decision.
So you can focus on growing the business.

You bring the passion and subject matter expertise. We bring the technical acumen of a technical co-founder, a judgment partner helping with speed, feasibility, security best practices, and patterns that work and scale.

Stack & infra

Framework, database, hosting, auth, payments. Boring, proven, and yours to keep.

Product & UX

Flows, screens, copy. No design by committee. We show, you react.

AI where it earns its keep

Embeddings, agents, copilots used when they ship a feature, not as a press release.

Integrations

Stripe, Segment, Postmark, your CRM. Wired correctly the first time.

Production launch

Your domain, your accounts, your logs. No vendor lock-in.

Handoff

30 days of post-launch fixes and a README an engineer can pick up cold. Or we can continue to support your growth.

What a run looks like

Two shapes we see most.

Composite scenarios drawn from the kinds of founders we build for. Names and details anonymized.

B2B services · Internal tool → product
Launched in 5 weeks.

Imagine a 30-person accounting firm whose partner built a spreadsheet that cut 6 hours a week off close. Ten peer firms want to pay for it.

We turn the spreadsheet into a multi-tenant web app with auth, Stripe, and audit logging. The partner keeps closing books; we ship the product.

What's possible: the side tool becomes an ARR line.

Consumer · LOI → live product
Pilot users in week 4.

Imagine a first-time founder with an LOI from a regional sales org and zero engineering on payroll. Runway measured in months.

We pick the stack, ship a working iOS + web client, wire billing, and hand over the logs. Founder spends those weeks on hiring and the next ten contracts.

What's possible: the LOI converts before the competitor finishes their Figma file.

Why the Foundry, not a dev shop?

Dev shops bill hours. We ship products.

A traditional agency makes money when the scope gets bigger and the timeline gets longer. Their entire model is padded hours and change orders.

We make money when you launch. One fixed price, one deadline, one team. The same senior engineers from kickoff to handoff. If AI lets us move faster, you pay less. We don't pocket the difference.

You leave with a production codebase in your repo, accounts in your name, and a founder-sized monthly bill. Not a binder and a bill.

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What founders ask

The four questions we hear on every first call.

Yes. From day one. Your GitHub, your AWS, your Stripe, your domain. We're listed as contributors, not owners. If you walk away after week two, you walk away with everything we've built.
It will. The scope document is a starting point, not a cage. We hold two direction checkpoints a week with the founder, and we swap features of equivalent size without a change order. Net-new scope gets a new sprint.
Because a senior engineer with modern AI tooling ships in a week what a staffed team used to ship in a month. We pass that back to you as a lower price, not back to ourselves as higher margin.
Keep us on a monthly retainer, or hand the codebase to someone new.

You've got the customers. Let's get you the product.

One fixed price. One deadline. A working MVP in weeks. Not a deck, not a Gantt chart, not another quarter of runway gone.