A product team and CTO for the price of a junior developer.

Shipwright gives early-stage startups a shipped product every week, with senior product and technology leadership, for a fixed monthly fee. No hiring, no agency, no lock-in.

Book a 30-minute call See pricing

Three founding-client places at a reduced rate. You own every line of code from day one.

Shipped this weekWeek of 7 September
  1. Stripe subscriptions with a 14-day trialReviewed by Matt · payments gate
    Live
  2. Team invites and role permissionsReviewed by Matt · auth gate
    Live
  3. CSV import for existing customer listsRequested by Priya, Tuesday planning
    Live
  4. Onboarding checklist and empty statesFrom user session recordings
    Live
  5. Weekly usage digest email to foundersInvestor update request
    In review

Why this exists

If you're a founder without a technical co-founder, every option for getting your product built is a compromise.

A founding engineer takes months to find, costs £100k+ with equity, and is a bet on one person. An agency builds an MVP for £30k and then leaves you with code nobody understands. A fractional CTO gives you good advice but ships nothing. A junior developer is affordable but needs someone to manage them and can't make the decisions that matter.

Building software has changed. A small, well-run system with senior oversight can now do the work of a product team, reliably and in production. What founders still need, and can't automate, is judgement: what to build, how to build it so it lasts, and someone accountable when investors ask hard questions.

Shipwright puts those two things together.

How it works

A weekly cadence you can plan a business around.

  1. Plan on Monday

    A short planning call. We agree the week's priorities from a backlog you can see and reorder at any time.

  2. Build all week

    Features are built, tested and documented by our delivery system, with every change touching payments, auth or data reviewed by a senior engineer.

  3. Ship continuously

    Work goes to a staging environment for you to try, then to production. Monitoring and automatic rollback are on from the first deploy.

  4. Review on Friday

    A recorded demo of what shipped, the metrics that moved, and a written summary you can forward to investors.

What you get

Everything a product team does, run as one service.

Ship

  • New features every week
  • Bug fixes as they're found
  • Staging and production environments
  • Integrations with the tools you already use

Quality and safety

  • Automated tests on every change
  • Security scanning and a GDPR baseline
  • Senior review on anything sensitive
  • Monitoring, alerting and rollback

Product

  • A prioritised backlog you control
  • Weekly planning and demo
  • User analytics and metrics
  • Product discovery when you need it

Business

  • 32 hours a month of senior CPO/CTO time
  • A named technical lead for investors
  • Architecture and documentation you own
  • Help hiring your first in-house engineer or PM

What it looks like

You see everything: what's planned, what's being built, what's live, and how it's performing.

Screenshot placeholder: backlog and weekly plan
Screenshot placeholder: live metrics and deploy history

How it compares

The realistic alternatives for a startup that needs a product built and someone to own the technology.

Junior developer Agency MVP Fractional CTO Founding engineer Shipwright
Monthly cost£4,000+ fully loaded£10,000–£30,000£3,000–£8,000£8,000+ plus equity£3,500
Time to start2–3 months to hire4–6 weeks2–4 weeks3–6 monthsUnder 2 weeks
Ships productSlowly, needs managingOnce, then stopsNoYesEvery week
Senior judgementNoVariableYesUsuallyYes
Product managementYouSometimes, at extra costNoYouIncluded
Investor-ready technical leadNoNoYesYesYes
CommitmentPermanent contractFixed projectRetainerEquity and salaryMonthly, one month's notice
Scales with youHire more peopleNew project each timeNoHire more peopleYes, without hiring

Costs are typical UK figures and will vary. Fully loaded cost includes employer NI, pension, equipment and recruitment.

Pricing

Three plans that grow with the company. Fixed monthly fee, no surprises.

Pre-funding

For founders building a first product before raising.

£2,000 / month
  • 16 hours a month of senior CPO/CTO time
  • Fortnightly planning and delivery cadence
  • Automated testing, monitoring and deploys
  • Written fortnightly summary
  • Business-hours incident support
  • Move to Product team when you raise
Talk about Pre-funding

Product team

For funded startups that need a product shipped and a CTO investors can call.

£3,500 / month
£2,500 for the first six months for founding clients
  • 32 hours a month of senior CPO/CTO time
  • Weekly planning, demo and written summary
  • Everything in "What you get"
  • Named technical lead and advisor
  • Your PM or ours leading day to day
  • Priority incident response
Book a call

Scale

For companies with product-market fit and more than one product surface.

From £5,000 / month
  • Multiple parallel workstreams
  • Embedded product manager
  • Extended CTO time and board support
  • Quarterly architecture and security reviews
  • A plan for in-house engineering if you want it
  • Custom terms
Enquire

Onboarding

One month's fee covers discovery, architecture, environment setup and your first production release.

Pause any time

Up to six weeks a year while you test, sell or fundraise. Your product stays live and monitored.

Leave any time

One month's notice. You own the code, the accounts and the documentation, and we'll hand over to whoever comes next.

Matt Varughese

Who's behind it

Matt Varughese, startup CTO and technical advisor.

Matt was founder and CTO at Drover, where he led a thirty-person product and technology team across London and Lisbon. Drover became a market leader in car subscriptions, raised through Series B, and was acquired by Cazoo in 2020.

Since then he has worked with founders on product discovery and delivery, system architecture and building technology teams, and with investors on technical due diligence. He specialises in AI and machine learning, and in the safety and privacy questions that come with them.

Shipwright is the productised version of that work: senior judgement, attached to a system that actually ships.

Matt really helped us unlock new ways for our customers to make the most of our platform. He deeply understands both the technology and our business.Will Taylor, founder of Workflow

More about Matt's consulting work

Questions founders ask

Who owns the code?

You do, from the first commit. The repository, cloud accounts, domains and documentation are all in your company's name. We work inside your accounts, not ours.

Is the code really written by AI? Is it any good?

Most of the code is generated by our delivery system, then tested automatically and reviewed by a senior engineer before it reaches production. Anything touching payments, authentication or personal data is always reviewed by a human. You can see the test results, deploy history and incident log at any time. The measure that matters is what ships and whether it stays up, and we publish both.

What happens if something breaks at 2am?

Monitoring alerts us and rolls back automatically if a deploy causes errors. Product team clients get priority incident response; Pre-funding clients get business-hours support. We'll agree what counts as an incident and the response times in writing before we start.

Will investors take us seriously without a technical co-founder?

You'll have a named technical lead with a track record of building and exiting a venture-backed company, who will join diligence calls and answer technical questions. In our experience a shipped, well-documented product with a credible technical lead is more convincing than a hypothetical hire.

How much of Matt's time do we actually get?

Product team includes 32 hours a month, spread across weekly planning, review of sensitive changes, and calls when you need them. Investor diligence, a major architectural change or a fundraising technical deck may go beyond that, and we'll agree a day rate for it up front rather than surprise you.

What if we want to hire our own engineers later?

Good. We'll help you hire them and hand over properly. Many companies keep the service running alongside an in-house product manager, which puts the product knowledge inside your company without needing to stop shipping.

What can't the service do?

It's built for web and mobile products, data pipelines and integrations, which covers most early-stage companies. Deep hardware, novel research or heavily regulated systems need specialist humans, and we'll say so on the first call rather than take your money.

Is there a minimum term?

No. Onboarding is one month's fee, then it's monthly with one month's notice. You can pause for up to six weeks a year.

Talk to Matt about your product

A 30-minute call to understand what you're building, whether this is the right fit, and what the first month would look like. If it isn't a fit, you'll leave with a clear recommendation anyway.

Book a 30-minute call

Or email matt@santara.consulting