About
Twenty-three years, two quite different halves.
A Melbourne software company. Operating since 2003, from Collins Street.
We started as a design agency and became a software company, and the second half was not an accident.
Through the 2000s we did brand, campaign and digital work for Ford, Intel, Telstra, National Australia Bank, Vodafone, Motorola, Johnson & Johnson, Nissan, Schweppes and Virgin. Large organisations are unforgiving about finish, and the standard stuck.
Around 2011 the work changed. Clients stopped asking for campaigns and started asking whether we could build the thing that ran their business. Since then we have built a healthcare platform that has been live for ten years and is still growing, a startup product carried through seven years and several rounds of investment, a cinema ticketing operation we ran until the company was acquired, and booking and scheduling systems for community services.
Some of those we still run. Some ended because the client was bought, or grew enough to bring the work in-house. We take that as the better compliment. We build systems modularly, document them properly and use nothing proprietary, so a client can leave whenever they want to — and the ones who did took the system with them rather than replacing it.
The team
Small by design, with a decade-old delivery partnership behind it.
Dean Tsoupas runs discovery, designs the architecture and stays with the system afterwards — the same person you will be speaking to in year six.
He also builds. He reads and writes the code, works directly in the database, and traces the faults himself. That matters more than it sounds: the person who sat through your discovery sessions is the person who can open the system and find the problem, so nothing is lost being handed to someone who was not in the room.
Development is delivered with Jetbro, a team in Ahmedabad led by Sharva Jethwa. We met in Melbourne fifteen years ago and worked together on projects here before he returned to India and founded the company. We have been building together ever since. It is the same people on every project, and they know these codebases as well as we do.
That arrangement is how a business this size takes on systems this size, and it is why there is no single point of failure sitting behind your platform.
We also do design, brand, photography and video work, generally for clients whose systems we already run. It is not what we lead with, but it is there when a project needs it.
What we care about
Three convictions, arrived at the hard way.
Understanding the operation
Software that does not match how the work actually happens gets worked around, and then abandoned. We spend the time up front because it is far cheaper than the alternative.
Building for the decade
A system that runs a business has to survive staff changes, growth, acquisitions and a decade of shifting requirements. That is an architecture problem, and it is decided early.
No lock-in
Conventional, documented, readable code. If you need to take it elsewhere, you can. We would rather compete on the quality of the work.
Tell us what the problem is.
No pitch, no obligation — if we are not the right fit we will say so.