Five days and one fixed fee, spent before a line of the build is committed. The week establishes what your reviewer will ask for, tests your plan against it, and hands back a sequence that runs backwards from the date nobody will move. Most of the expensive surprises show up on day three.
✓ Yours to keep · No obligation to build with us
Age assurance, consent, audit trails, data residency and permissions shape how a product is built. By the time a reviewer asks about them, the answer was fixed by decisions made months earlier.
A proofread is worth most before the print run, and a review works the same way. So the first week goes on finding out what the review will ask for, and only then on deciding what to build.
A founder runs it, because the sequencing decisions made in these five days cost the most to undo later. Everything else in the way we build regulated software depends on this week having happened.
Every day of it produces something that exists afterwards, whether or not you build with us.
The last column is the part that matters. A week of conversation produces notes, and this one produces artefacts you can hand to a reviewer, a board or another supplier.
Establish which review you face, who signs it off and the date that cannot move. Most projects arrive with a vaguer answer to this than they expect.
A named gate, a named approver, a fixed date
Work out what that reviewer will ask you to produce, item by item, and who inside or outside your company produces each one.
An evidence list with an owner against every item
Run your current plan and architecture against that list and find what breaks. This is the day that changes minds about the sequence.
A written list of what would have failed
Settle the decisions that have to be made before any code is written, and cut the scope that would put the date at risk.
A sequence, and a written list of what is deliberately not being built in version one
Turn the sequence into a build plan, a risk list with named owners and a fixed quote for whoever signs off the spend.
A build plan, a risk list and a price
They stay yours whether or not you build with us. Hand them to another supplier and they still work, because they describe your review and leave our process out of it.
A written map of the gate and who signs it off
The evidence pack you will need, and who has to produce each item
The decisions that must be made before any code is written
A build plan sequenced backwards from the review date
5 days, fixed fee
The fee is quoted before you start and credited against the build when you go ahead. If you decide not to, you keep everything the week produced and owe nothing further.
Ask for a quoteThe week is built to find four kinds of problem while they are still lines on a plan.
Audit trails, decision records and consent logs that the current architecture cannot reconstruct after the fact.
Markets, partners and app stores bring reviews of their own, with dates that were never in the plan.
The clinical safety officer, compliance lead or security owner who has to sign the product off and has not been shown it yet.
A first version too broad to defend in the time, where cutting deliberately costs less than building hopefully.
Telling a founder on day three that their plan fails is uncomfortable for an afternoon. Hearing it from the reviewer in month five can cost them the launch.
Philip Wasko
Co-founder, Foundry 5
Nothing gets redone between the review and the build, which is the economic case for running it first.
The evidence list and the sequence from day five become the scope of the build, so nothing is estimated again from a blank page.
With the gate already mapped, the build is priced as a fixed number against a fixed scope, where a day rate would be guessing at an unknown.
The Week-One fee is credited against that quote, so the same week of thinking is paid for once.
The people who mapped the review build the product, and nobody has to be brought up to speed on why a decision went the way it did.
Practical questions about running the week sit here. Commercial terms come with your quote, and you can ask for one here.
The person who can make decisions and sign them off, for three or four hours across the week, plus someone who can answer questions about your existing systems. Nobody on your team is committed full time.
Yes. The week examines what exists today, and the plan it produces is one your current supplier can execute if that turns out to be the right answer.
Then you hear that from us, and it is a good outcome for the fee. You keep the map and the evidence list, and you found out in five days instead of in month six with a statement of work already signed.
It depends on what is already committed, and the number of weeks running at once is capped because a founder runs each one. Send your date with the enquiry, and the reply tells you the earliest week available.
Yes, and that is the clearest brief we get, because the reviewer has already said what is wrong. The week separates the findings that are architectural from the ones that are documentation.
Tell us the gate and the date. If a week would tell you nothing you do not already know, we will say so before selling you one.
FIVE DAYS / ONE FIXED FEE / CREDITED AGAINST THE BUILD