Blackbox: idea to first paying customers in eight weeks.
A first-time founder, a strong insight, and no engineering team. We co-built the prompts, the stack, and the GTM motion — and shipped a B2B AI SaaS to first customers in eight weeks.
The challenge
A repeat operator, deep in B2B sales, had spotted a gap: outbound teams were drowning in research before every call. The insight was sharp; the execution risk was real.
No engineering team. No technical co-founder. A clear deadline — first customers in two months, or pivot. Standard advice would have been "find a CTO." Standard advice would have been wrong here.
Our approach
We engaged on AI Launch Standard. Eight weeks. One Slack channel. Working code from week one, not a slide from any week.
The first decision: don't over-architect. The MVP needed to validate the wedge — a single workflow, end to end, that a prospect could use in under two minutes.
The stack
- FrontendNext.js on Vercel. Boring. Fast to ship. Maintainable by anyone.
- AI layerClaude Sonnet for the core agent loop. GPT-4o-mini for high-volume utility calls.
- DataSupabase for everything: auth, postgres, edge functions.
- Workflown8n for cross-system flows. Stripe for billing. Resend for transactional email.
Launch in week 8
We had a working internal demo by week 3. First test users on the platform by week 4. Beta with five hand-picked design partners by week 6. Public launch and first paid contract signed in week 8.
The founder learned the stack alongside us — by the time we handed off, he could deploy, debug, and ship features without us. That was the real deliverable.
Where they are now
Twelve months later, Blackbox runs as a profitable, founder-led SaaS with a small in-house engineering team. They moved off some of our scaffolding and kept the parts that worked. We pop in for occasional architecture reviews — and that's exactly the relationship we wanted.
“The Yara team treated my project like their own. We shipped faster than I thought possible, and I came out the other side knowing how to keep building. That's rare.”
Tell us what you're trying to ship.
Book a 30-min strategy call. We'll tell you in 30 minutes whether AI makes sense for your business — and if it does, exactly what we'd build, in what order, for what budget. No deck. No follow-up email sequence. Just a real conversation.