What we learned shipping 9 projects in our first year
Nine projects, two countries, and a handful of lessons that only became obvious in hindsight, from payment integrations to a 39-page marketplace build.
By the end of our first year we'd shipped nine projects, from a music marketplace API for African creators with three payment providers wired in, to a home-services marketplace with 39 pages across three separate portals. A few things became obvious only in hindsight.
Scope creep is a communication problem, not a discipline problem
Every project where scope drifted, it wasn't because a client was unreasonable, it was because we hadn't written down what “done” looked like clearly enough at the start. The fix wasn't stricter contracts. It was clearer discovery calls.
The unglamorous integrations take the longest
Payments, in particular. Getting a payment provider working end-to-end, refunds, webhooks, edge cases, consistently took longer than the feature work around it. We now budget for that explicitly instead of treating it as a footnote.
Small teams ship fast when the handoffs are clean
We're not a big studio. What let us move fast across nine projects in parallel wasn't headcount, it was keeping design, build and QA handoffs unambiguous, so nobody was ever blocked waiting on a decision that should've been made a week earlier.
None of this is groundbreaking. It's just what was true for us, written down instead of left in a Slack thread, which is exactly why The Build exists.