The ceiling
Every client needs a piece of you. There is a fixed number of pieces.
Not demand, and not your rate. Delivery runs through one head and the head has a week in it. Raising the rate moves the money. It doesn't move the bar.
Three hours left, which is not another client. It is the sales calls, the admin, and the thing you keep meaning to build.
Committed to delivery32 hours
The week ends at 35 hours.
Why it stops
What you built works. Here's why it stops at the second client.
Prompts, a chain of agents, a spreadsheet with a tab nobody else is allowed to open. A faithful automation of how you already think, built at eleven at night. Most people in your position never build anything at all.
Schematic — shape only
Schematic — shape only
What else
What you're actually choosing between.
Keep prompting at it
By the third ask the same thing is written three ways, and you're the only one who knows which is load-bearing.
Hire a developer
You'd have to specify the work and judge the result. Both need the thing you don't have.
Bring in an agency
Months to assemble a team, then they ask you to write down your own expertise.
Leave it another year
The honest default, and we won't pretend it's cowardice. Nothing gets worse. That's the appeal.
The unit
A version a week, and you can stop after any one of them.
You buy one week at a time. No spec, no setup fee, no minimum, and a written definition of done before each week starts.
€5,000
One version. One week. Under two hours of your time.
Monday to Wednesday we build. Thursday a demo video reaches you, so you arrive at Friday's call having already seen it get something wrong. Then you decide whether there's a next one.
Cadence — one version, then nine of them
- No spec, and a written definition of done every week
- Nobody has ever answered "what do you want" with a specification. An acceptance test per version instead, agreed before the week starts.
- Some weeks miss
- You'll know from the video, not from us explaining. The next version starts where you say it went wrong.
- Custody from day one
- Repository and cloud accounts in your name from week one. No equity, no licence, nothing to unpick if you sell.
- Stop after any version
- No notice, no setup fee, no minimum. One client stayed ten months and could have left any Friday.
- Whoever scopes it stays on it
- You're not sold by a principal and delivered by a junior.
- No annual figure
- You buy one week at a time, so a yearly number would be one neither of us has agreed to.
The honest concession is that hiring someone leaves the capability inside your business permanently, and this doesn't.
Those four are SignalsAPI's, which is ours, which is why we can publish them. Client systems run in the clients' own accounts, so their figures are theirs.
Systems
The same method, in five industries that have nothing to do with each other.
| Ush | Executive scheduling, UK | Ranked meeting slots with reasons, on weights an assistant tunes. Beta in a month, useful at four. |
| KIMA | Real estate, Germany | Arrived vibe-coded on a spreadsheet, rebuilt on a queue. Written up below. |
| Research platform | Science, Israel | Papers and internal documents as a knowledge graph, for fifteen PhDs and no engineering function. |
| SignalsAPI | Recruitment, ours | Sources scraped for buying signals, at a width that runs without an ops rota. |
| Virtual BDR | Sales, ours | Eight programs on one errand, joined by two thin wires and nothing else. |
Case study — KIMA
A spreadsheet automation, rebuilt as a platform for German estate agencies.
He knew how German estate agency works and sold that knowledge by hand. What he'd built for himself was good, and it couldn't hold two agencies. What replaced it doesn't care which CRM an agency runs.
Schematic — shape only
They can hand the codebase to Claude now and add features without breaking anything. Client, KIMA, Germany
Two months from the idea to a working system in the agencies' hands. About nine versions. In their hands from 2025 through 2026.
Multi-tenant isolation is by construction rather than by convention: every query is scoped to one agency, so several share a deployment and none of them share a record.
Before you book
Who answers, and who we're wrong for.
Who answers
Deal Baker Ltd, a software engineering company registered in England and Wales in May 2023, trading as It Runs Without You. Architects decide the shape, delivery managers hold the week, and whoever scopes your project stays on it.
Most sites in this business quietly hope you won't look them up. The link is here because we'd rather you checked now than the night before you commit.
Companies House record, 14906367Not for you if
- You want a fixed quote against a frozen spec. That's an agency's product, and the good ones sell it well.
- You have a developer or technical partner you can direct. They'll do it themselves, and sooner.
- You need someone to run a team you've already hired.
- Nobody on your side knows the domain. We can build it; we can't know what it should do.
- It has to be C# or .NET, or run on Azure as its primary cloud.
- You need people on site, or you cannot give us two working hours inside 08:00–17:00 CET.
None of these are brush-offs. If one is you, say so on the call anyway and we'll point you at whoever we'd actually recommend.
The call
Twenty minutes, four answers.
Describe the thing you want to exist. One question comes first: how you'd reach a hundred customers if the software existed tomorrow. "I don't know" is a fine answer and the one we hear most; it changes what we'd build, not whether.
You bring the market. We build the product.
- Buildable
- What it actually is, on infrastructure you already pay for.
- First
- Which part has to be right before anything above it works.
- Hardest
- The part that will take longest, and why.
- Refused
- What we'd tell you not to build, and when to revisit it.
Three things we've talked clients out of buying: a vector database for a corpus that fitted in Postgres, bulk outreach over a shared consumer channel, and a second CRM integration in month one. "Don't build this" is one of the four, and you get it in twenty minutes rather than in month four.