We design and build software worth shipping.
Monarch is a small studio in Lisbon. We take products from a blank file to a real, launched v1 — strategy, brand, interface, and the engineering underneath it.
6 weeks
Median time from kickoff to a shipped v1
Shipped with teams at
Introduction
Most software fails long before it ships. It fails in the month nobody decided what it was for.
We start every engagement by cutting the idea down to the one thing it has to do, then build outward from there. Fewer screens, fewer meetings, and a v1 that a real customer can actually use.
How we workNine years, one small team, and a habit of finishing.
- 9 yrs
- Building products for founders who intend to launch
- 41
- Products taken from a first sketch to a public release
- 6 wks
- Median time from kickoff to a working v1
- 94%
- Clients who come back for a second engagement
What we do
Four disciplines, one team, no handoffs.
The people who decide what to build are the people who build it. That is the whole trick.
Product Strategy
We work out what the thing is before anyone opens a design tool. Positioning, scope, the shape of the first release, and the one number that will tell you whether it worked.
2–3 weeksBrand Identity
Name, mark, type, colour, and voice — delivered as a system your own team can apply on a Tuesday afternoon without calling us first.
3–4 weeksProduct Design
Every screen, state, and edge case, in a component library your engineers can build straight from.
4–8 weeksEngineering
We build it. Typed, tested, and deployed on infrastructure your team can take over.
6–12 weeksGrowth Design
Onboarding, activation, and pricing — the surfaces where most products quietly lose people.
OngoingHow we work
Three moves, repeated until it ships.
-
01
Week 1
Decide
Two days in a room with everyone who can say yes. We leave with a scope that fits on one page and a list of what we are deliberately not building.
-
02
Weeks 2–5
Make
Design and engineering run in the same week, not in sequence. You see working software every Friday, on a real URL, from week two onward.
-
03
Week 6
Ship
We launch it, watch the first hundred people use it, fix what breaks, and hand over a repository your team can keep building in.
The receipts
“They cut our roadmap in half and we launched a month early. The half they cut was the half we would have regretted.”
Dana Okafor
Co-founder, Halcyon
Journal
Notes from inside the work.
Process
January 2026
The six-week rule, and what it cost us to learn it
We spent eleven months on a project that should have taken two. The fix was not better estimation — it was refusing to quote anything longer than six weeks.
6 min read
Strategy
December 2025
Scope is the design
By the time you are choosing typefaces, every important decision has already been made. Here is where they actually get made, and who should be in the room.
Read entry
Case study
November 2025
What we learned rebuilding Halcyon
Four views of the same data, none of them good. Ten weeks later there was one, and activation went up 38%. A note on why removing features is so hard to sell.
Read entry
Questions
The things every founder asks us in the first call.
Still wondering? Write to us.
studio@monarch.designWhat does a first engagement usually cost?
A two-week strategy sprint starts at €12,000. A full build — strategy, brand, design, and engineering through to launch — starts at €60,000. Both are fixed-price, quoted before we start, and invoiced in two parts.
Do you work with pre-seed companies?
Often. About a third of our work is a first product for a team of two or three. We ask for a real budget rather than equity, because studios that take equity end up prioritising the wrong clients.
Who actually does the work?
The people you meet in the first call. We are nine people and we do not subcontract. If a project needs a specialism we do not have, we say so and recommend someone.
What happens to the code afterwards?
It is yours from day one, in your GitHub organisation, with the deployment pipeline documented. We hand over with a week of pairing so your engineers are not reading it cold.
Can you work with our existing designers or engineers?
Yes, and it usually goes well. We will ask to agree who owns which decisions in week one, because that is the thing that goes wrong when two teams share a codebase.
How far ahead are you booked?
Typically six to ten weeks. Strategy sprints can sometimes start sooner because they need fewer people. Ask and we will tell you honestly.
Next
Tell us what you are trying to launch.
One call, thirty minutes, no deck. If we are not the right studio for it we will say so and point you somewhere better.
Booking new work from March 2026.