The Startup Lab · 5 projects liveAnn Arbor

Small businesses deserve software
as good as the big companies.

We help small businesses increase their revenue and solve consumer problems — by experimentally validating apps through ideation, development, market penetration, and scalability. Ideas don't survive here on opinion; they survive on evidence.

Why we build

The big companies got the good software. Small businesses got the leftovers.

A school, a clinic, a contractor — they run on spreadsheets, messaging threads, and tools built for someone ten times their size. They lose money in the gaps: invoices that go out late, payments nobody chased, customers who quietly drift away.

We close those gaps. We help small businesses increase their revenue and solve consumer problems — by experimentally validating apps through ideation, development, market penetration, and scalability. Every app in the lab is a hypothesis — tested in the market, with real users, against real revenue. When our software grows a small business, it works. When it doesn't, we haven't earned the subscription — because our recurring revenue comes from theirs.

How we validate

Four phases. Every app earns the next one.

We experimentally validate every app through ideation, development, market penetration, and scalability. No phase gets skipped, and no app advances on enthusiasm — evidence moves it forward; the lack of it kills it.

01

Ideation

Every app starts as a hypothesis about a real business's revenue or a real consumer problem — sharpened before a line of code is written.

02

Development

We build working software fast and put it in front of real users early, so the market — not opinion — judges it.

03

Market penetration

Channels, pricing, and messaging are all experiments. An app proves it can win real paying customers, or it teaches us why it can't.

04

Scalability

What survives validation gets hardened and scaled. What doesn't gets discarded — and the lesson rolls into the next experiment.

We build products we own — with skin in the game. Experimentation means a willingness to unlearn, discard, and give up dozens of ideas to failure. The apps that survive have been voted for by the market itself.

The bond

The most important bond we share with our customers is making a profit, because our MRR comes from their MRR.

Apps that grow small businesses — validated by the market itself.

We help small businesses increase their revenue and solve consumer problems. Every app we own has been experimentally validated — through ideation, development, market penetration, and scalability.