Stackline

Two founders with fifteen years in freight between them, a thick deck, and a first investor meeting in eight weeks. They had been quoted four to six months by every development shop they spoke to, and one had suggested they "just use no-code for now".

They didn't need a finished platform. They needed to stand in front of investors with something that moved real shipments for real customers, and they needed the two pilot customers who had agreed to try it to keep using it afterwards.

We agreed on one journey to make excellent: a customer requests a shipment, sees quotes from three carriers, books one, and watches it arrive. Everything else was either deferred or done by hand behind the scenes for the first few months.

• A customer portal for requesting, booking and tracking shipments.
• Live quotes from three carrier APIs, normalised so they could be compared on one screen.
• Tracking updates pulled from carriers and surfaced in a single timeline, with email notifications.
• An operations view where the founders could see every shipment and intervene when needed.

Because it was an MVP we were tempted to cut corners on the foundations. We didn't, and that's why it's still running: the data model and integrations were built properly, and the parts we skipped were features, not structure.

Used to close a £1.4m seed round. Still the core product two years on.

The demo went ahead on time with live shipments on the screen. Stackline closed their seed round three months later. They have since hired an engineering team of four who work on the same codebase, and they've been generous enough to say so in their own pitch materials.