Hello, World!
We Ship Software is a small development agency run by Jarrod Taylor & Richard Rissanen focused on one thing: shipping software.
We’re veterans of the tech industry, hands–on engineers, working to build independent, product–led businesses.
And we’re really fucking good at it.
The Next Big Thing
Your new company just launched the next big thing. Investors are on board, customers are signing up and demand is rolling in. Too much demand.
You hire a development shop to keep up, to grow the team. The first month goes great — kick–off calls, a detailed roadmap, everyone is excited.
Then the slippage begins. Deadlines become “targets”. Estimates balloon. The developers you interviewed disappear, and you’re handed to someone more junior who’s juggling four other clients.
Months later you’ve made little progress. What you have is not quite what you needed, cost twice what you planned, and you’re starting the whole process over with someone new.
The truth is most software projects fail quietly.
Not with a bang — with a slow accumulation of missed standups, vague tickets, scope that keeps shifting, and a release date that everyone stops mentioning out loud.
By the time you realize what happened, you’ve spent more than half your runway and you’re left with something that sort of works, kind of.
It doesn't have to go that way.
Why Most Software Projects Fail
It's not a technology problem. The tools to build almost anything have never been better or cheaper. It’s not even a talent problem. There are excellent engineers everywhere.
Here’s why most software projects actually fail:
- The people writing the code don’t understand the problem they’re actually trying to solve.
- The outsourcing shop has too many clients, deprioritizing your project whenever something bigger comes along.
- Nobody takes ownership of outcomes – developers write code, the PM moves tickets, yet nobody ships software.
- Estimates are optimistic theater, not honest assessments that you can plan around.
- The project grows in scope with every new conversation, and nobody says “that'll cost more and take longer”.
These failures are rooted in how development shops are optimized — to sell projects, not to finish them. A finished project means a client relationship ends. Scope creep means it continues.
The incentives are broken from the start.
Why You’ll Hire Us
We understand something absolutely vital to your business: short–term decisions made under pressure create long–term structural risk.
Small teams optimize for survival — shipping fast to stay funded — and defer the foundational work that makes scaling possible. The danger is that by the time the business has resources to fix these issues, the technical problems have become deeply embedded and expensive to unwind.
Frequently Asked Questions
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