How we work
A small company with a short distance from question to code.
Kugua Inc is a focused mobile software company in Irvine. We keep the team close to the product, make tradeoffs visible and stay responsible after the first release.
Built around direct responsibility.
We take on a small number of mobile products and follow them through strategy, design, native engineering, store review and ongoing maintenance.
The image is an illustrative service scene, not a photograph of Kugua employees or clients. The operating principles below are the commitments we actually make.
Small on purpose.
There is a headcount at which a software company stops building and starts coordinating. We would rather stay under it. In practice that means we run few projects at a time, and the person you brief on Monday is the person writing the code on Tuesday.
It also means being straight about capacity. If we cannot start for six weeks, we will say six weeks rather than start badly and blame the calendar later.
Deadlines are real. Estimates are not.
An estimate is a guess made at the point where you know the least you will ever know about the project. We still give them, but we call them what they are, and we tell you when the guess moves instead of at the end.
A deadline is different. When a date is genuinely fixed — a school term, a trade show, a contract — we work backwards from it and cut scope out loud, early, with you in the conversation. What we will not do is promise the full scope and the date and then quietly miss one of them.
We ship, then we watch.
Version 1.0 is where you finally find out what you built. The fortnight after release produces more useful information than the three months before it: which screen people abandon, which permission prompt they decline, which device runs out of memory.
So we plan for that fortnight. Someone is on call, crash reports are read daily at first and weekly after that, and the early fixes go out as small releases rather than waiting for a milestone that suits our schedule.
Nobody remembers a launch date. They remember whether the app still worked six months later.
Say it in one message.
No stand-ups, no approval chain, no weekly report that costs an afternoon to write and a minute to skim. Write to us whenever something occurs to you; you will get a reply within a business day, and a straight answer rather than a scheduled one.
We keep one thread per project instead of spreading it across four tools. If something is genuinely complicated, we pick up the phone — usually for fifteen minutes, not an hour.
The arrangements, plainly.
- We are in Irvine, California, on Pacific time. Mornings overlap with Europe, evenings with East Asia.
- Code goes into your repository from the first commit, under your account and your licence.
- Store accounts stay in your company's name. We work inside them; we do not hold them.
- First phases are quoted at a fixed price. Ongoing work is monthly, cancellable with thirty days' notice.
- If we stop working together, you leave with the repository, the credentials and documentation written for a stranger.
We hire rarely.
When we do, it is one person at a time and usually because a project needs a skill we do not have. There is no careers portal and no take-home assignment. Send something you built, tell us which part of it you would do differently now, and we will read it.
If that sounds workable, start with an email.
One business day, Pacific time. A person, not a form response.