Every founder asks the same question on their first studio call: "can you ship in 8 weeks?" Every studio says yes. The actual question — the one that predicts whether you will get a working product — is much harder to ask. Here are the five questions we recommend (yes, even when asking us).
Question 1: "Show me three production systems you shipped this year."
Not the pitch deck case studies. Not the Dribbble screenshots. Live URLs you can open in your browser right now. If a studio cannot send you three URLs of running products built this year, they are between projects, junior, or both.
For each URL, ask:
- Is it live and serving real users?
- How long did it take to ship?
- Can I email the founder to verify the experience?
The third question is the killer. Studios with happy clients will introduce you. Studios with unhappy clients will dodge.
Question 2: "What is your sprint cadence and what do I see at the end of each one?"
A studio with a real process will answer in 30 seconds: "two-week sprints, demo on Friday of every sprint, written report covering what shipped, what is next, and what is blocked." A studio without a process will give you a vague answer about "agile" and "check-ins."
The bar is: you should be able to open the staging environment yourself, click through what they built this week, and read a written report explaining what is there and what is not. Without that, you have no way to know whether the project is on track.
Question 3: "Walk me through the IP assignment and offboarding process."
This question separates the studios who treat you as a partner from the studios who treat you as a hostage. The honest answer is: "full IP assignment from delivery date, source code in a Git repo you own, cloud accounts under your name, handover doc on day 1 of offboarding."
If the answer involves any of license-based, offboarding fee, or our internal tooling — walk away. The hidden costs will dwarf any rate savings. See our post on why code ownership matters more than dev rates for the full math.
Question 4: "What does week 9 look like if the build is going badly?"
Every project hits trouble. The good studios have a playbook. The bad ones improvise badly. Ask:
- If we are behind by week 6, do you flag it that week, or wait until launch?
- If a feature turns out to be 3× more complex than scoped, who absorbs the cost?
- If I want to cut scope mid-build to hit the launch date, what is your default response?
The answers you want: "flag immediately," "we split the additional cost transparently," and "yes, we will help you pick which features to cut and ship the rest on time." The answers that should worry you: "we manage that internally," "change orders cover that," and "we ship everything in the scope."
Question 5: "Who specifically will be writing my code?"
This is the question 80% of founders forget to ask. The senior engineer pitching you on the discovery call may not be the one writing the code. Some studios sell with their A-team and deliver with their B-team.
The honest answer is a name (or names) and a CV. You should be able to look up the engineers on LinkedIn or GitHub. If the studio refuses to introduce them — walk away. If they introduce them and the engineers are clearly junior — that may be fine if the senior pricing matches, but it should be transparent.
The five questions above will save you from picking the wrong studio more reliably than any portfolio review. Ask all five before signing.
The other half: what they should ask you
A good studio will also push back. Watch for:
- "What is your timeline and what happens if we miss it?" — they are protecting against scope creep.
- "Who is the decision-maker on your side?" — they want one throat to choke.
- "What is the riskiest assumption we are testing?" — they think like operators.
- "What happens after the build is done?" — they care about handover.
If the studio takes your brief and starts coding without pushing back on any of it, they are an order-taker, not a partner. You want pushback.
The pricing question (last, on purpose)
Notice that "how much does it cost" is not in the top five. Pricing matters, but it is the least predictive question. A studio that nails the first five and is 30% more expensive will ship something a studio that bombs the first five and is 30% cheaper cannot ship at any price. Optimise for execution risk first, pricing second.
The takeaway
The five questions above will help you separate studios that can ship from studios that can pitch. Ask them in the first discovery call. Watch the answers carefully. The studio that gives clean, specific, honest answers — even when those answers are inconvenient — is the one you want to work with.
If you would like to put us through these five questions, book a 30-minute discovery call. We will answer them all in writing.