You have a product idea that needs to exist before you can find out whether it works. You need someone who can build the whole thing — infrastructure, back end, front end, deployment — to a standard you won’t have to throw away six months later.
That is the work I do. I’m Hugh Grigg, a UK freelance and contract software developer, and I deliver complete MVPs for companies and founders as a single experienced engineer rather than a team you have to manage.
Contact me about your MVP and tell me what you’re trying to find out. I’ll tell you honestly whether I’m the right person to build it.
What “the whole MVP” actually means
An MVP is only useful once real users can reach it. That means a lot more than application code, and it’s usually the parts either side of the code that slow projects down:
- Cloud infrastructure, defined as code so it can be rebuilt and changed safely.
- The back-end services, data model and APIs.
- A web front end your users can actually use.
- Deployment pipelines, so shipping a change is routine rather than an event.
- Monitoring and logging, so you find out about problems before your users tell you.
- Automated tests covering the behaviour that matters to you.
I deliver all of it. You don’t need to assemble a back-end contractor, a front-end contractor and a DevOps consultant, then spend your own time keeping the three of them aligned.
Why a single senior developer is often the fair-cost option
The expensive part of most early-stage projects isn’t the development. It’s coordination — the meetings, handovers, integration problems and rework that come from splitting a small product across several people or an agency team.
On an MVP, one experienced developer who holds the whole system in their head avoids nearly all of that. Decisions get made once. There’s no interface between teams to negotiate, because there are no teams. You get a considerably smaller total bill for the same working product, and you have one person to talk to about it.
That only works if the developer is genuinely capable across the stack, and if the work is good enough that speed now doesn’t become cost later. That’s the standard I hold myself to.
Quality that doesn’t slow you down
“Move fast and fix it later” tends to mean paying twice. But heavyweight process on an MVP is just as wasteful. What actually works is a small number of disciplines that pay for themselves immediately:
- Infrastructure as code from day one, so environments are reproducible and you’re never afraid to change them.
- Tests that cover real system behaviour, not brittle microscopic unit tests. I’ve written and released open source tooling specifically to make this kind of testing practical.
- Static typing throughout, using TypeScript, so whole categories of bug never reach your users.
- Deployment automation from the first week, because a project that is hard to deploy is a project that stops moving.
None of this is ceremony. Each one makes the next change cheaper, which is the only thing that matters when you’re still finding out what your product should be.
MVPs and early products I’ve delivered
- Fanalysis — I joined as the second employee and Staff Software Engineer, building the product on AWS using Lambda, ECS, API Gateway, DynamoDB, S3 and Rekognition, with TypeScript and .NET.
- HOA Mailers — I delivered their AWS infrastructure, back-end systems and front-end software: Lambda, RDS, SAM, GraphQL, PostgreSQL, React and Next.js.
- Doozy — I’ve been helping build the product as a freelance engineer, using GCP, Firebase and TypeScript.
- Moment Wall Art — a complete serverless e-commerce system, including product catalogue, search and payments, built to run at very low operational cost.
- Pop Robin Cards — a custom e-commerce platform handling catalogue, stock, images, sales and order tracking.
What I’ll want to know
When you get in touch, the questions I’ll ask first are about your product rather than your technology:
- What are you trying to find out by building this?
- Who are the first users, and what do they need to be able to do?
- What does the product have to do to be worth continuing with?
- What’s your timeline, and what’s driving it?
Those answers decide what the MVP should contain — and, just as usefully, what it can leave out. Cutting the right scope is the largest cost saving available on any early product.
Start the conversation
Contact me about your MVP. Tell me what you want to build and what you’re trying to learn from it, and I’ll come back to you with an honest view of the approach, the shape of the work and what it would take to deliver.
I work primarily with AWS and TypeScript, and I’m a UK-based freelance and contract developer available to companies and founders wherever you are.
