— 00 Contact
Start with an email.
No form. No bot. The fastest way to start a conversation is a short email — three or four sentences is plenty for a first round.
— 01 Reach out
hello@steerscale.com
Replies within one business day · Budapest, CET / CEST
What helps in a first email
- One paragraph on what you're building and what's stuck.
- Where you are with it: prototype, in production, scaling, broken.
- A rough timeline and budget shape, if you have one. Approximate is fine.
- Anything you'd like me not to do (your team owns X, hands off the data model, etc).
— 02 Fit
Be honest about whether we're a fit.
Good fit
- Startup or scaleup with at least one production engineer on the team.
- Backend, distributed-systems, cloud-native, performance, or AI-product work.
- JVM-heavy stack (Java / Kotlin / Scala) is in our sweet spot, but not required.
- Clear problem, even if the solution isn't clear yet.
- 2–16 week engagement, or a 3+ month advisory retainer.
Probably not
- Greenfield "build my MVP" with no in-house engineer.
- Pure frontend, mobile, or design work — not the practice.
- Body-shop staff augmentation by the headcount.
- Adversarial procurement processes & sealed-bid RFPs.
- "Add AI" as the actual requirement, with no underlying product problem.
— 03 Elsewhere
Location
Budapest, Hungary — works with teams across EU and US time zones.
CET / CEST
— 04 Or just write