A rebuild doesn’t restore what you had. It delivers the version you couldn’t reach alone, because the work spans product, business, design and tech in one head. The path there is three steps, each with a clear deliverable and a clear decision point. You never commit to the next step blind.
each step ends in a deliverable you own and a decision you make
One week, fixed price. I review your product and code the way an acquirer’s technical due diligence would: where it breaks, why it won’t scale, what’s worth keeping, what has to change, and what a rebuild realistically costs in time and scope.
You get a written report you can act on with or without me: a prioritised map of the risks, the honest patch options, and a concrete rebuild plan with a fixed quote. If the right answer is “don’t rebuild”, the report says so, in writing.
This is the common entry point whatever seat you sit in: founder, technical cofounder, or the investor who wants an independent read before the next round.
The rebuild keeps what you proved: the product, the experience, the flows your customers already chose. What changes is everything underneath: production-grade architecture, real auth and data boundaries, tenancy where it’s needed, the parts that hold under load.
And because the work is product, business, design and tech together, the rebuild is where the compounding happens. Positioning gets sharpened, the design gets a senior pass, and capabilities that were out of reach on the old foundation get built in. What comes back is measured in your numbers: churn, support volume, time-to-feature, and a codebase anyone can take over.
Weeks, not quarters. One head, no handoffs, no translation loss.
Ongoing product and tech decisions made with someone who knows your codebase from the inside, plus continued building as you grow. This is strategy and development, not ops or on-call. The goal is to make you more capable and less dependent: on me, on any platform, on any single hire.
Diagnosis: €7,500, fixed. One week. Most rebuilds land between €50,000 and €150,000, scoped and fixed after diagnosis. Ongoing partnership from €5,000/month. If the numbers above are out of reach, a rebuild is rarely the right spend, and the diagnosis will tell you that honestly.
Headroom, and options. If growth is flat and shipping is fast, you’re right, buy nothing. But if development has slowed to a crawl, if you can’t sell to the customers who ask hard security questions, or if nobody but the platform can take the code over, the product works today and quietly caps you tomorrow. The diagnosis prices exactly that gap, in your numbers.
Often, yes, and the self-assessment on each platform page will tell you so before we ever talk. If your wall is the shape of your queries rather than a hard platform limit, optimisation is the right spend and I’ll say so. A rebuild is for when the limit is structural: the architecture, the ownership model, or the compliance surface.
Structurally. I’m not in any platform’s partner program, I take no referral fees, and I don’t resell anyone’s hosting. No one pays me to recommend a platform or to recommend leaving one. The advice has to survive on being right.
Then you get a written patch plan with concrete steps, most of which you can do without me, and we’re done. You’ve spent €7,500 to avoid spending €50,000 wrong. Diagnoses that end there are the point of the step, not a failure of it.
Every rebuild starts with a written specification: what gets built, the acceptance criteria it’s measured against, and the delivery date. We write it together during the first week, it needs your input to be honest, and we both sign it before the build begins. From that point, two commitments apply, and they’re in the contract, not just on this page.
The engagement is paid in stages. The final stage is only invoiced when the rebuild meets the acceptance criteria in the signed specification. If it doesn’t, I fix it until it does, on my time, or you don’t pay that final stage. No renegotiation at the finish line.
If delivery runs past the agreed date for reasons on my side, the price drops by the same percentage the timeline overran, automatically and without negotiation:
The ambition, and the track record so far, is that none of this ever triggers. It exists because asking you to carry all the risk of my estimate would be a strange way to start a partnership.
Henrik Hallengren has built across product, tech, strategy and design for 20+ years, the four disciplines a rebuild usually needs four separate people for. At the highest level, for some of the world's biggest brands, Google, Mondelēz, P&G and Panasonic among them, worked with across roles and projects. That span in one head is what makes a rebuild fast, and what makes the result more than a restoration.
Independent by structure: no platform partnerships, no referral fees, no vendor to please.
