We build our own companies.
Founders hire us to work on theirs.

For founders

What we do first depends on where you are.

You've raised. The round has to turn into a product that sells and revenue you can show investors at the next one. Our engineers and salespeople start in the first week, so the money goes on building and selling while you hire at your own pace.

You haven't raised. You have an idea or an early version, and it needs to earn, or to get far enough that raising is a choice. We help you pick the first version someone will pay for and sell it with you. Then we tell you what we'd do next.

Your product is live and has stalled. It sells, but revenue has gone flat and you can't see why from inside. We go through the analytics and the checkout to find where buyers drop, then work down that list with you until the numbers move.

You'd rather build it together. We co-found for a stake, and now and then we buy a company, usually a small B2B SaaS, and rework it. If you're thinking of selling yours, write to us.

Something small is bothering you. Left alone, small problems get expensive. A checkout that fails in one country, say, or code nobody wants to touch. We fix it while it's still small. We'll also give a second opinion on your architecture, on AI in your product or on where to incorporate; our own companies are incorporated in five countries.

For funds and angels

A company can look good in a deck and still be badly built: code nobody can extend, a payment setup that's about to get cut off, revenue that won't hold. We've built and run our own companies, so we know where to look. Bring us in before you invest, and keep us on after if you like.

Before you invest. Send us a company that interests you and we'll go through it as if we were buying it ourselves. We read the code to see whether it's built to grow or will need rewriting, use the product like a customer, and check that payments, compliance and revenue hold up. You get a written view of what's solid, what will break first and what it would cost to fix before the next round. If it isn't a good investment, you'll hear it from us before you've wired anything.

After you invest. If you go ahead, we can stay on and fix what we found, with the founders. When a company you've backed needs to reach revenue or its next round, our engineers and salespeople work in it. If it has stalled or the founders have moved on, we can take it over and rework it, or buy it.

A product from scratch. If there's a founder or a market you want to back and no product yet, we build it and run it until there's a team to hand it to. Sometimes we stay on as co-founders.

Alongside your money. Where you want operators next to your investment, we can put our own money in with yours and do the work too.

How we work

We started as a team of two. Since then we've taken three products past $100K a month, two of them past $300K, on our own. On your product we do the same jobs we did on ours, and we run it the way we run our own, which mostly means we care what it earns. We've already made most of the expensive mistakes ourselves. You can skip those.

We're a bootstrapped venture studio, so there's no fund behind us and the money we put in is our own.

We're not an agency. Depending on the project we take a fee, a stake in the company, or a mix of both. If you'd rather hand us the whole technical and growth side, there's a monthly retainer too, which is how we started out as a CTO for hire. Taking risk is how we built our own companies, so we're used to it, and we'll take equity alone when we believe in a project enough to share that risk. We agree on it after the first call, once we know what the work is. Due diligence for investors is quoted before we start, so there are no surprises.

We've had to solve the unglamorous problems too: getting a payment processor to take us on and keep us, and keeping a product fast past its first few thousand users. And we care how a product feels. One bug or one confusing step and people leave, so whatever blocks a user gets fixed before the next feature.

The team is remote, spread across Georgia, France, Monaco, Dubai and the US, and covers engineering, marketing, sales and analytics.

The name

Forteresse is French for fortress, from the Latin fortis, strong. We wanted a name for something solid, a building on a deep foundation that's made to take weight. We try to build the same way. The stones also carry a lot of history, and every company we've built has added some to ours.