Small studio.Senior work.No account managers in between.

Week one: we ask, you talk

The first week of any project is conversation, not code. We ask about your business — who your customers are, how they find you, what a good month looks like, what’s quietly eating your time. You won’t be handed a fifty-question form; we ask specific questions, in a call or over email, and we do the writing-down.

By the end of discovery you get a written scope: what we’re building, what it includes, what it deliberately leaves out, what we need from you, and what “done” means. Nothing is built until you’ve read it and agreed. If somewhere in that first week we conclude the project isn’t worth your money — it happens — we say so then, when it’s cheap to hear.

How communication runs during the build

• One person, directly. You work with the person building your project. No account manager translating your feedback, no “let me check with the team” black hole.

• Regular check-ins, visible progress. You see work-in-progress at regular intervals — design directions before they’re built, working versions before they’re finished. The point is that you’re never surprised by what shows up at the end, because you watched it take shape.

• Plain English, always. Every update, every decision, every trade-off is explained in language you’d use with a colleague, not a compiler. If we can’t explain a choice simply, we treat that as our problem, not yours.

• Email first, calls when useful. Most communication runs over email — it’s searchable, time-zone-proof, and gives you a paper trail. Calls happen where a conversation genuinely beats a thread: kickoff, design reviews, anything sensitive.

• We reply within one business day. During a project and after it.

Decisions and changes

Scope is written down, and it’s defended — that protects you, not just us. When you want to add or change something mid-project (you will; everyone does), it’s handled in the open: here’s what it adds, here’s what it costs in time or money, your call. What we won’t do is quietly absorb changes until the timeline slips and the relationship sours. Honest friction beats silent resentment.

How handover works

A project isn’t finished when it launches; it’s finished when you’re comfortably holding the keys. Handover with us means:

• Everything is yours. Domain, code, content, and every account created for the project — hosting, analytics, email tools — owned by you, with us as an invited collaborator you can uninvite.

• Documentation a human can read. A plain-English guide to what you have: how to update it, where things live, what runs on what schedule, and who to call about which thing. Written so that a future developer who’s never met us could take over.

• A walkthrough, not a wave goodbye. We show you how to make the updates you’ll actually make — change text, swap images, read your analytics — until you’re comfortable doing it without us on the line.

• A launch-warranty period. If something we built breaks because of how we built it, fixing it is our cost, not a discussion.

After launch

You choose the relationship. Some clients take the keys and the documentation and run independently — genuinely fine, and everything we hand over is built to make that possible. Most keep us on through an Ongoing Support plan: monitoring, updates, backups, and small fixes, scoped to what’s live. Either way, the work is documented, owned by you, and never held hostage.

Why a small studio can do this

Arial Tech is deliberately lean: a founder-led studio using serious modern tooling — including AI — to do the production-heavy parts of the work faster than a traditional team. The judgment calls stay human: what to build, what to leave out, whether the work is good enough to ship under our name. What the tooling buys isn’t lower standards at higher speed; it’s senior attention on every project, without the overhead of layers — which is exactly the thing small businesses usually can’t get from an agency.