“The developer built a different design than the one I paid for.”

The situation

The founder was building plugins that let animators pick ready-made animations, clothing and other assets and drop them straight into their projects. The small firm he’d hired kept building the wrong things. In one case, he paid a designer for the interface, and the firm built a different one. Updates broke things that had worked, and the developer disappeared for stretches at a time. The plugin itself was never finished. All he had was a desktop script.

What I found

The founder didn’t have all of his own code. The previous developer had given him a download that was missing pieces. Nobody was steering the work, so specifications were ignored and nobody noticed until it was too late.

What I did

• Worked with the previous developer to recover the complete source code
• Interviewed developers individually and built a new team
• Steered the project day to day, stepping in whenever the team got stuck or team members clashed

The result

The project was finished in 3 months.

And one more thing

A separate team had built the product’s motion-capture feature, where a user performs in front of a camera to create a custom animation, but it only ran on a desktop. They quoted “a few days” to move it to the cloud, let it stretch to two weeks, and asked for more equity in the company. Their proposal made it clear they didn’t know how to build for the cloud. I built a working proof of concept over a weekend, showing the existing code could run in the cloud as it was. The founder now has a team of university interns converting it and preparing it for launch.