About

A studio built to finish things.

Monarch started in 2017 with two people and one project. Nine years and forty-one launches later the shape is the same: a small team, a fixed scope, and a date we do not move.

Founded
2017
Team
Nine people
Based
Lisbon · Remote
9 yrs
Building products for founders who intend to launch
41
Products taken from a first sketch to a public release
6 wks
Median time from kickoff to a working v1
94%
Clients who come back for a second engagement

Why we exist

Every studio says it ships. Almost none of them will tell you what they refused to build.

We think the interesting part of this work is the editing, not the making. Anyone can add a feature. Deciding which forty to leave out — and being able to explain each one — is the job.

See how we work

How we think

Four opinions we keep running into.

  1. 01

    Scope is the design

    Deciding what not to build is the highest-leverage act in the whole project. Everything after it is execution. We spend the first week there and we do not rush it.

  2. 02

    Ship weekly or you are guessing

    A design that has never been deployed is a hypothesis. From week two you get a real URL every Friday, because opinions about screenshots are worth very little.

  3. 03

    Small team, whole problem

    Handoffs are where intent goes to die. The same four or five people carry a project from the first conversation to the launch post, and they hold every part of it.

  4. 04

    Leave it better than a handover

    The end of an engagement should not be a cliff. Documented decisions, a codebase your team can read, and a month of availability afterwards for the questions that only show up later.

The studio

Nine people. No account managers.

You work with the people doing the work, every week, for the length of the engagement.

  • Marta Ferreira

    Marta Ferreira

    Founder, Creative Director

    Ran design at two Lisbon startups before deciding she preferred the first six weeks.

  • Sam Ridley

    Sam Ridley

    Principal Engineer

    Writes the boring code that is still running four years later.

  • Adaeze Nwosu

    Adaeze Nwosu

    Brand Designer

    Draws type by hand first. Every single time.

  • Kenji Watanabe

    Kenji Watanabe

    Product Strategist

    Recovering management consultant. Now asks shorter questions.

The long version

How Monarch got here.

  1. 2017

    Two people and a shared desk

    Marta and Sam left their jobs the same month and took on one project — a booking tool for a chain of dive schools. It launched in five weeks and is still in service.

  2. 2019

    The six-week rule

    After a project ran eleven months we stopped quoting by the hour and started quoting fixed scope in six-week blocks. Nothing we have done since has changed the work more.

  3. 2021

    Engineering comes in-house

    We stopped handing designs to other people's developers. Design and engineering moved into the same week, and the gap between a mockup and a deploy went from months to days.

  4. 2023

    A studio of nine

    Brand and growth joined the practice. We turned down the chance to double again — nine is the largest number of people who can all still hold the whole project.

  5. 2026

    Forty-one launches in

    Two engagements at a time, six-week cycles, and a waiting list we are honest about. The shape has not changed much since 2019, which we take as a good sign.

Join us

We hire about once a year, and it is usually now.

We are looking for one designer who can write and one engineer who can say no. If that is recognisably you, send something you made and a paragraph on why.

Write to the studio Read the journal

Open applications, all year.