Small on purpose. Senior on principle.
Sanaan has been six to eight people since 2017 — by choice. Every project gets principals, not a pyramid. We grew up watching agencies scale into the very thing their pitch decks warned about, and decided the interesting problem was staying good instead of getting big.
We started as two engineers fixing the aftermath of other people's launches. Nine years later, the work is the same — we just get there before the damage now.
The studio runs on a simple loop: take on fewer projects than we could, staff them with people who've shipped before, and publish the prices so the wrong clients filter themselves out. It's not a growth strategy. It's a quality strategy that happens to grow.
Based in Houston, working everywhere. About half our clients have never met us in person; all of them can name the people building their product.
Sanaan Nawaz
Founder & PrincipalSets the bar and answers for it. Eighteen years across product engineering and brand — still reviews every launch personally.
Mara Ellison
Design DirectorOwns the pixels and the reasons behind them. Previously led design systems at two venture-backed platforms.
Deniz Aksoy
Engineering LeadWrites the code clients inherit gladly. Obsessive about performance budgets and boring, dependable architecture.
Priya Raghavan
Mobile LeadSwift and Kotlin, natively. Shipped consumer apps with a combined 40M installs before joining Sanaan.
Jonah Reyes
Growth LeadTreats marketing like engineering: hypotheses, experiments, logs. Allergic to vanity metrics.
Ana Kovač
Delivery LeadThe reason launches are boring. Runs every project's cadence, demos, and the promise that Fridays mean progress.
Portrait marks, not stock photos — you'll meet the real faces on the first call.
Everything clients fear about agencies, in writing — with the opposite promised.
Quote low, invoice highSenior pitch, junior deliverySilence between invoicesHostage hosting and mystery stacksReports designed to be unreadable
- Fixed quotes that only move when scope does — in writing, first
- The team you meet is the team that ships
- A reply within one business day, every time
- Your accounts, your code, your keys, from day one
- One dashboard, readable in thirty seconds
These aren't values-poster aspirations — they're contract language. Every statement above appears in our master services agreement.
Candor
We tell you the uncomfortable thing in week one, not week ten.
Craft
The staging build is the sales pitch. Nothing ships that we wouldn't sign.
Ownership
Your accounts, your code, your data. Leaving us should be easy — so staying means something.
Cadence
Every Friday, something you can click. Momentum is a deliverable.
Between client work, we build for ourselves: Buildorata, Fixorata, Drivorata, Rentorata, and PropOrata — five vertical SaaS products operated in-house on our Plaidware platform. Running software we have to answer for every month is the discipline your project inherits.