Ideas need somewhere to launch from.
A starport is where something ambitious becomes ready to leave. Infrastructure, engineering and mission control in one place. Things arrive incomplete and depart capable of going somewhere.
Every startup begins somewhere before launch.
There is an idea. A problem worth solving. A rough sketch, a conversation, a prototype, a half-working demo — or sometimes nothing more than a founder who is convinced there is a better way to do something.
But an idea is not a product. Between the idea and the first real customer sits a difficult stretch of product decisions, design, engineering, infrastructure and trade-offs. For founders without an established product team, that stretch is often the thing that stops an otherwise good idea from ever leaving the ground.
Starport exists for that part of the journey. The founder owns the mission. We provide the engineering capability required to begin it.
Jason Baldwin
Starport is small on purpose. The person who scopes your mission is the person who writes the code and is on the call when it launches. There is no delivery team to be handed to.
Twelve years building and operating backend and distributed systems. For the last six, CTO and founding engineer at a Series A proptech company — I wrote the first commit and still ship production code daily. That platform is a multi-region geospatial pipeline on AWS holding roughly 875 TB across some 800 million objects, plus the multi-tenant SaaS and public API on top of it.
Before that, a US esports platform that went from eight states to all fifty while its engineering team went from fourteen to forty — including migrating a live custom WebSockets protocol to GraphQL, and a codebase from JavaScript to TypeScript, without stopping the product. Before that, the backend for a European IoT platform managing over a million connected street lights.
Go, TypeScript, Python, C#, PostgreSQL, Terraform. BSc Computer Science, University of Pretoria.
How we work
- Your repository and cloud accounts from day one
- Working software every week, deployed
- Direct access to the person building it
- Trade-offs raised when they happen
- Fixed scope per mission, not open-ended hours
- No lock-in — everything is yours throughout
Also from the same workshop
Engineering Bay inspects and hardens software that is already live. If what you have is built and you are worried about it rather than trying to launch it, that is the better door.
The manifesto.
Ideas are easy to keep perfect when they never leave your head.
Real products have users. They get clicked, misunderstood, ignored, loved, broken and occasionally paid for. That is where the useful information is.
So we believe in building enough to learn, engineering enough to trust, and launching early enough that reality gets a vote.
We do not measure progress in tickets closed or lines of code written. We measure it in distance travelled between an idea and a customer using it.
Bring us the mission. We’ll help you launch it.
Why “Starport”?
Because it describes the job. A starport is infrastructure, not the destination — the place where something incomplete is prepared, checked and sent on its way. We are not trying to become the founder, take over the company, or build technology for its own sake. We exist to give founders the product capability they need to move.
If the name rings a faint bell from somewhere else, enjoy it. Nothing here depends on getting the reference.
How we talk about the work
Bring us the mission.
Tell us the idea, the problem or the half-built thing. We’ll tell you what the smallest worthwhile first launch looks like.