How KMC Home Solutions kept shipping for 18 months with the team that built version one

Version one launched to a waiting list of service companies, and the requests started the same week: an app for technicians in the field, accounting sync, route planning. Every one of them was a reason a customer would stay or leave.

The founders had two options, and neither was good. Hiring two senior engineers would take four to six months before anyone shipped a line. A new agency would mean starting over with people who had never seen the code.

They kept the team that built version one: three engineers and a designer who already knew every corner of the product. Work runs in two-week cycles with KMC’s product lead; each cycle’s scope is agreed up front, reviewed on staging, then released.

The founders and the team review the roadmap together every month, and someone is on call for production issues. From the start, the team built for an eventual handover: tests on every change, documentation kept current, and every decision written down.

Eighteen months on, the engineers who built version one are still the ones shipping it. KMC’s customers have tripled on the same codebase, uptime has held at 99.95%, and releases still go out every couple of weeks.

When KMC hired its first in-house engineer, the team had them shipping in their first week. The two now build side by side, and KMC grows its own team at its own pace, without ever having had to start over.