From Idea to MVP in 60 Days, Still Growing 6 Years Later

A husband and wife, both still working full-time jobs, walked into our office in late 2019 with investor backing, a concept for a healthcare marketing platform, and no idea how to build software. They had customers waiting and money in the bank. What they did not have was anyone who could build the product.

Technology scared them, because they wanted to be strategic and there were so many options. They knew how to use every tool and platform available, but building something custom from scratch was a different problem entirely. Every week without a working product was a week competitors could move first and investor confidence could quietly erode.

They looked at other agencies before coming to Fixation. Most shops were heavy on the marketing side but had a revolving door of developers (never the same person twice). Some had large organizations behind them, with the pricing to match. The founders worried, rightly, that their project would get farmed out overseas, that responses would take days instead of hours, and that if they changed direction mid-build (which startups always do), the agency could not keep up. They also refused to start with WordPress or anything off-the-shelf. Their vision had a long runway, and they did not want to hit a technology ceiling before they got airborne.

Fixation started by listening. The founders sat down, in person, and explained their world: who they were selling to, how healthcare providers in their vertical made purchasing decisions, what data those providers actually needed, and what the families searching for care looked for online. That domain knowledge shaped everything that came after. A vendor who skipped that step would have built a generic directory. This platform needed to understand the industry it was entering.

The MVP shipped in about 60 days. A full team built it (not a lone contractor), and they set up CI/CD pipelines and a clean layered architecture before writing the first feature. Separate layers for business logic, data access, orchestration, and presentation, all wired through dependency injection and contracts. That might sound like overkill for an MVP, but it is the reason the platform could be migrated to .NET 8 six years later without a rewrite. Fixation delivered the product in pieces, demoing progress every week so the founders could see exactly what was being built and flag anything that felt wrong before it became an expensive misunderstanding. They own 100% of the code, always have, and that ownership has given them the freedom to hire outside design firms, bring on internal designers, and change their site on their own terms whenever they want.

The platform was built for search engine performance from the start: fast load times, mobile-first design, and a process for quickly addressing anything Google flagged. But the backend is where the client's customers get the most value. Providers get analytics, content control, spam controls, and AI-powered heuristics that keep their listings fresh, search-friendly, and competitive. The founders can tell their customers, honestly, that the platform gives them more data and insight than any other vendor in the space. That claim holds up because of how the system was architected, not because someone wrote it on a sales page.

One detail that shows the depth of the architecture: every third-party service integrated into the platform (analytics tools, APIs, data providers) is isolated from the rest of the system. When a vendor changes their API or the client wants to switch to a better provider, that swap happens without touching anything else. Users never see that work, but it is the reason the platform has survived six years of constant change without needing a full rewrite. When Fixation migrated the entire application from .NET 4 to .NET 8 in the summer of 2025, the conversion took about 60 days and was invisible to every person using the system. No downtime announcements, no transition period. The technology underneath changed completely, and nobody outside the development team noticed.

When the founders needed guidance beyond code (technology decisions, scaling priorities, what to build next), Fixation filled the CTO role without requiring a full-time technical hire. Over time, as the company grew, the founders offloaded the day-to-day technology management entirely. They stopped attending every weekly demo. Their staff handles that now.

Sixty days from kickoff to a sellable MVP. A company that grew from two people (still at their day jobs when the project started) to more than 20 employees. Six years of partnership and counting, with nearly 14,000 commits in the codebase. A complete .NET 4 to .NET 8 framework migration done in 60 days with zero disruption to a single customer. And a codebase where components built once get reused over and over, compounding the original investment instead of depreciating it.

The founders have been recognized locally for their leadership, including a chamber of commerce award. They spend their time running a growing company and being with their family. Fixation meets with their staff now, not the founders, and that might be the most honest measure of what the right technical partner looks like for a startup: six years in, the founders are not thinking about the code at all.