A stack of 85 useful things.
Stack85 builds small, sharp software products. Each one fixes a single expensive problem and ships in weeks. Eighty-five of them, over ten years. Product 01 is live; 84 slots are still empty.
Constraint
The number is the method.
Eighty-five products in ten years is not a target we hope to hit. It is the rule we build under. Divide it out and you get roughly one product every six weeks, which settles most arguments before they start.
Six weeks is too short for a product to turn into a roadmap. It is too short to add the feature that only one prospect asked for. It is long enough to build one thing properly, test it against a real business, and put it in front of people who will pay for it.
It also forces the harder decision early: what is the single most expensive problem here? Everything that is not that gets cut in week one instead of week nine.
We count publicly because a number you have published is harder to quietly abandon. Right now it reads 01 of 85. It will read 02 when 02 is live, and not a day before.
Products
85
Years
10
Per product
~6w
Small, and staying that way.
We are a small team. That is a choice, not a stage we are trying to grow out of. There are no layers and no committee — the people building are the people deciding, which removes most of the delay between noticing something and fixing it.
A six-week cadence does not survive a handover. It does not survive a sign-off queue, a stakeholder review, or a quarter of alignment. It survives when the person writing the code is also the person who chose the problem and will answer the support email.
What that means in practice: we say no to most things. We take on one product at a time. We do not run a services arm on the side. And when we cannot do something well, we say so rather than staffing up to pretend otherwise.
Founder
Mahadev
Founder · Bengaluru, India
I spent six years in performance marketing. Google, Meta and Canonical certified, most of it buying attention for other people’s businesses.
The same thing kept happening. We would fill the pipeline, the client would celebrate, and then the leads would sit. Someone replied on Thursday to an enquiry that arrived on Monday. By then the person had bought from whoever answered first. A lot of money died in that gap.
The other pattern was tools. A business pays for a platform with forty features, uses one, and still does not have the thing it needed.
So I stopped optimising campaigns and started building. Velora is the first — it exists because replying in the first hour beats replying in the third day, and nothing else needed to be in it.
That is how we work now. One problem, one product, ship it, price it honestly, move on. Product 01 is live. 84 to go.
How Stack85 builds.
- 01
One problem per product
Every product answers a single question. If it needs a second sentence to explain, it is two products, and we build the more expensive one first.
- 02
Ship in weeks, not quarters
Roughly six weeks from decision to live. A quarter is long enough for a product to become a plan, and plans do not fix anything.
- 03
Price it honestly
One price, published, for what the thing actually does. No call to unlock the number. No tier that exists to make the tier above it look reasonable.
- 04
No product gets abandoned
Shipping number twelve does not end support for number three. Every product stays maintained, or we say plainly that it is being retired and why.
Product 01 is Velora. If the next one should be yours, write to hello@stack85.com.