Any idea to a multi $million market cap business

The AI part

How we use AI (no big words)

When people say AI they mean two different things: software built with AI, and AI shipped inside the product. Founders end up needing both. We do both, and below is the plain-words version of how.

01 · AI AT THE KEYBOARD

We build with Claude Code, daily

Claude Code works inside the production repo of the matchmaking platform we run, under a 20KB file of house rules. Those rules are earned: a caching outage and a database deadlock from our own history are written in as law the agent can never break again. It fixes root causes, not symptoms, then proves each change by driving the running app in a real browser as a test user. And nothing ships on its word alone: a human reviews everything first.

agent session compressed, not embellished

$ claude

reading house rules (20KB, every lesson paid for)

picking up last night's production error report

tracing... found it. fixing the cause, not the symptom

checking the live database (read-only, relax)

writing the fix

opening a real browser, signing in as a test user

clicking through the broken flow... works now

adding today's lesson to the house rules

✓ done. a human reads every line before it ships

9

curated skills. Playbooks the agent loads before it types, managed like code.

5

live connections. The app and its database (read-only), a real browser it drives, production error reports, tickets, the IDE.

53

pre-approved actions. The verify-your-own-work loop runs without waiting for a human click.

879

lines of playbook. Ten numbered patterns the agent follows when rebuilding our UI screens.

02 · AI IN THE PRODUCT

We ship AI features users actually touch

Two proofs. One is ours and linkable. One runs for a paying client and stays anonymous, because their competitors read websites too.

our own R&D

AI Trend-to-Script Pipeline

self-hosted · 9 steps · retries built in

Our own research system. It finds which movies and shows are trending, reads what real audiences say on Reddit and YouTube, and sorts 500+ comments per run with a small model we host ourselves, at zero cost per comment. A six-signal ranking engine picks the ten titles worth writing about, and only those ever reach the big model, which drafts a ready-to-read script for a short video. If a source is down, the run skips it and still finishes. Prompts forbid invented facts. A human approves every script. Nothing auto-posts, and that part is deliberate.

one button press → 20 titles → 92 reviews → 428 comments → 520 sentiment reads → 10 analyses → 1 script

Read the full case study ↗

client work · live

The matchmaking platform we run

11 AI agents in the codebase

Built on Laravel's official AI SDK, so the model provider is a config change, not a rewrite. A few of the features, in plain words:

A personality report where the AI must quote the member's own answers as evidence and admit when evidence is thin. The model scores; plain code makes the final call.
A date-venue picker that searches real map listings and quotes real reviews. Code checks every quote word for word against the source, so an invented quote never reaches the screen.
Plain-English member search where the model returns only filters and IDs, never sentences. Everything you read comes from the database.
Video interviews get transcribed and summarized. Profile photos get three yes/no checks from a vision model, with a hard cost cap.

House rule: the screen never renders raw AI text.

We perfected both the boring way: by running them every day.

Happy to walk you through either one live: the agent session, the pipeline, the prompt console, on a screen share. That is why AI consulting sits on our services list with a straight face.

Ask for the live walkthrough →

What we do

Six ways to use us

Every engagement runs on the same machine: a hands-on senior architect with a vetted bench behind him. Start with the slice you need.

01

Fractional CTO

Senior technical leadership by the hour: architecture calls, hiring, vendor wrangling and a roadmap that survives contact with reality.

"A CTO's judgment, without the CTO's payroll"

02

Custom Web Solutions

SaaS platforms, internal or customer facing systems, designed and built end to end. The complex, load-bearing kind.

"We don't do conveyor belt projects"

03

Freelancer Hiring per Contract

We source, screen and manage battle-tested freelancers for your project: per contract, per role, with one consolidated hourly report.

"We have a guy that knows a guy"

04

Software Architecture Audit

A senior architect reads your codebase and infrastructure, then tells you the truth: what will scale, what will fall over, and what it costs to fix.

"Bad news early is cheap. Bad news late is a rewrite"

05

Software Architecture Planning

Stack, data model, infrastructure and CI chosen for the next three years of growth. Decisions made once, correctly, instead of rediscovered by every new hire.

"Built for year three on day one"

06

Startup Technical Consulting

An honest read on your idea before you spend serious money: feasibility, budget, build-vs-buy, and what to ship first.

"The first conversation is free for founders"

Track record

Built from the first commit

Three startups where 402 started as the founding engineer and ended up running the team. Plus one product of our own.

UK Cycling-Insurance Startup

UK · Insurtech · 2015–2020

PoC → Prototype → MVP → Scale · team of 4

Joined as a one-man show in daily contact with the CEO and CMO, covering everything from database to DevOps. Left five years later as de facto CTO with a team of four, after taking the product from a monolith to microservices in a regulated industry. Picked up certifications in AML (4MLD), Conduct Risk, Data Protection and Information Security along the way.

US Matchmaking SaaS

US · SaaS for professional matchmakers · current

MVP → Scale · team of ~6

Our current engagement: an admin platform and a customer-facing app for the US matchmaking industry. Laravel, Livewire, Alpine, Tailwind, Docker and Vapor. A team of six contractors, run with surgical efficiency, founder-direct since day one.

Marketing-Analysis SaaS

SaaS · Analytics & automation · 2020

PoC → MVP · founder-direct

Came in founder-direct on Laravel and Vue, learned the team's KPIs, then automated their week: repetitive work down from 20 hours to 2, with a reporting and graphing layer for a bird's-eye view of the business.

"Donald came in, worked with the team to understand our KPIs and business needs, and developed a set of software that reduced our team's repetitive tasks from 20 hours a week down to 2 hours a week."

★ 5.00 · Upwork client review

Normcore ↗

our own product

Bulgaria · Apparel e-commerce · live

Idea → Build → Live · in-house

Our own apparel brand, live at ancug.bg. A fully custom storefront with variants, dual-currency pricing and promotions, plus a body-measurement calculator that estimates your size from height, weight and age using published scientific formulas, error margins included. We run production for ourselves too: the advice you get has skin in it.

What clients say

★ 5.00 · Upwork

"Donald is an amazing talent! He quickly came up to speed on an existing platform and made significant contributions to our SaaS products. We screened and interviewed hundreds of candidates before we found Donald, our persistence paid off."

SaaS platform · 18-month engagement

★ 5.00 · Upwork

"Donald has been the best developer we have ever worked with. He excelled at translating our business needs into technical solutions, advised us on the right tech-stack and developed the product from A-Z."

B2B webshop & product configurator

How we engage

One engagement. Three phases.

01 · FOUND

Senior Foundation

A senior architect joins as your founding developer: architecture, proof of concept, then a market-ready MVP. Senior judgment exactly when decisions are most expensive.

Months 1–6

02 · SCALE

AI-Boosted Build

An AI-boosted mid-level developer takes over feature delivery on top of clean architecture. Near-senior output at roughly half the cost, with the architect reviewing.

Foundation onward

03 · FLEX

Specialists on Demand

PM, QA, UI/UX, plug in from a couple of hours per week. You buy exactly the hours your stage of business justifies.

Per need, any week

Each phase adds leverage. None of it depends on a single person.

Senior-only build 1.0× burn

402 model ≈0.5× burn

Join at any stage

Idea Budgeting PoC Prototype MVP Scale

From consulting on a napkin sketch to taking over a live product, we bolt on wherever you are.

Business traction Dev capacity, scaled up and down on demand

365

days a year of development. Holidays, sickness and notice periods stop a person, not the cycle.

0

critical developers. Standards, documentation and a shared bench make every seat replaceable in days.

1→N

team size, matched to revenue. Grow to a full team and shrink back without hiring or firing anyone.

Straight terms

Results, not theatrics

Four years as a boutique agency. The terms have never needed small print.

Max 2–3 clients in parallel

The founder stays hands-on in every engagement. That's the point of a boutique, and why the roster is capped.

One consolidated hourly report

Every freelancer's hours on your project, in one report. You always know who did what, and for how long.

Transparent markup

You see what the bench costs and what we add on top. No mystery line items, no "blended rates".

Elastic by contract

Capacity follows your demand and your budget: up when traction says so, down the moment it doesn't.

Cancel anytime

Contractually: no notice period, no reason needed, no strings attached. (We do appreciate a couple of weeks heads-up.)

Every role covered

PM, product ownership, UI/UX, QA, back-end, front-end, full-stack, DevOps, all plugged in per need. A well-oiled machine.

The bench

HQ in Sofia. Bench on four continents

Battle-tested freelancers from the world's major emerging IT outsourcing hubs, vetted on real projects, managed by us and reported by the hour.

Nigeria Ethiopia Pakistan BulgariaHQ Bangladesh Indonesia Ecuador Egypt

8

countries on the bench

4

continents, follow-the-sun coverage

1

consolidated hourly report

No map with glowing dots. You've seen that site already.

The founder

You'll be working with Donald

AI generated but close enough

Donald Ovcharov

Founder & CEO, CODE-402

Lead Full-Stack Developer & Software Architect

Sofia, Bulgaria

Fifteen years shipping production software, 90% of it working founder-direct. De facto CTO of a UK insurance startup for five years. Line manager of up to eight (2 QA, 4 back-end, 1 front-end, 1 principal) at Epsilon Telecommunications, fifteen people managed in total. Built hiring from scratch: wrote the job descriptions, screened 100+ CVs, interviewed 40+ & hired 5+.

Stack PHP Laravel (10+ years, framework of choice) · Python OpenAPI + LangChain · Alpine · Tailwind · Vue/React · Node/TypeScript

Data & infra MySQL · Redis · Elasticsearch · AWS (Vapor, Lambda, RDS, SQS, CloudFormation/Terraform) · Docker · GitHub Actions

Paper CS degree, Technical University of Sofia · ELSYS · CCNA

15y

in production

15

direct reports at peak

100+

CVs screened, 40+ interviewed

5k

req/sec systems

"Donald is a natural leader… building a reputation as a reliable partner in all aspects of our work. I would have no hesitation working with Donald again if the opportunity arose."

Director Information Systems, Epsilon Telecommunications · LinkedIn recommendation

Questions founders ask

Straight answers

For the first months a senior architect works inside your project the way a technical co-founder would: making the strategic calls and writing the code, in daily contact with you. Architecture, proof of concept, then a market-ready MVP, and a team grown around it when traction says so.

Yes. We join at any stage: idea, budgeting, PoC, prototype, MVP or scaling. A takeover starts with an architecture audit, so you get an honest read on what you own before anyone touches it.

Hourly, with one consolidated per-hour report covering everyone on your project and full transparency in our markup. The phase model keeps senior judgment where it matters and delegates the rest, at roughly half the burn of a senior-only build.

Scale down any week. Capacity follows your budget. You can cancel anytime: contractually no notice period, no reason needed, no strings attached. We do appreciate a couple weeks' heads-up.

Donald does the complex parts himself. We take a maximum of 2–3 clients in parallel to keep it that way. Delivery scales through battle-tested freelancers across eight countries, covering project management, product ownership, UI/UX, QA, development and DevOps per need.

For founders, yes: an honest read on your idea, architecture and budget, from fifteen years of shipping software. No slide deck, no "discovery workshop" invoice.

Next step

Let's connect

Start with one founding developer next month. Scale the moment the numbers say so.

The first conversation is completely free for founders: an honest read on your idea, architecture and budget, from fifteen years of shipping software.

Email Donald → Book a 30-min call

donald@402.agency

Donald Ovcharov · Sofia, working worldwide

Connect with us on LinkedIn

Follow us on LinkedIn - one day we might post something, you never know.

Company page Donald's profile