Taste and finishing are the whole job now
A founder can get a working prototype out of an AI tool in an afternoon now. I think that's great. It also means a working prototype is worth less than it used to be, because everyone has one.
What still separates the products people use from the ones nobody opens twice comes down to two things: taste, and finishing.
Taste
Taste is all the small decisions nobody writes in a spec. What the first screen shows. Which three settings you leave out. How a glucose alert reads at 3am when someone is half asleep. Whether the app feels calm or busy.
You can't prompt your way to it, because you have to know what you are aiming at first. Most of it comes from having shipped enough products to see what people actually do with them. I have put more than twenty apps in the stores since 2018, for banks, start-ups and my own company, and most of what I know came from watching those apps get used.
Finishing
The last 20% is where most projects die. Store review, the payment edge cases, offline mode, the admin panel somebody needs on day two, the onboarding that turns a sign-up into a user. None of it is exciting and all of it decides whether the product exists.
That is why I build the whole thing: the iPhone and Android app, the watch app if it needs one, the web app, the backend, payments and the launch. One person holding every layer means nothing falls between two contractors.
What that looks like for a founder
- One call and one written brief: what we build first, what waits, and what it costs.
- A clickable prototype on your phone before any backend exists.
- A new TestFlight and Play build every week, with a note of what changed.
- A stack picked for what it costs to run, not for what is fashionable. A small product should not need a big monthly bill to stay alive, and if the budget is tight I will plan around it with you.
- Help with the decisions around the build too: scope, pricing, and getting the product into a shape investors take seriously.
If you have an idea and want it built properly, have a look at my work or write to me at giorgikhimshiashvili@gmail.com.