The Challenge
Orbit's idea is sharp: help founders see the real gap between what they believe is happening inside their company and what their employees actually experience, then turn that gap into a clear set of reports and a concrete 90-day action plan.
The problem was simple to describe and painful to live with — the product often couldn't finish producing the very thing customers were paying for. Reports would stall partway through, sometimes running for over 20 minutes before failing outright and losing the customer's data. Long reports got cut off mid-sentence. The onboarding flow could trap brand-new users in a loop before they even got started. Emails routinely landed in spam instead of inboxes.
What Orbit brought to us as a UI refresh turned out to be a much bigger issue once we looked underneath: the product wasn't stable enough to reliably run its own core business.
What Changed
We rebuilt Orbit into a platform the client could actually run a business on, rather than one they had to babysit.
Reports that finish. The generation process that used to fail partway through now completes reliably, every time — no more lost customer data, no more support headaches explaining why a report vanished.
Reports that don't get cut off. Customers now get the full, long-form reports they're paying for, instead of ones that stopped mid-sentence.
A product that doesn't break when it grows. The system now handles far more complex, larger organizational reports without falling over — important for a platform whose whole pitch depends on going deep on a company's data.
A real business behind it. We added live subscription billing with support for promotions and discounts, meaning Orbit can actually charge customers automatically instead of managing payments manually. Email deliverability was fixed so customer communications land where they're supposed to. We also added ongoing error monitoring, so issues get caught before customers notice them, rather than after.
Self-sufficiency for the team. We built the client a private control panel so their own team can review customer submissions, adjust how the AI behaves, and manage the system day to day — without needing an engineer on call for routine changes.
Room to grow. New features that used to take days and risked breaking other parts of the product can now ship in a fraction of the time, giving Orbit the flexibility to keep iterating without fear of the product falling apart.
The Results
From routinely failing to reliably delivering the core product customers pay for.
From a product no one could safely extend to one that ships new features fast, without breaking what already works.
From manual, fragile operations to a real, running business — automated billing, working customer communications, and a team that can manage the platform themselves day to day.
A ten-month engagement that started as a UI refresh and became a full rebuild once it was clear that was the only way to give Orbit a product worth building a company on.
The Takeaway
Orbit came to us wanting a better-looking product. What they needed — and what they got — was a product that actually works, reliably enough to run a real business behind it.