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Shut The Goat Up

London · Est. 2022

Shut the Goat Up

Every category has a greatest of all time. Ours got comfortable, expensive and slow. We are the product company from London that builds the software to take the crown off.

See the work → Pick a fight

A scrolling list of incumbent marketing phrases, each struck through.

§ 01 — The work

Three products.
Three incumbents.

We build our own products and we fund them ourselves. No client roster, no billable hours — if it ships, it is because we backed it.

  • Review app & configurator Live

    RenderApp

    Photoreal, interactive 3D streamed to any browser — no plugin, no workstation, no download. Send a link, take comments straight on the model, and let people configure the thing themselves.

    Coming for

    Frame.io and Sketchfab

    renderapp.io →
  • Point of sale In build

    Tender

    A multi-tenant point-of-sale platform: merchant API, dashboard and terminal app. Built for operators who resent paying a percentage of their business for a card reader.

    Coming for

    Square and Toast

  • Security Classified

    Gruff

    Not announced. Not a landing page with a waitlist. It ships when it is good enough to embarrass something expensive.

    Coming for

    Long-lived credentials

§ 02 — Position

Why the Goat is beatable

01 The GOAT stopped shipping
Every category has a greatest of all time, and every one of them eventually starts defending instead of building. The roadmap turns into a press release. The price goes up. The release notes get shorter. That is the moment the category becomes worth attacking.
02 Small beats slow
We do not build with a pyramid. The people who design the product write the code, and there are not many of them. A team of four shipping fortnightly will outrun forty people in a governance forum every single time.
03 No lock-in
Open standards, open formats, and software you can run yourself. Your data exports, and your deployment is yours to keep. We would rather earn the renewal than rely on how painful it would be to leave.

§ 03 — Engineering

How we
build

No delivery managers, no bench, no pyramid. Four disciplines, one team, and the people who write the code are the ones carrying the pager for it.

  • 01

    Product engineering

    Senior people writing the actual software. Small teams, short cycles, and something running every week rather than a roadmap slide.

  • 02

    Platform engineering

    Kubernetes, infrastructure as code, and pipelines that deploy on merge. The boring machinery that makes shipping fast unremarkable.

  • 03

    Reliability

    SRE practice applied properly: error budgets, real observability, and on-call that a human being can live with.

  • 04

    Security

    Threat modelling, supply chain, secrets, and an audit trail that survives contact with a regulator — designed in, not bolted on afterwards.

§ 04 — The underdogs

Who is this exactly

Kseniya Spencer

Managing Director

LLB and LPC at Anglia Ruskin and the Oxford Institute of Legal Practice, qualified as a solicitor in 2015, then decided contracts were not enough of a challenge. Runs the business so the engineers do not have to.

Allan Degnan

Technical Director

Twenty years across government, defence, finance, media and startups. CTO when it needed one, and still the one writing the code. Has built the platform, been on the pager for it, and passed the audit on it — usually in that order.

§ 05 — Start something

Point us at
your Goat.

Tell us which incumbent is taxing you, ask for early access, or come and build one of these with us. We answer our own email.

fight@shutthegoatup.com