An independent oilfield services operator had deep domain expertise, a recurring workflow problem, and no path to building software. We co-built a field ops SaaS on a revenue-share arrangement. No upfront development fee. First paying customer before handoff.
The client ran a small but well-regarded oilfield services operation in West Texas. They had fifteen field technicians, a solid reputation with two or three anchor clients, and a dispatch process that ran entirely on phone calls, group texts, and a shared Google spreadsheet that was always out of date.
The founder had watched two competitors implement off-the-shelf field service management software and fail to get adoption. The tools were built for HVAC companies and landscaping crews. They did not understand wellsite logistics, crew certification requirements, or the informal communication patterns that field technicians actually used.
He wanted to build something specific. Something his crews would actually use. He had the domain knowledge and the relationships. He did not have a development team, a technical co-founder, or the capital to pay standard agency rates for a custom build.
We structured the engagement as a co-build. No upfront development fee. In exchange, we negotiated a percentage of monthly recurring revenue for a defined period, with a buyout clause at the founder's option.
That structure changed the dynamic immediately. We were not contractors executing a spec. We were operators with skin in the game, and we designed every decision accordingly — toward adoption, toward revenue, toward the simplest thing that a field technician would actually open on a phone with one bar of LTE on a dusty wellsite at 6am.
Discovery took one week. We spent three days on-site in Midland — riding along for dispatch calls, watching how work orders got assigned, understanding which parts of the process caused the most friction. We also interviewed two of the anchor clients to understand what they actually needed to see from a subcontractor's software.
We scoped a lean MVP: work order creation and assignment, crew availability and certification tracking, GPS check-in at site, and a simple client-facing portal showing real-time job status. Everything the anchor clients had said they wanted to see from a subcontractor, made visible without any manual reporting.
We built on React Native for the crew-facing mobile app — the one that had to work on cheap Android phones in low-connectivity conditions. The dispatcher web app was Next.js. The client portal was a read-only view into the same data layer, behind a simple login.
We shipped a working demo at day 22. By day 40 we had the founder's primary anchor client using the portal in staging. The formal handoff happened at day 58, with one signed paying customer already on the platform.
The product worked because the founder stayed in the process. He reviewed every screen. He pushed back when something felt wrong for how field technicians actually behaved. He introduced us to his best crews and let us run usability sessions during slow shifts.
The operators who succeed with co-builds are the ones who understand that the domain expertise is the product. We built the software. He built the thing that made the software worth building.
The platform launched with one anchor client and twelve active crews. Within six months, the operator had tripled their active crew capacity without a proportional increase in dispatch headcount — the platform was doing the coordination work that used to require three people on the phone. Two additional client companies had signed on to the portal. The founder exercised the buyout clause at month eleven.