Pre-revenue solo founders with under $35k
Our floor is $35k for a Discovery Sprint. If you are bootstrapping with a small budget, that price filters us out — and you should be glad it does, because at your stage you need cheap iteration, not senior engineering.
Try instead: Build it yourself with Cursor / Claude Code / v0 / a strong template. Hire a senior contractor at $100/hr for short engagements through Toptal or your network. Come back when you have product-market fit and need to ship at quality.
Equity-only deals
We do not take equity in lieu of cash. The math does not work for either side at our scale, and equity-for-services arrangements consistently produce misaligned incentives we have learned to avoid.
Try instead: Cash-tier engagement now; equity advisor relationship later if the engagement goes well and there is genuine alignment.
Voice cloning, deepfake, or surveillance work
We do not build systems whose primary purpose is to deceive a person about who they are talking to, generate non-consensual likenesses, or perform mass surveillance of individuals. This is a category exclusion, not a case-by-case judgment.
Try instead: Find someone else. There are shops that do this work; we are not one of them.
Dark-pattern conversion AI
AI used to manipulate users into purchases, subscriptions, or commitments they would not knowingly make is not a category we work in. The line between "good UX" and "dark pattern" is sometimes blurry; if you cannot tell which side your project is on, ask us in the brief.
You want a forty-person agency
Mini Trends is a deliberately small senior-led practice with a finite bench. If your project requires an account team, multiple workstreams running in parallel, change-management consulting, and a six-month sales cycle — you want a partner shop, not us.
Try instead: Anthropic implementation partners, Slalom, Thoughtworks, BCG X. We refer this kind of engagement out a few times a quarter.
You want us to build something we already told you not to build
If our written proposal includes a "this is the wrong approach, here is the right one" recommendation and you want us to ignore it and build the wrong thing anyway — we will pass. Our work is judgment plus craft. Removing the judgment removes most of the value.
You need someone to attend daily standups
Our model is async-first. We deliver in writing, in your repo, with weekly written updates. If your engineering culture requires daily synchronous standups and we are expected to attend, we are a poor fit even if everything else aligns.
Try instead: A full-time embedded contractor (try Gun.io or A.Team) will fit better than we will.
Your timeline is "yesterday" and the work is real engineering
We turn down "I need this in two weeks" engagements when the actual scope is six. We do not believe in setting bad expectations, missing them, and apologizing.
Try instead: If the timeline is real and immovable, scope down with us — we may be able to ship a useful slice in time. If the scope is real and immovable, your timeline is wrong.