Why IRLY

People ask what IRLY stands for. The answer has two parts: what we set out to do, and a comment from someone who misread the name.

What we knew at the start

Two things were settled before the studio had a name.

The first was that we would be working with early-stage companies. That is where the two of us had spent our careers: building products from the first line of code, raising money for them, growing them and selling them. We knew the pressures of that stage from the inside, and we knew how much of an early budget disappears into software before a single customer sees it.

The second was that AI was going to change how software gets built. We had been early into machine learning, and earlier still into generative AI. By the time the studio existed we were already building with it every day, some time before it was a normal thing to say on a website. The bet was that a small team of experienced people using these tools properly could do what used to need a large team, and that early-stage companies would benefit from that first.

The comment

Early on, we were explaining the studio to someone and they said they had read IRLY as "I really love you".

There was a pause. Then one of us said: well, let's hope our clients say that about us.

It was a joke at the time. We kept it as the test of our work. A client who would say that has had software delivered that works, on the date we said, at the price we quoted, by people who told them the truth along the way, including the times the truth was that they did not need us.

What it means day to day

We tell people when they should not build something, or when they should build less of it. We stay involved after launch, because the people who built a system are the right people to look after it. We answer the phone when something breaks, and we say plainly what happened and what we are doing about it.

If you have worked with us and would not say it, we would like to hear why.