Pitch Us
A separate door from the rest of this site. Here, you bring a venture opportunity, not a business problem to get built — and Ugly Baby Labs becomes a partner with a stake in the company, not a vendor you hire.
Not a way to hire UBL
If what you have is a business problem you want turned into software, you don’t need Ugly Baby Labs as a partner to get it built. That’s a different door, and it doesn’t ask for a stake in anything.
Pitch Us is for something else: a venture you’ve found in your own industry, worth building as its own company, where you want a technology partner invested in the outcome alongside you — not a team you’re paying to execute a spec.
If that’s what you’re after, Start a Project is the other doorWho we back
An experienced operator who has spent years inside an industry, not reading about one — someone who knows a recurring, expensive problem firsthand, knows exactly who buys the solution to it, and intends to run the resulting company day to day. You don’t need to be technical. That part is ours to bring.
The knowledge you already have — who feels the problem, who pays to fix it, why you’re the one who can sell it — is the part we can’t hire our way into.
Not a closed list
We back founders across the physical and service economy — the trades, field service, and similar industries are examples we use to make this concrete, not a boundary around who can pitch. We don’t keep a published list of qualifying industries.
If your industry hasn’t appeared in anything we’ve written, that’s not an answer about your fit. What matters is the problem and your standing to solve it, not whether your trade happens to show up in an example.
What rules a pitch out
- No standing in the industry the idea serves — no customers, no relationships, no firsthand knowledge of the problem
- An idea with no one identified who’d actually buy it
- Wanting someone to build the software while you stay the sole owner-operator with no shared stake
- Not planning to stay actively involved once building starts
- No ability to fund your own company’s direct technology costs during the build
- Looking for employment or contract work rather than a partnership
The selective process
Pitch Us is selective by design. Not every pitch leads to a conversation, and not every conversation leads to a partnership.
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Application
You tell us who you are: your identity, your company if you have one already, and the industry you know.
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Pitch
You describe the opportunity at a high level — the problem, who buys the solution, why you’re positioned to build it, and what you can bring to the build. Confidentiality applies before any of the detail that actually matters gets discussed.
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Evaluation
We look honestly at what you’ve described and answer one question: are we interested enough in this to have a real conversation about it?
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Selection
If we are, we invite you into that conversation. Most pitches end at Evaluation instead — that’s a normal outcome, not a verdict on the idea. It means this particular fit isn’t right, for us or for you.
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Partnership
If it’s a fit on both sides, Ugly Baby Labs becomes your technology partner, and the build begins.
Build Mode and Operate Mode
Once we’re partners, the relationship runs in two modes.
Build Mode
The active phase, while your product is defined and built against a clear scope: what’s included, what counts as finished, and what’s explicitly left for later. You see real, working product at meaningful points — never a deck standing in for one.
Operate Mode
Once your product is live and doing what you agreed it needed to do, the relationship moves into Operate Mode: watching it, maintaining it, and continuing to improve it as an ordinary part of the partnership, not a separate ask each time. A major new product or platform expansion can start a build phase of its own.
Equity, negotiated case by case
Where we partner, Ugly Baby Labs takes a negotiated minority position in the company — decided deal by deal, based on the specific opportunity. There’s no percentage or range published here, because none is fixed to publish.
Final equity, legal, and tax terms for any actual deal are counsel’s to finalize, not this page’s.
Talk with us
There’s no live pitch submission here yet. If you think you’ve found a venture worth building together, say so, and we’ll go from there. To reach a person today, Talk with us.
Talk with us