Independent product studio · Israel

A studio of one. Which is the point.

Yanshuf Studio designs, builds and ships complete web products. No handoffs, no account manager, no telephone game between the person you briefed and the person writing the code.

Start a project See what I’ve shipped

Scope Idea to live product Product decisions, interface, build, deploy — one person, end to end.

First release Typically 6–10 weeks Fixed-scope phases with something working at the end of each.

Hours UTC+3, Israel Full overlap with Europe, mornings with the US East Coast.

01What I do

Build the product

For founders and small teams who need a working product in front of real users, not a prototype that dies in a demo. I take the thing from a rough idea through scoping, product decisions, interface design, the build itself, deployment, and handover of a codebase someone else can pick up.

Fixed-scope phases · 6–10 weeks to first release · priced per phase, not per hour

Add AI where it earns its keep

Extraction, transcription, semantic search and agentic workflows dropped into software you already run. Built for the boring parts — evaluation, cost per call, what happens when the model is wrong — because that is the difference between a feature and a demo.

2–4 week engagements · one feature at a time · you keep the prompts, evals and the bill

Look before you commit

A second pair of eyes on a decision that is expensive to reverse: architecture and stack choices, feasibility of a roadmap, a security and code review, or an honest read on whether a plan survives contact with production. Six years of fielding escalations on a live fintech platform sharpens that read: the question is what a system does at 2am, not what it does in a demo. Sometimes the useful answer is that you should not build it.

Fixed fee · 3–10 days · written findings you can hand to a board or a team

02Work

Two products, each taken from an empty repository to a running service — product decisions, interface, code, data, tests and deployment. The same job, whether the idea is mine or yours.

Pub Quiz HubTrivia night automation

Live

A quizmaster describes the night they want; Claude writes the whole pack against a validated schema. The app prints presenter scripts and PDF question and answer sheets, then runs the night live — teams join from their phones with a short code, answers score themselves, and the scoreboard updates on reveal.

Built end to end: data model, live session state machine, PDF rendering, host authentication, and a Playwright suite that drives a real session from generation through to final scoreboard.

Open the live app ↗

Stack: Next.js · TypeScript · Tailwind
Data: Prisma · libSQL / Turso
AI: Claude, forced tool call → schema-valid JSON
Output: react-pdf · three document types
Tests: Vitest · Playwright end-to-end
Ops: Swappable DB and rate limiter, by env var alone

Or ZaruaHebrew calendar · companion

Live

A Hebrew calendar that works with no network and no account. Date conversion with proper after-sunset roll-over, Shabbat candle-lighting and Havdalah times by city or coordinates, zmanim, the month view with the week’s parasha, and remembrances for the dates that matter.

Everything is computed on the device, so nothing about your observance leaves it. Bilingual English and Hebrew with full right-to-left layout, and it installs from the browser as a standalone app.

Open the live app ↗

Stack: Vite · TypeScript
Dates: hebcal/core, computed on-device
Platform: Installable PWA, offline app shell
Privacy: Local-first — no account, no telemetry
Languages: English · Hebrew, full RTL
Tests: Playwright end-to-end

// Further products are in build and will appear here when they launch, each under its own name. Nothing goes on this page until it is running in public.

03How an engagement runs

A call, and an honest answer

Forty-five minutes on what you are building and who it is for. You leave knowing whether this is a good fit, and whether the thing is worth building at all. No charge, no deck.

A written proposal with a fixed scope

What ships, what deliberately does not, what it costs and when it lands. Anything uncertain is named as uncertain rather than buried in an hourly estimate.

Weekly increments you can open

Every week ends with something deployed that you can click, not a status update. Course corrections happen while they are still cheap.

Launch, then hand over the keys

Live on your infrastructure, in your accounts, with the repository, the deploy pipeline and documentation written for whoever comes next — including a future engineer who is not me.

04The name

Yanshuf is Hebrew for owl.

ינשוף — the bird is built for exactly the two things this work rewards: seeing detail in bad light, and moving without noise. Most of what makes a small product succeed is unglamorous and happens where nobody is watching.

The studio is one engineer in Israel, working in English and Hebrew, and set up for clients in Israel, Europe and the English-speaking world. Small enough that you always talk to the person building the thing; experienced enough that the thing gets built.

Twenty-five years of building software behind it: museum and university systems, a port’s damage-reporting system, .NET web applications since version 1, and six years on the customer’s side of a fintech support desk.

English and Hebrew, including right-to-left interfaces built properly rather than mirrored as an afterthought.

The products above are the proof. Each was taken from a blank repository to a working product alone — product thinking, design, code, infrastructure — which is the same job, whether the idea is mine or yours.

Tell me what you’re trying to build.

A short email is enough to start. If it is not a fit, I will say so quickly and, where I can, point you at someone it does fit.

paul@yanshufstudio.com

Useful things to include

What you are building, in a paragraph
Who it is for, and what they do today instead
When it needs to be live, and why that date
A budget range — even a rough one saves us both a call
Anything that already exists: designs, a codebase, a spreadsheet holding it together