The team is two people. The company will go nameless at their request; for context, they sell vertical software to mid-market manufacturers, they’re Series C, and the marketing function is two people because the rest of the org runs lean. In the fourth quarter of last year, they used Lovable, Bolt, and v0 to ship: a partner-portal microsite, a returns calculator, an A/B-test routing tool, a webinar registration backend, an internal taxonomy editor, six landing pages, four interactive demos, two sales-collateral generators, and three small internal dashboards. Twenty things. Most of them small. Some of them not.
For ten of those twenty, they pressed for a Relay engineer. The other ten shipped without us. We asked them to talk us through the difference.
“We never pressed when we were prototyping. We pressed when the prototype was about to meet a customer.”
The pattern they described matches the four moments from the research above. The press almost always happened at one of three points: the day before a launch, the moment they tried to wire something to Salesforce or Marketo, or after the first time something went sideways in production. Sessions averaged just under an hour. The same engineer , the marketing org’s “Relay person,” in their words, picked up most of them, by the system’s preference and theirs.
What surprised us, and them, was the maintenance pattern. Eight of the ten tools they pressed for stayed in the relationship after launch , the engineer was paged when something broke, never more than once a week, usually less. They estimate they spent under $4,000 a month across the quarter and shipped what their COO called “a year’s worth of internal-tools work” in three months.
What we learned from running their account: software engineers, made available the moment a builder needs them, change the kind of work a non-engineering team is willing to attempt. They didn’t ship more landing pages, they ship landing pages either way. They shipped harder things. The taxonomy editor was the one we were most surprised by; it’s the kind of project that traditionally would have gone into the engineering backlog and never come out. Instead a marketing manager built it with Lovable, pressed twice, and it’s now used by every department in the company.
The thing the team said most often, in the writeup we did with them, was a version of: “We didn’t want a freelancer. We wanted a person.” We think that’s the line between this category and the previous one.
Customer name withheld at their request. Numbers verified by their finance team. Photos by Sasha Yip.