Why startups in the US should work with Tequity

Tequity is a product design and development agency that helps early stage startups go from 0 to 1. We partner early, often when it’s just the founders and an idea, and work with them to validate their idea, launch the MVP, iterate based on user feedback, build scalable engineering and product systems, and eventually find PMF.

These are bold claims, but we stick by them.

Not only are we helping great entrepreneurs realize their life long ambitions, these companies often end up changing the trajectory of the planet. It’s a privilege to partner with ambitious founders - and we push ourselves to earn that trust daily.  

There are plenty of dev shops in the market, so founders often get confused about whom to pick. Every founder's inbox is bombarded with emails and DMs from our competitors promising them great products at cheap prices. So why should startups, especially those in the US, work with Tequity?

We are specialists in working with early stage startups  

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Every company should aspire to be the best in the world at a niche. And for Tequity, we want to be the best in the world at building products for early stage startups in the US.

Why early stage?

It’s the most exciting stage of any company, filled with dreams and passion. It gives us an incredible amount of energy.

Why the U.S.?

It has been the nerve center for business innovation for many decades now, and we believe will be the case for many decades to come.

You can determine the focus of any company by understanding whom they say ‘NO’ to, so here are a few sales opportunities we turned down last week:

1. An interior design services company that wanted to build an AI platform to generate interior design mock ups [We don’t do internal tooling projects]
2. A Govt enterprise that wanted to build a public health system for tracking virus outbreaks [We don’t take up Govt projects]
3. A Fortune 2,000 company that wanted to do a RAG implementation for internal knowledge management [We don’t work with enterprise clients]

But here are customers we partnered with recently

1. An early stage startup that makes it easier for substance abuse patients seek the treatment they need to get better
2. A platform for hospitals to manage post surgery care and recovery of patients
3. A product that destigmatizes botox, and helps users find accredited injectors
4. An AI voice assistant that helps users quit their addictions

We are a startup that helps startups, and want to be the best in the world at this.

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We help build your TEAM, not hire individuals

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“We >> Me” is a core value at Tequity, and we manifest this for our customers. It takes a village to raise a child, and it takes a multitude of skillsets to build a product. At Tequity, we build you a TEAM that will work with you for the next few months and years to build out your product. Contrary to what many founders believe, it takes more than ‘1 full stack engineer’ to build out successful products.  

Here’s what the team could look like for various stages of the company.

Note: 0.25 or 0.5 indicates part time resources

With Tequity, you can hit the ground running with a mixed team of engineers, designers and product managers. At early stages, you don’t need everyone to be full time on the project - and that’s ok with us. We are happy to have some people engaged part time on projects, and grow to full time roles as the product scales.

One of the most underrated advantages we bring is a dedicated 5–10 person team that deeply understands your product and works shoulder-to-shoulder with your founding team.

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We have built systems and processes to support US Startups  

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There are many challenges that US companies face when working with outsourced development agencies. We have understood the nuances of this well and have created clear SOPs and Processes to overcome these challenges. Some of these are highlighted below.

Work asynchronously

When working across borders and timezones, it’s super important to have systems that support async work. We ensure we immediately set up

1. Slack Channels
2. Jira Boards
3. Figma files

That is shared between the Tequity team and the startups. This lays the foundation of clear communication between teams.

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Teams that work US times

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While in the long run, it’s always hard for Indian team members to overlap fully with US teams, we have 2 types of teams at Tequity:

Team

Work Timings (India)

Ideal for

Early Shift

7am to 5pm (IST)

West Coast startups who can overlap between 6pm to 10pm PT

Late Shift

11am to 9pm (IST)

East Coast startups who can overlap from 7am to 12noon ET

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Trained on soft skills

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When working across borders and timezones, teams not only need to do their functional jobs well, they also need to be able to liaise with stakeholders in an effective manner. At Tequity, we hire and train for soft skills. While most engineers would focus on fluency in C++, we believe the English language deserves equal importance :)

• Spoken English
• Etiquette when joining meetings
• Ability to send notes on Jira/email
• Responding to questions on calls with clarity
• Keep their work organized

These are some of the soft skills we emphasise on when hiring and retaining our team.

And if you’re building from the US, these soft skills make all the difference.

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Periodic Reviews with Key Stakeholders

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When we just got started with our business, an early customer told us - Overcommunication is the only acceptable level of communication, and we have imbibed that philosophy at Tequity. I have already highlighted above, how we communicate operationally, but let me touch upon strategic communication and overlap with our customers.

We have 4 levels of discussions at an account level:

These meetings help us stay tightly aligned with our customers — week after week, quarter after quarter.

We embed AI into every aspect of our delivery

At Tequity, we see AI not as a threat, but as a force multiplier. It helps our teams work smarter and faster across every stage of product development — from idea to launch. Here’s how we currently use AI in four core areas of delivery:

Product Management

AI helps us go from raw ideas to actionable specs and plans with greater speed and clarity.

• PRD generation: We use LLMs to convert founder conversations and notes into structured product requirement documents.
  Tools: ChatGPT, Notion AI, Grok
• Sprint planning: AI helps us prioritize features, estimate timelines, and generate sprint-level planning outlines.
  Tools: GPT + Jira integration
• Vibe coding with Lovable and Bolt: The tools we use allow us to turn plain-English prompts into UI concepts, UX flows, and copy drafts — helping teams move from idea to wireframe faster.
  Tools: Lovable, Bolt
  
  

Design

AI accelerates the design process, allowing us to explore ideas quickly and iterate efficiently.

• Wireframing from prompts: We use AI to instantly generate first-draft wireframes based on feature descriptions or product specs.
  Tools: Uizard, Relume
• UI layout exploration: Designers use AI to test alternative structures and improve layout decisions early.
  Tools: Diagram (Figma plugin), Galileo (Now called Stitch with Google)
• UX copy assistance: Microcopy and in-product text are reviewed and improved using language models for clarity and tone.
  Tools: ChatGPT, Jasper
  
  

Engineering

AI enhances developer productivity, especially in writing, refactoring, and maintaining clean code.

• Code generation and refactoring: We use Cursor as our primary IDE to scaffold code, suggest improvements, and reduce repetitive logic.
  Tools: Cursor
• Boilerplate automation: GitHub Copilot helps generate standard patterns like authentication, forms, and data handling, freeing developers to focus on core logic.
  Tools: GitHub Copilot
• Code commenting and documentation: We use LLMs to generate inline comments, summaries, and system-level documentation automatically.
  Tools: ChatGPT API
  
  

QA and Testing

We’ve integrated AI into our quality workflows to improve coverage, reduce manual effort, and ship with confidence.

• Merge request reviews: Coderabbit provides consistent, AI-based code reviews that flag potential issues before they reach production.
  Tools: Coderabbit
• Test case generation: Based on user stories and acceptance criteria, we generate automated test cases to validate edge scenarios early.
  Tools: Internal GPT-powered scripts
• Bug triage automation: AI helps us analyze logs and QA reports to classify and prioritize issues quickly.
  Tools: Sentry with GPT classifiers
  
  

Here’s the bottomline - 2 years ago, the avg customer with Tequity engaged a team of 8 Full time employees with us as a part of their pod.

Today? It’s around 4.5.

This increased efficiency we singularly attribute to the usage of AI inside our organization.

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We have been there, done that  

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To close off, we have worked with 20+ US startups in the last 12 months and helped them in their quest to find PMF. Some of them are listed below:

1. Resonately
2. Laptis
3. Muse
4. Alto Neuro
5. MabLab
6. TerraFlow

We are always happy to share references from our existing customers to new ones to give them more comfort about working with us.

If you’re an early-stage US startup looking for a reliable partner to go from 0 to 1 — we’d love to hear from you. Reach out to us through this link - https://www.tequity.tech/contact-us

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