The day, hour by hour
Everyone else counts this in days. Here it is in hours.
09:00 to 09:40
The challenge
One challenge for the whole room, on the wall, read out twice and taken apart. A person, a moment, a finish line with a number in it. No solution in the sentence, because that part is theirs. Teams of four form around it.
Those five add up to eight hours, and building takes the biggest share, close to half. No single block is the point of the day. Pull any one of them out and the rest stops working, which is why this needs a room and a day rather than a meeting.
The thing that does not appear on the clock
There is no alignment workshop, because alignment is happening the whole time. The challenge is argued into one sentence in the morning. The riskiest belief gets picked out loud. The testing settles what the room was guessing at. Every stage forces a small decision in front of everybody, so by 16:50 the big one is a formality rather than a debate.
One of these is written up in full
Four working prototypes before 16:00, and zero developer hours.
Athens and Warsaw, July 2026. Trustpilot figures as at 6 August 2026.
Ionian Technologies · Thessaloniki · May 2026
A software agency building Wardrobed, an outfit app, on a hypothesis with no evidence behind it.
They took the prototypes onto the street that same afternoon. One tester spent ten minutes and never found an outfit she would wear.
“Building has gotten easier. Distribution is now the challenge. We learned a few things about our users and about what we are going to do next.”
Spyros Tsoukalas, founder
Read the full case study → including all four briefs.
The output
Three things on the table at 17:00
Live at a real URL. Already fixed once against what the testing exposed.
What a synthetic panel did with it: whether they finished, in how many clicks, and where they stalled.
The riskiest belief, the cheapest test that hits it, the number that decides, and a name against step one.
Plus a written debrief within five working days, and a go, pivot or stop said out loud by the person allowed to say it.
Price
What it costs, and what happens if it fails
Up to 20 people, about 395 a head. One invoice, excluding VAT. For EU business customers the reverse charge applies. Happy to work under your NDA.
What moves it: room size, travel outside Greece, real users on top of the synthetic panel, or a second day. Prices are indicative until confirmed in writing. From you: a room, a screen, wifi, laptops and lunch. English or Polish.
The guarantee
No working app and no tested plan by 17:00, and you pay nothing.
The whole fee back, not a credit note. Conditions are in the terms: a room, working wifi, at least eight people and an agreed challenge.
How it starts
Two free steps before anyone signs anything
The two tests
Synthetic users test the usability. Real people test the business.
A synthetic panel will tell you a product is confusing. It cannot want anything, so it will never tell you whether a person would pay. So the real-user test gets designed first, in the morning, and the product gets built against it.
of startups fail for no market need — the top reason, published by CB Insights year after year.
Examples picked during the 09:40 block, then built against.
| The test | Costs about | Takes |
|---|---|---|
| Five Mom Test conversations | 0 EUR | 3 to 5 days |
| Pre-sale with a payment link | 5 to 20 EUR | 3 to 7 days |
| Fake door | 0 to 50 EUR | 1 week |
| Priced landing page plus ads | 150 to 300 EUR | 10 to 14 days |
| And many more your team will learn | ||
A plan without a number is a mood board.
How to get the most out of it
Put people in the room who never usually build together
PMs and product designers who would own whatever gets decided.
Sales, marketing and support. They know the objection and the language customers use.
The person allowed to say go, pivot or stop. Needed from 16:20.
Teams of four, deliberately odd, including one person who thinks the idea is wrong.
Questions people ask
Before you book the call
Fifteen minutes tells you whether this is worth a day.
Bring the thing your team has been arguing about. If a build day is the wrong shape for it, I will say so on the call.
Book the 15-minute call