Our Application Development Process

Originally published 2013, updated 2026 to reflect how we actually build today.

At Caffeine, application development is our core business. We’ve built SaaS products across finance, real estate, fitness, marketing, and more, and the technology has changed a lot since we started. What hasn’t changed is the process.

Products

We build everything from a customized SaaS application with its own database backend, to an application integrated with social media and third-party APIs, to an application that exposes its own API for someone else to build on.

Process

We start by interviewing you, the customer, and gathering as many details as possible. From there, we define requirements and generate specifications, which lets us make architecture and technology decisions.

Once that’s done, we recommend scaling back requirements into a minimum viable product, the smallest feature set you can take to market, so you can get your product in front of customers and start getting real feedback.

For the technical-minded, read more about our hybrid waterfall/agile methodology.

Technology

We don’t lead with a preferred stack. The right technology depends on the product, the architecture, the team that’ll maintain it after launch, and any third-party integrations the project actually needs. Picking a stack before you understand those things is how projects end up rebuilt two years later.

Getting Started

To get started with your project, contact us. We’ll discuss your needs and begin the process of determining scope, cost, and requirements.