01 · For foundersBuild · Understand · Lead

For non-technicalfounders.

The founder gap

If you do not understand how software is built, you will eventually mismanage the people building yours.

01Build the first version
02Understand the system
03Lead the technical work

Zorentia is for non-technical founders building software companies. You start by building your first version in Zorentia Build Studio, our software building platform. When that first version exists and you want engineers involved in preparing it for launch, you can continue into Zorentia Office for professional technical oversight.

We start this way because there is a problem in the usual advice given to non-technical founders. You are told to focus on the business, hire someone technical and let them handle the technology. That sounds clean in theory. In practice, you are still the person deciding what gets built, what gets funded, who gets hired, whether work is good enough, when priorities change and when the product is ready for customers.

If you understand almost nothing about how software is built, those decisions become much harder to make well.

You will not know whether technical pushback is protecting the product or blocking it.

An engineer pushes back on your fifth feature change in the same month. You hear attitude. They hear another change to work that is already underway.

You may think, “I am the founder. I am paying you. Just build what I asked for.” But the engineer may be telling you that the fourth change is still unfinished, the fifth affects work already in progress and continuing to change the product is exactly why nothing is getting finished.

They may be right. They may also be wrong. Maybe the request is genuinely small. Maybe they are making something more complicated than it needs to be.

Now imagine asking two developers for the same feature. One says, “Yep. Easy. I can add that.” The other says, “Not yet. We need to finish the current milestone first, and this changes how the account system works.”

Which developer is better? You cannot tell from those answers alone.

The first engineer might already know a clean way to implement the feature. They might also be telling you whatever keeps you happy. The second engineer might have identified a real technical problem. They might also be overengineering something straightforward.

Agreement is not proof of competence. Pushback is not proof of competence either.

What matters is the reason. If you do not understand enough about the work to follow that reasoning, a technical disagreement can become a power struggle. You can reward the person who says yes fastest, fight with the person trying to protect the product or let somebody hide unnecessary complexity behind technical language because you have no basis for deciding which one is happening.

You will mistake visible success for verified software.

Your engineer has been looking at a bug for hours. You paste the problem into an AI tool. It changes the code. You refresh the page and the bug disappears.

It is very tempting to conclude that the engineer is useless and AI just solved in thirty seconds what they could not solve all afternoon.

Maybe it did. The engineer may genuinely have missed an obvious solution.

But you still need to know what happened. Did the AI fix the underlying problem or only the visible symptom? What else did it change? Did the fix affect another part of the product? What was tested afterwards? Was there a reason the engineer rejected that exact approach earlier?

The same problem exists when software appears to work without AI being involved. The login screen can work while the permissions behind it are wrong. A payment can go through while another payment case fails. A feature can work perfectly along the exact path you tested and break somewhere else. A developer can hardcode something that looks fine in a demo and fails as soon as real users behave differently.

If your only test is “the thing works now”, you do not have enough information to judge the engineer, the AI or the software.

Software can look finished before the engineering is finished. Clicking through the interface is not a complete technical review, and you do not need to inspect every line of code yourself to understand that. Somebody still needs to know what should be checked, what evidence matters and what could have been affected elsewhere.

AI can generate code very quickly. It does not automatically give you the knowledge required to judge everything that code changed. If you are paying somebody to build a product you cannot personally inspect, you need more than “it worked when I clicked it”.

You will underprice software whose complexity you cannot see.

You describe the product in plain English and it sounds straightforward. “Users create accounts, upload something, invite their team and pay through Stripe.” You call it basic. The engineer quotes more than you expected. You negotiate hard because the product does not sound complicated enough to justify the price.

But each part of that description carries requirements that are easy to miss when you only see the interface.

Team invitations need permissions. Permissions need rules about who can see and change what. Payments need successful payments, failed payments, refunds and account states. Uploaded information needs somewhere to live, rules around who can access it and behaviour when something goes wrong.

The interface may still look simple. The system behind it may not be.

Now the engineer is trying to deliver a flawless product on a compromised budget for a scope you insisted was simple in theory. Deadlines slip. Corners get cut. The relationship deteriorates. Eventually you may pay another engineer to repair decisions that were made when everybody was pretending the project was smaller than it was.

You do not need to know how to implement every one of those systems. You do need enough understanding to recognise that the number of screens is not a reliable measure of how much engineering sits behind them.

You will micromanage the parts of engineering you can see.

When you cannot evaluate the technical work, it is easy to start managing the visible output instead.

You ask why the button is not finished. Why the screen took three days. Why the engineer is talking about permissions when you asked for invitations. Why they are changing something in the database when you asked for a new field. Why they are testing something again when the feature already worked on your laptop.

Visible output becomes the easiest thing to measure because it is the part you can see.

That can turn into micromanagement without you even realising it. One developer may produce a lot of screens quickly and leave a bad system underneath them. Another may spend two days fixing something you barely notice because it prevents a much larger problem later.

If you only understand the screen, the first developer can look more productive.

Understanding more about how software is built does not mean telling engineers how to do their jobs. It means having more ways to judge progress than how quickly something changed on the screen.

You will keep changing the scope and then wonder why nothing gets finished.

A customer tells you on Tuesday that they would love team invitations. On Wednesday, you message the developer and ask them to add it.

To you, it is one feature.

To the engineer, it may mean new records, permissions, invitation rules, emails, expiry behaviour, screens, tests and changes to work that is already underway.

Then another customer asks for something.

Then you have another idea.

Then something that was meant to take two weeks has been open for six. You start wondering why the engineer cannot finish anything.

But the engineer has been trying to finish a product whose definition changes every few days.

A customer asking for a feature does not automatically mean that feature should become your developer's task the next morning. One of the most useful technical decisions in an early company is often: yes, that matters, but not yet. Finish this first.

These are not separate founder problems.They come from the same gap

The arguments with engineers, the constantly changing scope, the bad budgeting, the micromanagement, the inability to tell whether AI produced a good fix and the difficulty judging whether technical pushback is legitimate all have something in common.

You are being asked to make decisions about a software product without enough understanding of how software gets built.

The answer is not for every founder to become an engineer.

The answer is also not to learn enough technical vocabulary to start telling experienced engineers how to architect systems.

You need enough first-hand understanding to recognise what kind of decision you are looking at, follow the explanation being given to you and know when deeper technical judgment is required.

That is why Zorentia starts with Build Studio.

So how do you learn thiswithout becoming an engineer?

Build your first version in Zorentia Build Studio.

Zorentia Build Studio is a software building platform. You use it to take your actual idea through the process of becoming working software.

This is not a tutorial project. It is not a programming course where you spend months learning syntax before touching your business. You work on the product you already want to build, while Zorentia guides you through the decisions behind it and generates the software from the system you define.

The goal is not to make you capable of replacing an experienced engineer. The goal is to make the building process less abstract before you begin paying other people to continue it.

Start with the problem before you start with the software.

You begin by making the idea clear. Who is the product for? What problem are they dealing with? What are you proposing? Why might it be useful? How might the business work?

Zorentia turns that thinking into a product brief and an editable pitch deck, so you have something concrete to put in front of other people before committing to the whole build.

You can then publish a landing page and collect feedback from potential users. You can also bring in feedback gathered elsewhere.

When you propose a feature, Zorentia checks it against that evidence. You begin separating what people actually need from what simply sounds interesting to build.

This matters because one of the earliest ways founders lose control of scope is by treating every good idea as something the product needs immediately.

Decide what belongs in the first version before you start building everything.

Once you have evidence, you decide what belongs in the first release.

Zorentia helps you create a focused feature list, understand how those features depend on one another and establish an order to build them in.

This is where a founder starts seeing why “just add this feature” can be more complicated than it sounds.

Some work needs to happen before other work can begin. One feature may depend on information created by another. A change that looks isolated on a screen can affect several parts of the system.

You are still not implementing those technical details by hand. You are seeing how the product decisions connect before code is generated from them.

See how a feature becomes an actual system.

For each feature, you work through what information the product needs to store, what work needs to happen behind the scenes and what the user needs to see and interact with.

That means the database, backend and frontend stop being abstract technical words.

You see them in the context of your own product.

If your product needs household accounts, for example, you can see that the system needs more than an “invite” button. It also needs information about households, members, invitations, ownership and access. The backend has to enforce those rules. The frontend has to present them to the user.

You do not need to become the person implementing those layers.

But when an engineer later tells you that a feature affects the data model or permissions, you have something real to connect that explanation to.

Generate working software from the decisions you approved.

Once the system is defined, Zorentia generates the database, backend and frontend from that approved design.

It starts the generated application, runs technical tests and checks the screens and routes before creating the verified application package.

You still review the result, configure it and run it yourself.

This gives you an important distinction early: a product can pass a technical check and still need customer testing, product judgment and further work. “The application runs” and “the business is ready to depend on this” are not the same statement.

That distinction becomes important later when you are reviewing work produced by engineers or AI.

Put the product in front of people who did not build it.

Once you have a working first version, you test it with real people.

Zorentia helps you prepare tasks, record what happens, capture blockers and identify where people struggle.

This is where another founder assumption gets challenged.

You already know how the product is supposed to work. Your users do not.

A screen making sense to you is not evidence that it makes sense to them. A feature working technically is not evidence that it solves the problem well.

The product now has to survive contact with somebody who was not in your head while you were building it.

Work through what it takes to get software out of the development environment.

Build Studio also guides you through local setup, GitHub, hosting, domains and HTTPS.

You work through the steps involved in running the software outside Zorentia and making it accessible.

You do not have to memorise every deployment command for the rest of your career. But hosting, repositories, domains and environments stop being mysterious objects that only a developer can talk about.

You have seen where the product lives and some of the infrastructure it depends on.

That becomes important later when you need to make sure your company, rather than one individual developer, controls the technology the business depends on.

By the end of Build Studio, you have built something and learned why its pieces exist.

The problem informed the evidence. The evidence informed the features. The features informed the system. The system informed the generated code. Technical checks told you something about whether it worked. Real users told you something about whether it made sense.

You have not become an engineer.

You have something more useful for the role you are actually going to play: first-hand experience of how your own product moved from an idea into software.

So when somebody later says, “this feature changes the permissions model”, “we need to finish this before starting that”, “this needs to be tested somewhere else” or “we should not rebuild this part”, those ideas are no longer being introduced to you for the first time while money, deadlines and hiring decisions are already on the line.

That is why every founder who works with us in Office first goes through Build Studio.

Start in Build Studio

Build Studio pricing

When your first version exists, the next job is getting it ready to launch.

By the end of Build Studio, you have more than an idea. You have worked through what the product needs to do, built the first version, seen how the system fits together, tested it and gained first-hand experience of how software moves from a product decision into something that works.

You can keep developing the product yourself through Build Studio. Feature Builder helps you define additions to an existing product, including what needs to change, how the feature connects to the current system and what the person implementing it needs to inspect before beginning.

Or, when you want engineers involved and need professional technical oversight as you prepare the product for an MVP launch, you can enrol in Zorentia Office. This is where the relationship changes. Build Studio helped you build and understand the first version. Office helps you lead the technical work required to take that version toward launch with engineers involved.

Zorentia Office is your

pre-launch CTO

01You

Lead the business

02Zorentia

Leads the technical work

03Your engineers

Implement the software

You lead the business. Your engineers implement the software. Zorentia leads the technical work between the two.

We begin with the product you already built. We review the existing codebase and system before deciding what happens next. Some parts may already be suitable. Some may need correcting. Some may need extending. Some may need restructuring. We do not assume the first version should be rebuilt simply because another engineer is now involved. We also do not assume something should stay simply because it happens to work today. We decide based on what the product needs in order to reach launch.

Your customer, product vision, commercial priorities, budget and what you are learning from the market remain your responsibility. We work out what those things mean for the technology. Then your engineers build against that direction.

You do not need a technical background to start. You do need to be willing to understand the product you are building.

You can arrive with a problem and an early idea. You do not need to know how to write the software. You do need to be willing to go through Build Studio instead of treating the technology as something you never intend to understand.

If you later continue into Office, you are still pre-launch. You have a Build Studio product to build on and want engineers involved in developing it toward an MVP launch. The product may be a SaaS application, web application, mobile app, AI product, marketplace, customer portal or another software-enabled business.

The exact product can change. The relationship does not. You lead the business. Zorentia provides the technical oversight. Your engineers implement the work.

If what you want is somebody to take the technology away so you never have to think about it, this is not that service. If what you want is to get the development done while becoming better able to lead the company that depends on it, that is what Zorentia is built around.

Technical Office Hours are led by experienced software builders. They are currently led by Mercy Nekesa, a computer scientist, founder and production software builder. See who leads Office today.

The goal is not more development. The goal is a product that is ready to launch.

A founder can spend months paying engineers and still not be meaningfully closer to launch. Features keep getting added. Old work keeps getting reopened. Engineers change. New technical opinions create new rebuilds. Everything is always “almost ready”.

Office gives the technical work a direction and a finish line.

We decide what needs to happen before launch, break that work into milestones, stop unnecessary work from entering the current scope and review what your engineers deliver before the company moves on. The question throughout Office is simple: what does this product need next to become something a real customer can rely on? That is the work Zorentia Office is there to lead.

Already completed Build Studio and preparing your product for launch with engineers?

Book an Office Hour · A$300 per session

03 What Office leads

Your engineers build. Office keeps the whole pre-launch effort moving in one direction.

Hire engineers for the work your product actually needs.

A convincing conversation is not enough to tell you whether someone is right for your build. Before hiring, we help you understand what kind of engineering support the product actually needs and what that person should be responsible for delivering. Sometimes that is a freelancer. Sometimes it is an agency, junior developer, experienced engineer, intern, internal hire or technical collaborator. The answer should come from the work, not from the assumption that more expensive means better, cheaper means smarter or the person who sounds most technical must be the right choice.

If you already have a developer doing good work, keep them. You do not need to replace a good engineer simply to work with Zorentia. Your existing developer or team can continue implementing. Office provides technical direction around that work and reviews the result. The purpose is not to make hiring magically risk-free. It is to stop you evaluating people only by whether they sound confident, move quickly or agree with everything you ask for.

A customer asking for a feature on Tuesday should not automatically become your developer's task on Wednesday.

Your business should keep learning while the software is being built. That does not mean the engineering plan should change every time you learn something.

Part of Office is deciding what should be built. Another part is deciding what should not happen yet. A customer request may be important and still belong in milestone three. A new integration may be useful and still belong after launch. A rebuild may sound cleaner and still be unnecessary. Another engineer may sound helpful and still be the wrong use of the budget. Once your engineers begin an agreed milestone, we keep that work focused until it is complete unless new information genuinely changes what the business requires.

This is not about being inflexible. It is about distinguishing between new information and a new instruction. If the evidence genuinely changes the product, the plan changes. If it does not, the idea gets recorded and placed where it belongs. That discipline protects you from constant rewrites, unfinished work and repeatedly paying engineers to reshape something that never had a stable definition in the first place.

Two weeks of work should end with a review, not another promise that it is nearly finished.

While the product is actively being developed, we recommend one Office Hour every two weeks. The purpose is not to have another meeting because two weeks passed. The purpose is to create a regular point where the agreed work is compared with what actually exists.

We return to the current milestone and ask whether the implementation does what was required, whether the completion checks pass, whether something is missing, whether the change affected another part of the product and whether anything is still blocking progress. You take part in that review. You hear what works, what does not and why the next decision is being made.

We do not move to another milestone just because the calendar says it is time. If the current work is incomplete, we define what needs to be corrected. If the requirement changed because the business genuinely changed, we deliberately update the plan. Then we issue the next Implementation Directive. Sometimes that directive begins the next milestone. Sometimes it tells the engineer how to finish the one they were already supposed to complete. The build moves forward because work is finished, not because everybody is tired of looking at it.

Review. Decide. Build. Advance.

If your developer leaves tomorrow, you should still be able to access your own company.

Engineers need access to the systems they work on. That should not make one engineer the only person who can access the business's code, domain, cloud infrastructure or deployment accounts. Office checks who controls the repositories, domain, cloud infrastructure, deployment accounts, app-store accounts, billing and credentials the company depends on.

When an account does not exist yet, you create it under your company's control and give the people doing the work the access they need. If something already sits inside somebody else's account, we help you work through bringing it under company control.

You should know where the technology lives, who has access and what needs to happen when a working relationship ends. Trusting somebody to build your product should not mean needing their permission to keep operating it.

04 How Office operates

Every technical decision leaves the room as work your engineer can execute.

CaptureDecideDirectBuildReviewAdvance

Do not make your engineer guess what the meeting meant.

A useful technical conversation can still produce bad software if everyone leaves with a different understanding of what was agreed. Every Office Hour produces an Implementation Directive, written instructions for the person implementing the work.

The directive records where the product is now, what problem is being addressed and what the next milestone is. It defines what is included, what is deliberately excluded, the order of the work and anything that needs to exist before another piece can begin. Where relevant, it also records technical constraints, account-ownership requirements and the checks that determine whether the work is complete.

You can download the directive and give it directly to your engineer. That means you are not leaving the session and trying to translate a technical conversation from memory. Your developer does not have to guess what “we talked about on the call” means. They have the actual work. You also have something concrete to compare against when they say the milestone is finished. The directive connects the technical decision to the implementation and gives the next review something specific to audit.

Common Table / Office sessionsZorentia Office

Workspace / Sessions

Office sessions

Published

Latest directive

Shared data before features

Reference: OH-0003
Date: 22 July 2026
Release: First usable release

Recommended next step

Approve the shared household data and access contract before building the meal-planning flow.

Included scope

Household, member and invitation records
Owner and member permissions
Invitation lifecycle and expiry rules
Cross-household access protections

Implementation order

01
Write the household ownership and permission matrix.
02
Model invitation acceptance and membership removal.
03
Prove isolation with two-household access fixtures.

Current state & diagnosis

Current state

The prototype stores meal plans and grocery items against one local user, while the validated product promise now depends on several people sharing one household record.

Diagnosis

Building the meal-planning screens on the single-user model would bury the core collaboration rules inside feature code. Household ownership and access must become the implementation contract first.

Deliberate exclusions

Recipe discovery marketplace · Nutrition and calorie tracking · Pantry prediction and stock levels

Your business keeps changing between Office Hours. The build does not need to become chaotic because of it.

You speak to a customer the day after a session and learn something important. You notice a problem. You remember a requirement that did not come up in the meeting. You receive a document that changes how you think about part of the product. Those things need somewhere to go.

You should not have to keep everything in your head until the next Office Hour. You also should not have to message your engineer immediately and turn every new discovery into another change to the current milestone. Office keeps those two things separate.

Tell Office before the detail disappears.

Use Tell Office to record what you learned while the context is still fresh. Explain what happened, what you think needs changing and why. Attach the relevant files and supporting information.

This means you are not relying on remembering the conversation two weeks later. It also means your developer does not receive a stream of half-formed instructions every time the business learns something new.

Recording something is not the same as deciding to build it.

Tell Office preserves the information first. We decide what it means for the build afterwards.

Common Table / Tell OfficeZorentia Office

Workspace / Update

Tell Office

Saved

Type Voice File

Customer interview synthesis

Ready to send

The interviews changed the priority. Housemates need to agree on dinners and shop from one live grocery list. The first release should support one household, link invitations, seven planned dinners and shared item check-off.

common-table-interview-synthesis-v3.pdf286 KB · Attached today, 2:12 pm

Office updated the record

Project Memory v3

Core promise, household roles and first-release boundaries rewritten from the interview evidence.

Revised: 5 sections revised
Written: Today, 2:18 PM

Project Memory stops the history of your product living inside your head.

Products change. A decision that makes perfect sense today may be difficult to explain six months from now if nobody kept the reason behind it.

A new engineer may understand what the system does today without knowing which customer conversations shaped it. An adviser may ask why something was prioritised. You may remember that a feature changed but not exactly what evidence led to the decision. Project Memory keeps that history together.

It holds the product background, source material, important updates, previous decisions and session history so the reasoning does not disappear every time the conversation changes. A change is not preserved only as “we want this feature”. The context behind why that feature became important stays with it.

That matters when a new person joins the project. You should not have to reconstruct your entire product from old messages, scattered files and whatever you happen to remember. It also means the next Office Hour starts with the history already available. The conversation can continue from where the product actually is.

Common Table / Project memoryZorentia Office

Workspace / Memory

Project memory

Version 3

Common Table

Common Table helps busy shared households agree on dinner and turn a week of meals into one grocery list everyone can use.

Updated today, 2:18 PM · Updated from common-table-interview-synthesis-v3.pdf

Product Promise

Common Table replaces the group-chat scramble around dinner with one calm weekly plan. A household chooses its meals together, and the product turns those choices into a grocery list without duplicate ingredients.

The first product promise is coordination: everyone sees the same plan, knows what still needs buying, and can update the list while someone is already at the shops.

Build Plan gives the idea a place before it becomes another engineering task.

Once a discovery is recorded, we decide what it changes. Does it affect the work happening now? Does another piece need to be finished first? Should it become the next milestone? Does it belong after launch? The Build Plan records where the work belongs, what each stage is meant to achieve and what needs to be true before that stage counts as complete.

This is how “not now” stops meaning “we forgot about it”. The answer can be: “Yes, we need this. Put it in milestone three. Finish the current work first.”

If new evidence genuinely changes what the product needs, the plan can change deliberately. But a request does not become urgent engineering work simply because it was the most recent thing somebody said.

Tell Office captures the discovery. Project Memory keeps the context behind it. Build Plan decides where that information belongs in the work. You can keep learning without asking your engineers to restart every time you do.

Common Table / Build planZorentia Office

Workspace / Plan

Build plan

32% complete

First usable release

Stage 01 of 4 · 32% complete

01
In progress
Shared Household Foundation
Objective
Define the household, membership and invitation rules before meal planning or grocery-list implementation begins.
Implementation
1. 01
  Define household, member and invitation records with explicit ownership.
2. 02
  Document what owners and members can view, create, edit and remove.
3. 03
  Specify invitation expiry, acceptance and existing-account behaviour.
Complete when
- Members cannot read or change another household’s records.
- An accepted invitation creates exactly one membership.
Meal Plan & Recipe Capture
Planned
Consolidated Grocery List
Planned

Ready for technical direction

Bring the product you built. Leave with the next technical decision and the work required to execute it.

For non-technical founders who have completed Build Studio and are preparing to launch with engineers.

Book an Office Hour · A$300 per session

05 What remains with you

Technical leadership without giving away control of your company.

If only Zorentia understands the technical decision, we have recreated the same problem.

Office exists to provide deeper technical judgment where you need it. That does not mean you should leave every Office Hour with another technical instruction you do not understand. We explain why a decision makes sense for your product. Why does one piece of work need to happen first? Why is a feature being pushed outside the current milestone? Why is an engineer's shortcut acceptable here? Why are we rejecting another one? Why does this change affect another part of the system? What needs to be checked before you accept the work?

You are not expected to write the code or challenge every recommendation. You are expected to become increasingly capable of following the decisions affecting your own company.

Build Studio gave you your first experience of the process. Office continues that understanding while experienced engineers are doing the implementation. Over time, you should get better at knowing when a concern matters, what a useful technical explanation sounds like, what unnecessary work looks like and when an engineer's judgment deserves your trust.

You remain a non-technical founder. The goal is not to keep you dependent on explanations you cannot follow.

06 Who leads Office

Technical Office Hours are led by experts who have already carried the responsibility your product now needs.

You are not paying for general advice. During an Office Hour, an experienced software builder acts as your pre-launch CTO: inspecting the product, making the technical decisions required to move it toward launch and giving your engineers clear direction for the work.

That expertise does not push you out of the decision. You gain the judgment of someone who can see what is happening across the system, while learning why the decision matters and what your team should be able to show when the work is complete.

Judgment shaped by real production responsibility

The person guiding your launch has already carried software beyond a demo and into the hands of real users. They understand what changes when a company depends on the system continuing to work after the code leaves the development environment.

A view of the whole product, not only the screen

Your technical direction accounts for the existing codebase, data, backend behaviour, frontend implementation, infrastructure, security, ownership and the dependencies between them. A decision is not treated as isolated simply because the visible change looks small.

Direction your engineers can build against

Your customer evidence, commercial priorities, scope and budget become technical decisions, milestones and written implementation instructions. Your engineer knows what to build, and the next review has something concrete to evaluate.

Technical reasoning you can understand and use

You do not leave with a recommendation hidden behind technical language. You understand why the decision makes sense, what trade-off was made and what evidence should exist before you accept the work, making you better able to lead the company that depends on it.

Current Office lead

Mercy Nekesa

Mercy Nekesa Computer scientist Founder, Zorentia

Technical Office Hours are currently led by Mercy Nekesa, a computer scientist, founder and software builder.

Her experience spans building companies from zero, shipping and operating production software, making technical decisions with founders, teaching software teams, and formal computer science training across Australia and the United States.

Founded, built and grew a technology company to 7,000+ active users

More than 7,000 active users ran on infrastructure she designed, deployed and operated.

That included AWS infrastructure, data architecture, mobile payments and the day-to-day operation of a live production system.

She has not only built software. She has been responsible for keeping it working while a real company depended on it.

Built two technology companies from zero

Raining Vegetables in Uganda. Zorentia in Sydney. Both built from a blank page into real software products.

Mercy wrote and shipped the software behind both companies herself. When she is making decisions about your build, she has already carried that responsibility from idea through production.

Macquarie University

Expert in Residence at Macquarie University. Macquarie University Incubator is also an institutional customer of Zorentia.

Mercy works with founders through the university’s incubator. Zorentia is used across its START and EDUCATE programs.

UNSW New Wave winner. Westpac innovation grant recipient.

Winner of UNSW New Wave 2025 and recipient of a Westpac innovation grant.

Awarded in Africa and Europe

Best Female Entrepreneur, DFCU Bank, Uganda.
Best Agri-Business, Generation Food Award, Rikolto, Belgium.

Her work also included delivery with organisations including the Rabo Foundation and NARO, turning external requirements into software that had to work in the real world.

Taught 200+ students. Supervised 50+ teams to an MVP.

More than 200 university students taught and more than 50 teams supervised through building and shipping an MVP.

That experience matters inside Zorentia Office for a simple reason: making the right technical decision is only half the job.

You also need to be able to explain it clearly enough for a founder to understand it and for the person building the product to act on it.

Master of Science in Computer Science

University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia.

Postgraduate computer science followed years of building and operating software.

Bachelor of Science in Computer Science

The State University of New York at Buffalo, USA.

Four years of computer science in the USA, alongside engineering experience with startups across Boston and Baltimore, secure financial systems at ETS in Washington D.C., and NSF-funded research in New York.

What founders say about working with Zorentia

“Having a technical co-pilot. A person able to translate outcomes into code. It's refreshing to hand over work and to have someone who will carry some of the burden. As a non technical solo founder it's an emotional assistance in some way.”
Nicholas WongFormer Vice President of International ProductActivision Blizzard

“Zorentia's ability to grasp the concept so quickly, in order to turn idea into MVP. A rare talent for anyone to be able to quickly apply their own technical expertise to another person's expertise/big idea.”
Kirsten HaywoodFormer Head of Corporate AffairsWestpac Group

“I found the MVP scope document… really helpful. It clearly outlined the MVP deliverables and the development process.”
Pranav ChandraStudentUniversity of Sydney

“Incredible value. I've learned things about a more technical side of life, and very much appreciated the timings, and support.”
Cally SheehanChief Dog OfficerDog Days Concierge

07 The end state

The goal was never to make youthe engineer.

The goal is to get the product into the market without requiring you to become a passenger inside the company that depends on it.

Build

You begin in Build Studio with an idea. You work through the problem, the evidence, the first release, the system behind it, the generated software, testing and getting the product online. At that point, you have something real and some first-hand understanding of how it came together. You can continue building it yourself, or you can bring engineers into the product and enrol in Office for professional technical oversight as you prepare for launch.

Lead

If you continue into Office, your engineers have agreed work to deliver. There is a written record of what they were asked to build. New customer discoveries have somewhere to go without automatically becoming interruptions. The product has a history. The build has a plan. Milestones are reviewed before the company moves on. The technology remains under company control. And the technical decisions are explained rather than simply handed down to you.

Launch

A real customer can access the product and use what it was built to do. The software exists outside the development environment. The company has moved from preparing a product to having one in the market. You reach that point with more than software. You have a codebase, customer evidence, testing information, a history of the decisions behind the product, technical accounts under company control and more experience working with engineers than you had when you began.

The finish line is

launch

From there, you can grow the engineering team, hire permanent technical leadership, continue developing the product or discuss the next stage with Zorentia.

Office is not designed to keep you in an indefinite pre-launch relationship. It has a job to complete.

That is the zero-to-one job: take the idea through the first build, bring in the right technical support when you need it and get a real product into the hands of customers without giving up your understanding of the company you are building.

Your first move

Start by building your first version.