Recapped — sole engineer on the alpha, six years on the team

Recapped is a B2B SaaS platform for enterprise sales teams — mutual action plans, digital sales rooms and customer onboarding, the shared workspace where a buyer and a seller run a deal together.

I joined in July 2019, when the company was four people, and stayed until June 2025.

I was the only developer for the first 18 months. Frontend, backend, database, infrastructure, deploys — there was nobody else to hand any of it to. What I built in that period is the alpha the company took to investors; it helped raise a $6M seed round and the team grew from 4 people to 30 around it. The round is a matter of public record — CRV, Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator and Zoom Ventures are all listed as investors.

Then I stayed and made it maintainable. Growing from one engineer to a team changes the job: what used to be "I know why that works" has to become code that a new hire can read, tests that fail loudly, and boundaries that hold when four people are in the same file. Elixir and Phoenix on the backend, React and TypeScript on the front, PostgreSQL underneath.

Two reasons a client might care.

Six years with one company, remote, across nine time zones, in English. Anyone can be good for a sprint. Staying useful to the same team for six years is a different claim, and it is the one that is hardest to fake.

I have been the person who is alone with a product. That is the situation most founders hiring a freelance engineer are actually in: there is no team to escalate to, the thing has to work, and every decision compounds. I have done that on someone else's company and then again on my own.