“They are the best team I've ever worked with regarding application development thus far.”
Ben Siegel
CEO, The CyberNest
Client
The CyberNest
Cybersecurity intelligence platform helping security teams find trusted information
Role
Tech Stack
The Problem
Ben Siegel had an idea for a cybersecurity intelligence platform. Not a feature request on someone else's product. Not a pivot. A ground-up vision for how security teams should discover, validate, and act on threat intelligence.
He had advisors. He had a plan. What he didn't have was a team that gave a damn.
Ben shopped around to agencies. The pitches were polished. The org charts were impressive. But the partnerships never materialized. What he kept finding was the same model: a sales team that disappears after the contract is signed, junior developers who need more oversight than they provide, and "dedicated" project managers who are dedicated to six other clients simultaneously.
He didn't want a vendor. He wanted engineers who would treat CyberNest like it was their own product — who would argue about architecture decisions at 9 PM because they actually cared whether the thing worked, not because they were billing for it.
We were more expensive. But we cared more. And in cybersecurity, where CISOs will scrutinize every pixel of your UI looking for reasons not to trust you, that difference isn't a nice-to-have. It's the whole point.
What We Did
There was no existing platform. No legacy codebase to inherit. No "redesign." This was a blank page.
We started with two engineers and a UX expert. Discovery, ideation, wireframes, designs, feature planning — the full arc from "here's the vision" to "here's how we build it." Start to finish.
That's not how most agencies work. Most agencies want the spec handed to them. They want Figma files and a JIRA board and a clear definition of "done" before they'll write a line of code. We sat in the ambiguity with Ben and helped him figure out what the product should be while we were building it.
Daily standups. Sprint planning. Retros. Shared Slack channels. The kind of integration where CyberNest's team would forget we weren't employees.
That's the point.
Deliverables
Core security intelligence platform with complex data visualization, real-time threat monitoring, and the admin workflows security teams live in daily.
Collaboration tools for security teams to coordinate responses, share intelligence, and manage organizational security posture.
Content platform positioning CyberNest as a thought leader. Custom CMS, content workflows, and audience engagement.
Progressive disclosure that takes complex security concepts and makes them accessible. Guided setup, contextual education.
Internal tools to manage customers, monitor platform health, and configure security parameters. The unglamorous stuff that makes the business run.
01
02
03Proof
CyberNest's onboarding originally depended on scrapers to pull expert profiles and work history automatically. Clean idea: scrape, enrich, present.
But the scrapers weren't reliable. Data would lag, come back incomplete, or just not show up. The onboarding experience — the thing that makes a first-time user say "this works" — was dependent on a data source we couldn't control.
A vendor would have kept patching the scraper. We killed the dependency entirely.
We redesigned the onboarding flow so users could manually enter their work history — and made that experience feel better than the automated version ever did. The frontend evolved from "display whatever the scraper returns" to a thoughtful, guided input flow built around what users actually needed to communicate about their expertise.
That's the difference between building features and building product. We didn't just solve a technical problem. We used it as an opportunity to make the UX genuinely better.
Proof
Beyond the platform itself, we've worked alongside Ben to think through what CyberNest becomes next — specifically, how to build an expert network and consultation flow that connects cybersecurity professionals with the organizations that need their expertise.
This isn't something that was in the original spec. It's what happens when your engineers have enough context to contribute to product strategy, not just ticket execution. We're not waiting for requirements to show up in a JIRA board. We're in the room helping shape what gets built and why.
That's the model. Not "tell us what to build." Think with us about what should exist.
By the Numbers
3+ Years
Ongoing Partnership
5 Products
Shipped
4,000+
Documents Indexed
What started as a project engagement became a retainer. What started as a retainer became a partnership. Three years of accumulated context means every sprint is more productive than the last — no ramp-up, no context switching, no "getting up to speed."
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