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Clownmind
The studio

A small studio that takes the work other people have already given up on

Clownmind has been building commerce and product software since 2016. Forty-one people across three studios, senior-only delivery, and a strong preference for telling clients the inconvenient version.

  • Founded 2016
  • 41 people
  • 3 studios
  • Employee owned
Start a conversationWhat we do

Some of the teams we have worked with

Why we exist

Most agency failures are honesty failures, not skill failures

We started Clownmind after watching the same project fail twice at two different agencies. Neither team lacked talent. Both had sold a scope nobody believed in, and both discovered the real problem in month four with no budget left to solve it.

So we built the studio around the opposite instinct. We charge for the assessment, we write the plan down, and we say when something should not be built. Roughly one client in five takes the framing document and does the work in-house. That is a good outcome, and it is the reason the other four trust the recommendation.

We stay deliberately small. There is a ceiling on how many projects run at once, because the thing clients actually buy is the attention of senior people, and that does not scale by hiring quickly.

Building for the web
11yrs

Building for the web

Products shipped
430+

Products shipped

Countries served
17

Countries served

Client retention
96%

Client retention

How we operate

Six things we will not trade away

These are not values on a wall. Each one has cost us a project at least once.

We write the plan down

Every engagement produces a document a competitor could execute from. If our value depended on withholding information, it would not be worth much.

The people who pitch are the people who build

No second bench. The engineer in the framing week is the engineer writing the code in week nine, and they stay through launch.

We argue about scope early

Talking a client out of work is uncomfortable and occasionally expensive. It is also the fastest way to earn a second project.

Everything is handover-shaped

Your repository, your cloud accounts, your infrastructure. Documentation written as though we are leaving, because eventually we are.

Performance is a contract, not an aspiration

Budgets for page weight and interaction latency, enforced in CI. A pull request that breaks them fails, including ours.

You get told bad news early

Slippage surfaces in the week it happens, with options attached. Nobody has ever been happier to hear it a month later.

Studios

Three locations, one standard

Same pay bands, same review process, same right to say no to a piece of work. Every project runs with at least four hours of overlap with the client's day.

DelhiIndia

Head office, strategy & platform architecture

BengaluruIndia

Engineering & delivery hub

MumbaiIndia

Design & research

What working with us is like

  • A shared Slack channel, not a ticket queue.
  • A preview URL from day three of the build.
  • Two-week increments with something real at the end of each.
  • Written decisions, so nobody relies on remembering a call.
  • Direct access to the engineers, not through an account manager.
  • Bad news the week it happens, with options attached.
Start a conversation
How we work

Four steps, and you can stop after any of them

Every stage produces something you own outright. Nothing is held hostage to the next invoice.

  1. 01

    Framing week

    A paid week where we map the constraints, the existing systems and what success has to look like in numbers. You keep the output whether or not we continue.

  2. 02

    Architecture & plan

    A written technical plan with the trade-offs made explicit, a milestone schedule, and a fixed budget band for the first release.

  3. 03

    Build in the open

    Two-week increments, a preview URL from day three, and a Slack channel where your team can see the work rather than wait for a demo.

  4. 04

    Launch & operate

    Load testing, runbooks and monitoring before go-live, then a support window while your team takes the wheel — or a retainer if you would rather we kept it.

Testimonials

What clients say when we are not in the room

These are lightly edited excerpts from reference calls, published with permission.

“They rebuilt our checkout in nine weeks and then spent another two arguing us out of three features we did not need. Conversion went up either way. That mix of speed and pushback is rare.”
PRPriya RamanathanVP Digital · Halberd Outdoor
“The framing week was worth the whole fee on its own. We came in wanting a replatform and left with a plan to fix search instead, which turned out to be the actual problem.”
TFTomás FerreiraHead of Product · Meridiana Living
“We had two agencies before this. Clownmind is the first one whose handover documentation our own engineers could read on a Friday and deploy from on a Monday.”
DWDana WhitcombeCTO · Northlake Health
“Their SEO people write code. I did not realise how much time we had wasted on audits nobody could implement until findings started shipping in the same sprint.”
KAKenji AoyamaGrowth Director · Studio Ferrous
“Peak week went by without a single incident. They rehearsed the load twice in September and found a caching bug that would have cost us the whole of Black Friday.”
ANAyesha NkemdirimDirector of Ecommerce · Verdant Supply Co.
“They told us not to build the AI feature we asked for and explained why in writing. Six months later that was clearly the right call. I trust the next recommendation more because of it.”
MBMarcus BellFounder · Rowan & Fen

Come and argue with us about your architecture

Bring the version with the embarrassing parts. That is the one worth talking about.

Book the call
098916 18148WhatsApp