What is a design partner?
A design partner isn’t just an early adopter—it’s a collaboration. We work directly with your engineering team to integrate RSpond into your Spring applications, learn from your real-world problems, and shape RSpond around your needs. In return, you get a solution that fits, direct access to our engineering team, and influence over the RSpond roadmap.
What we’re looking for
We’ve been deliberate about defining our ideal design partner profile. The right partner makes both teams stronger. The wrong one can burn runway for everyone involved.
Team Size: 2–16 Developers
Large enough to have real architectural challenges, small enough that we can work closely with the people making decisions. We avoid 200+ developer teams where decisions move slowly and noise drowns out signal.
Employee-Led Development
Teams where the majority of design and implementation decisions are made by employees who live with the consequences—not temporary contractors who hand off and leave. The architect should be someone who’ll be there for a while.
Organizational Agility
Your organization can actually make decisions and move. If getting a simple agreement signed takes four months of legal review, that’s a sign we’re not the right fit yet. We need partners who can commit and execute.
Preferred project types
We stack-rank projects in this order of preference:
Java 8, 11, 17 → 21+ upgrades, WebSphere → Spring migrations, or framework rewrites where requirements are well-understood. You know exactly how the whole thing should work—it just didn’t turn out right the first time.
A focused new project with clear requirements and roughly three-month scope. A small database application, an internal tool, a bounded service. Small enough to prove value quickly.
Big new projects risk bogging both teams down in business requirements discovery. We don’t say never, but we strongly prefer projects where the “what” is known and the “how” is the question.
What you’ll get
- Direct engineering access—work side-by-side with RSpond’s core team
- Roadmap influence—your problems shape what we build next
- Early access to every crosscut and capability before public release
- AI-assisted development—fine-tuned models trained on the RSpond codebase to accelerate your team
Our philosophy on partnerships
We’re transparent: we’re a startup, and we need to be somewhat mercenary about where we invest our time. If a better-fit partner emerges, we’ll be honest about reallocating resources. We expect the same honesty from you. The best partnerships are ones where both sides can say “this isn’t working” without it being a crisis.
Ready to talk?
Tell us about your team, your project, and the Spring pain you’re experiencing. We’ll set up a conversation within a week.
Email info@rspond.net →