Slash Tech is one year old this month.
Jayben and I started it to make a meaningful difference to a problem we kept running into. We were tired of watching people do genuinely good work while being held back by technology that was never built for them — systems bolted on, handed over, and quietly left to rot the moment they stopped fitting the operation.
Most firms in this space sell you a product. We didn't want to do that. We wanted to bring the tools and the skills that fit your organisation and your needs — and use them to make you better at what you already do. Not to make you dependent on us. To leave you more capable than we found you.
That is the difference we set out to build the firm around, and a year in, it is still the thing that decides which work we take.
The thesis underneath it was straightforward enough to fit on one page. Operations across environmental, industrial and IoT work were quietly held together by a small number of people doing the right manual steps in the right order. The systems worked — until the people moved on, the volume grew, or the operation tried to scale. That gap had a name we kept hearing variations of, and we decided to call it operational decay.
So the firm came down to a single question. Is technology the answer for this operation, and if it is, what should it actually do?
A year on, what has held up is the question itself.
Most of the conversations we have now still start the same way they did at the beginning. Someone in operations describes a workflow that produces the right outputs because specific people do specific things at specific moments. They can see it will not survive growth, or a handover, or the loss of one person. They are not sure whether software is the right answer or whether they are about to spend money on something that will end up in the same place — working at delivery, and slowly becoming someone else's problem six months later.
That conversation does not need a polished pitch. It needs an honest read. The firms that treat scepticism as an obstacle lose those conversations early; the ones who treat it as a brief get to do the work.
What has changed is how we structure the work itself.
We started the year with one offer and a vague sense that we would shape engagements case-by-case. By month four it was clear that pattern was not honest. Different clients needed different things, and pretending one engagement model fit all of them produced quotes that felt right to nobody.
So we wrote down what we actually do. A Fit Call to decide whether there is anything here at all. A Discovery Sprint when there is, but the shape of the work is not yet defined. A build when the question is answered and the system needs to exist. And — quietly, the most important one — an ongoing relationship for the operations that need a system to keep working after we leave the room.
Making that visible on the site, instead of leaving it implied, has changed the calibre of conversation we get. Fewer people show up hoping for a quote on something they have not fully thought through. More people show up because they have read the engagement model and decided it matches how they think.
The other thing that has changed is what we are willing to say out loud.
A year ago, we would have been more careful. We have learned that the clients we want to work with do not want to be sold to — they want to be levelled with. So we started writing the things we actually believe. Why we will not quote your project until we understand it. Why your scepticism is a brief, not a problem. Why some operations should not be automated yet, and how we tell.
None of that is positioning. It is just what we say in the room, written down.
Year two is about depth, not breadth.
We are not chasing more sectors. We are going deeper into the ones we already understand — environmental and industrial operations where the systems have to be maintained by the team that runs them, not the firm that built them. That means more thinking about the operating layer that sits beside the technology — runbooks, ownership, the version of documentation that actually gets used.
It also means more written work. Field Notes is becoming the place where the thinking lives, not just an output. If you have read this far, you are part of the small audience that makes that worth doing.
To the clients who took a meeting with a firm that did not exist twelve months ago, and decided we were worth the risk — thank you. To the operators who let us into systems they had built and held quietly for years — that trust is the thing the firm is built on.
The goal has not moved since the first conversation Jayben and I had about starting this. Leave the people we work with more capable than we found them, with tools and skills that fit the way they actually work — and good work that is no longer held back by the technology meant to support it.
Year two starts now.
— Javier & Jayben
