Skip to content
BongoBravo

Manifesto

We are small
on purpose.

BongoBravo is a workshop, not a startup. We make software the way a good carpenter makes a table: one at a time, finished properly, sold at an honest price to someone who will use it every day.

Nobody asked us to write this down. We did it so you can hold us to it — and so we remember on the weeks it gets tempting to do otherwise.

A company is just a few people making things for other people. Everything else — the funding, the charts, the growth at any cost — is a choice somebody made.

WE CHOSE DIFFERENTLY.

What we believe

  1. Craft is the whole product

    Fewer features, finished properly. A screen that a carpenter cannot use with cold hands at seven in the morning is not finished, however clever the code behind it is.

  2. Rest is part of the work

    Forty hours is plenty. No crunch, no heroics, no badge for answering mail at midnight. Tired people ship bugs and make bad calls; rested people do the best work of their lives.

  3. Respect is measurable

    It is not a value on a wall. It is one price with nothing hidden under it, your data exported in one click, and no retention call when you leave.

  4. Small tools, shipped often

    One product solves one job for one kind of business. When it is done we start another instead of bolting the next idea onto it until nobody can find anything.

  5. Salt water fixes most things

    The best decisions we have made came after stepping away from the screen. We plan for that on purpose: ship it Friday, go swim, come back with a clear head on Monday.

  6. We work in the open

    Prices, decisions, mistakes, the products that failed. If we only publish the wins, the journal is marketing, and we already have enough of that in the world.

Things we will not do

Short list. It does not change with the market.

  • Sell your data, or let anyone advertise to you inside our software.
  • Hide the price, or invent a tier you only find out about at renewal.
  • Make leaving hard. No hostage data, no cancellation maze.
  • Take money that comes with someone else's growth targets attached.
  • Hire people to work hours we would not want our own families to work.
  • Ship a feature we would be embarrassed to demo to the person paying for it.

How a week actually goes

Values are easy to write. This is the part that makes them true.

Mornings

Quiet by default

No meetings before noon. Long stretches of uninterrupted work are the only way anything good gets built.

Fridays

Something ships

Small and real beats big and someday. Then we write down what it cost and what we learned.

After that

We close the laptop

The work will still be there. Families, water and sleep will not wait as patiently as a backlog does.

Who is behind this

3 people · Sunny Morocco · Snowy Sweden

Ismail Mechbal

Chief daydreamer

Dreamer, surfer, parent. Dreams the tools up on the water and builds them before the kids wake up.

Mohamed El Hachimi

Head of hard things

Hardcore about the work. Surfing when there are waves, fishing when there are not.

Wael El Hachimi

Resident nerd

Surfer and nerd. If he is not in the water in Taghazout, try the water in Lombok.

Maybe you

WHEN THE WORK NEEDS IT

We hire slowly, and only when a person will make the work better rather than just bigger.

If any of this sounds like you, come and say hello.

Customers, hires, people with a boring problem worth solving. Same address for all three.

[hello@bongobravo.com]
BongoBravoKeep the beat. Do it properly.