Mr. Jackdaw Company

Mr. Jackdaw Company began in 2008 as one person and a design desk, doing print work for small business owners: menus, signage, the things a local shop needs to look like itself. The job was always to sit across the table from someone and understand what their business actually had to do.

Print gave way to web development, still for small businesses, and later to building software inside startups: small teams, a problem that keeps moving, and the discipline of shipping. The tools changed each time. The work underneath never did. Find where someone's day snags, and build the thing that clears it.

That is the throughline: the people always matter more than the tools. The friction someone lives with every day turns invisible to them, and the work is to notice it. What a person needs is rarely what a feature list would have guessed, so the software gets shaped to the work, not the work to the software. Figure out what you really need, then build it.

The company designs, builds and runs its own products: Choose My Plane, a website for comparing aircraft, and two iPhone and iPad apps, HopStop and Pounce. Each one is described, with where to get it and where to ask for help, on the products page.

Beyond its own products, the company takes on outside engineering work: building an app or web product, or modernizing one that already exists. The engagements are described on the consulting page.

Raphael Okure builds and runs Mr. Jackdaw Company. He does the work himself: the design, the architecture, the code, and the operations that keep it running after launch.