Our History

How we started

Wednesday started on September 1st, 2020, founded by Ali and Mac.

Mac was working with one of the fastest-growing unicorns in Southeast Asia. Ali had been working remotely for some of the largest organizations in the world. Both were building critical systems that powered millions of simultaneous transactions, operations, and workloads.

Wednesday started with one idea. A small team with the right mindset, skill set, and direction can change the trajectory of a business. Our focus then was building digital products. We looked at our own experience and realized that the products we had worked on succeeded, and gave those businesses a competitive advantage, because of the kind of decisions we made while building them. So we set out to build small teams of craftsmen and women who would make the same small decisions we would. Those decisions are what let a business stay flexible and competitive as markets and other forces shift.

Building for startups

From 2020 to 2025, we worked with many leading startups, a number of which went on to become unicorns. If you carry a smartphone, there is a good chance the products we built are already on it.

The work was product engineering services. Funded startups came to us with a problem. Sometimes it was as simple as extra hands. Sometimes it ran deeper. We took on whatever it was:

• augmenting their team
• shaping product strategy
• building parallel products
• working out technical architecture
• solving scaling bottlenecks
• solving user acquisition, retention, and engagement problems

Why we pivoted

Wednesday was a craft-focused product engineering agency until 2025. Craft still matters, but with AI, companies need fewer people to build. The startups we worked with kept the work in house with their own engineers, and there was less of it for us. So we had to change what we did.

The more we used AI, the clearer one thing became. The output is only as good as the person directing it. If that person does not know what good looks like, the result is still poor, however fast it arrives. Six years of building products had taught us what good looks like.

So in 2026 we moved to the part of the work a product team cannot do from the inside. A software company's product team builds the core product. Making that product work for each customer is a different job: the integrations, the customizations, the data, and the adoption work that decides whether a deployment succeeds. That job is forward deployment.

What we do now

We are the forward deployed engineering team that software companies bring in. We sit with their customers until the product is live and in use. What we learn there goes back to their product team, so every deployment makes the product better. Our job is to make the team building the product more effective.

We still build products of our own: Off Grid AI, Chime, Traction and Right Suite. Building them keeps us close to what a product team needs from the field. To learn how we work, read our forward deployment handbook.