[01] / About

Passionate product people
helping companies own their software.

We're a team of developers, designers, and product thinkers who believe companies should run on software they control — not subscriptions they rent. Our work is helping mid-market businesses get off expensive SaaS platforms like Salesforce, NetSuite, HubSpot, WordPress, and Tableau, and onto custom software built for the way they actually operate.

We're not a body shop. We're product-minded engineers who care whether what we ship actually solves the problem. That means we pick the engagements we can do well, work as a small senior team with no offshore subcontracting, and stay on until the replacement is running in production — not just delivered in a handoff doc.

Delivery topology — your team, our team, your repo, with weekly demo and daily commits.

fig. B · delivery topology

[02]

§ Principles

How we operate.

[01]

Seniors on the keyboard

The people who scope your project are the people who build it. No bait-and-switch to juniors post-signature.
[02]

Ship or kill

Every sprint produces something running in production or it produces a decision to stop. No dashboards that nobody opens.
[03]

Boring tech where it fits

Postgres, React, Python, Node. We reach for exotic stacks only when the problem genuinely requires them.
[04]

Full transparency

Slack-shared boards, weekly demo, raw burn-down. You see what we see, including the bad days.
[05]

Say no early

We turn down projects we can't do well. It saves everyone time and money — and earns our honest yes.
[06]

6-hour response

Every message, every weekday. Not a chatbot. An actual engineer on your account.

[03]

§ Team

Small team. Deep bench.

Founder

Michael Shapiro

Founder & CEO · B.S. Computer Engineering, MSU

Michael Shapiro is the founder and CEO of Stack Renew. He started his career as a server-hardware engineer at Dell Computer, then transitioned into product management — an unusual path that taught him to ship products developers want to use and businesses can actually run on.

In 2007 Michael founded Stack Renew as a software development and consulting firm to bring that engineering-first product mindset to a broader set of clients. Over the 19 years since, he has served as virtual CTO for multiple companies — guiding architecture, hiring, and the messy decisions in between — and grown the firm into a senior team of developers, designers, and product owners.

Today his focus sits at the intersection of cutting-edge AI tooling and shipped software: getting LLMs, agents, and ML pipelines into production where they earn back their cost, not stop at demo day. The current focus of the firm — getting clients off expensive SaaS and onto custom software they own — is the natural product of an engineer-PM who believes companies should run on systems they control, not subscriptions they rent.

Personal career: 26 years (Dell server engineer → product manager → founder, 2007)

[lead]

Principal · Engineering

15+ years shipping

Production systems at Series-B through enterprise scale. AWS, Python, Postgres, Node. Ex-early-stage CTO.
[lead]

Principal · Design

12+ years shipping

Product design for SaaS, fintech, and healthcare. Figma to production with no handoff gaps.
[lead]

Senior · ML

10+ years shipping

Gradient boosting, transformers, MLOps pipelines. Published research, production scars earned.
[lead]

Senior · Mobile

10+ years shipping

Native iOS (Swift), Android (Kotlin), Flutter and React Native. 18 App Store launches.