01 — Client size
No enterprise. No Fortune 500.
A 50-person barber franchise, yes. A corporation's innovation team, never. Our work is for owner-operated shops, 1–20 employees, one person making the call.
We're Tyler Moretti and Eric Fernandez. We own Mainline Studio outright and we build everything you see here ourselves. Our plan is to ship 3–5 niche SaaS products for small service businesses over the next few years, fund the work through custom-software services, and hold onto everything we build. That's the whole plan.
Booksy charges $29.99/mo to serve barbers. Vagaro charges $25+/mo. Square Appointments is $29/mo. GlossGenius is $24/mo. ServiceTitan is more than all of them combined. They all do the same thing: one generic product that tries to cover 50 trades at once, priced to fund that generalization.
For a 50-chair salon chain, that math works. For a 1-chair barber, a 2-bay mechanic, or a 1-dock warehouse, it's nonsense. A solo barber is paying for half-baked features that were designed for a nail tech or a dog groomer, at a price that assumes a 50-seat deployment.
We think the fix is obvious. Build one app per trade. Price it for the actual shop size. Don't try to be everyone's software. That's what Mainline Studio exists to do.
Lineup is the first app. $7.99/mo for barbers. Next one's for mechanics. The one after that is for warehouses. Services fund the builds while the apps compound.
Runs lead gen, client-facing communication, proposals, retainer conversations, and the public-facing side of the brand. If you book a discovery call, it's Tyler on the other end. Also runs the Mainline Studio Claude Max setup — brand work, landing pages, content, and the entire ops stack you're looking at right now got shipped through Claude Code.
Runs client site builds, app product engineering, and all the production code behind Lineup. Built the first Iconic Fades site end-to-end. Keeps shipping to production every day. If something breaks at 2am, Eric is the one who logs in. Owns the codebases — Lineup, the Mainline delivery templates, and every app that follows.
These aren't aspirational. They're how we actually decide, every week.
Every service and every product tier has a number on the site. If a buyer has to ask "how much," we failed — or the offer isn't ready to sell yet.
When we build an app, we own it. No flipping, no fundraising that dilutes us out of our own work, no acqui-hire exits. Long-term.
Typography spacing, page speed, micro-interactions, copy density, shipping on time — caring about the small things signals we care about the big things. Polished externals signal polished internals.
Tyler and Eric answer every DM, run every discovery call, sign every client. No sales team. No SDRs. If we scale past what two humans can cover, we hire carefully — we don't shortcut with a funnel.
We don't start a new app until the current one hits its internal targets. We don't chase new service tiers until existing ones are saturated.
We take custom software work when it makes an app better (or pays for the next one). We don't market services. Services are the "powered by" — not the headline.
Mainline Studio has strong opinions (no VC, no F500, public pricing, craft). Each app has its own product opinions (which verticals, which features, which price points) — the agency doesn't override them. We respect our own products' autonomy.
If any of these are dealbreakers for you, we're not the right studio.
A 50-person barber franchise, yes. A corporation's innovation team, never. Our work is for owner-operated shops, 1–20 employees, one person making the call.
Two founders own Mainline Studio outright. We don't want a board, a fundraising round, or an acquirer pressuring us to sell for someone else's return.
Every offer is fixed-price. If we quote $2,995, we ship for $2,995. If it takes us longer than we thought, that's on us — not on your invoice.
We use modern tools. We don't lead with them. You're buying working software, not a buzzword.
Both founders are based in Chicago. Our first client partner, Iconic Fades, is a Chicago barbershop. Our initial acquisition focus is Chicago metro + one adjacent metro for expansion. We'll work remote with clients anywhere, but in-person matters for trust-building with shop owners — most of our best work comes out of walk-ins to actual shops.
If you're in Chicago and run a barbershop (for now) or a trade we've shipped an app for (soon), we'd rather sit down in your shop than schedule a Zoom.