Startup studio & technology partner — Aotearoa New Zealand
The startup studio that
builds with you.
Strategy, technology and operations — one embedded team, accountable from idea to traction.
Entry Life co-builds ventures with founders who need more than a vendor: senior strategic, technical and operational capability inside your company, with a single point of accountability. On select engagements we take equity, so our incentives sit on your side of the table.
30 minutes with a founding principal.
- Founder-led
- NZ-registered
- Select engagements structured with equity
We meet your venture exactly where it is.
See how we'd work at your stage →Our studio model flexes support intensity, team allocation and engagement structure to your stage — the highest-leverage intervention at every phase, never a one-size package.
Pre-Idea / Pre-Seed
Your focus: Concept validation, problem–solution fit, rapid MVP scoping
Our support: Founder coaching, market research, business model design
Seed
Your focus: Product buildout, first-hire strategy, early customer acquisition
Our support: CTO-as-a-service, pitch deck development, investor readiness
Series A & Growth
Your focus: Scaling tech infrastructure, hiring leadership, entering new markets
Our support: Board advisory, operating model design, growth architecture
Mature / Expansion
Your focus: Platform modernisation, M&A readiness, global expansion
Our support: Digital transformation, R&D lab, ecosystem partnerships
Not sure which stage is yours? That's a normal first-call question — bring it to the intro conversation.
Investor-readiness support means preparing you and your materials for raising; it is never a promise of funding.
What a startup studio is
Not an agency.
Not a consultancy.
A co-builder.
A startup studio is a hands-on company builder. Rather than advising from the outside or delivering a project and leaving, a studio embeds its own team inside a venture — working across strategy, technology and operations as a committed co-builder, often with shared incentives. Entry Life applies this model to partner ventures at every stage, from concept validation to global expansion.
If you've only ever hired agencies and consultants, the difference is simple: they're paid to deliver a scope. We're structured to deliver an outcome — and we stay inside the venture while it happens.
New to the studio model? Our engagement page explains it in plain terms — including how the equity option works and when it doesn't apply.
| Dimension | Agency | Consultancy | Startup studio |
|---|---|---|---|
| What you buy | A delivered scope | A recommendation | An outcome, built with you |
| When they leave | On handover | On report delivery | When the venture runs without us |
| Who carries the risk | You do | You do | Shared — on select engagements, in equity |
The problem you're actually solving
You don't need another vendor. You need a co-founder-grade team without giving up a co-founder's seat.
Building a venture usually means stitching together a strategy consultant who never builds, a development agency that ships and disappears, and a recruiter who's never run a product team. None of them talk to each other. None of them share your risk. Every handoff is a place where your idea loses fidelity — and your runway loses months.
Meanwhile you're the founder: making architecture decisions without a CTO, writing an investor narrative between sprint reviews, and hiring for roles you've never held. We've sat where you sit. That's why the studio exists.
- Founders
A co-builder from idea to traction
Senior strategy, build and operations inside your venture — without giving up a co-founder's seat.
See how we work at your stage → - Investors & funds
An operating partner you can deploy
Post-investment execution capability for portfolio companies. A studio, not a fund.
Talk to us about your portfolio → - Corporate innovation
Startup velocity, your governance
Your IP, your brand, your board — our build pace. Skunkworks to spin-out.
Discuss a venture build →
How the studio works
One team, inside your venture, accountable end to end.
Entry Life embeds as a co-builder, not a contractor. Our people join your stand-ups, work in your tools, and carry shared accountability for what ships and what happens after it ships. One partner covers the three things every venture needs — strategy, technology and operations — so nothing falls between vendors, and when something goes wrong there's one phone number. We answer it.
Support flexes to your stage, from validating a pre-seed concept to scaling infrastructure through Series A and beyond. And on select engagements, we take equity in place of full fees — we do better only if your venture does.
We build it with you, and we stay accountable for what happens next.
Equity is one of four ways to work with us — never a requirement.
What we cover
Strategy, technology and operations. One roof, one point of accountability.
The best outcomes happen when strategy, technology and operations move as one. Each pillar is a full capability in its own right — together, they're the reason nothing gets lost in a handoff.
- 01 — Strategic
Know what to build, and why it wins.
Market positioning, go-to-market planning, business model design, investor readiness and pitch deck development. You get a plan the technical team actually builds against — because it's the same team.
Strategy in depth → - 02 — Technical
Ship the product, not just the code.
MVP and product development, AI/ML integration, Web3 and blockchain, architecture design and tech stack advisory — delivered by an in-house engineering team, led by a named principal, not a rotating bench.
Product & technology in depth → - 03 — Operational
Run like a company, not a project.
Team building and hiring, process design and SOPs, financial modelling, growth and scaling operations, KPI dashboards and OKRs. The company around the product, built deliberately — and documented to survive without us.
Operations in depth →
Built in-house
The engineering behind the studio.
Great strategy dies without execution. Our in-house engineering team designs, builds and operates across four domains:
Technologies we've built with include React Native, Ethereum, Fireblocks and Unity3D.
Mobile & web applications
Scalable, performance-driven products for real users — from React Native apps to progressive web experiences.
AI & machine learning
Custom AI/ML including LLM integration, predictive analytics and intelligent automation — applied where it moves a metric, not where it decorates a deck.
Web3, blockchain & DeFi
Decentralised applications, smart contracts and tokenomics design — engineering-first, with the security discipline that real-money systems demand.
Research & development
Exploratory engineering and prototyping: stress-testing assumptions and taking ideas to proof-of-concept before you commit the runway.
From first call to first ship
What happens when you get in touch.
1. Intro call
Thirty minutes with a founding principal — not a salesperson. You tell us your stage, sector and the decision in front of you; we tell you honestly whether we fit.
2. Scoped proposal
If we're a match, you get a proposal matched to your stage: what we'd do, who's on it, and how the engagement is structured.
3. We embed and build
Our team joins yours — same stand-ups, same tools, shared accountability — across whichever pillars the work demands.
4. Handover by design
Everything we build is documented to outlive us: code, processes, hiring. The goal is a venture that runs without dependency on the studio.
Your intro call is with Anitoni or Amin — named principals, not a sales team.
How we align — not what we charge
Four ways to work with us.
- Model 01
Full-fee delivery
A conventional engagement: you pay for senior capability, we deliver it. Clean and simple.
- Model 02
Hybrid fee + equity
Reduced fees in exchange for equity. We carry part of your risk; we share part of your upside.
- Model 03
Embedded studio support
Our team works inside yours — same stand-ups, same tools, shared accountability.
- Model 04
Strategic & operating partnerships
Longer-term, board-level or portfolio-level relationships for funds and corporates.
Proof, not promises
What we've built, and what it did.
Our client work sits under NDAs, so we publish sector, scope, stack and outcome rather than names. Every figure you see here has been verified before publication.
- FintechMulti-currency wallet
Real money, real users, real custody.
Challenge: a consumer fintech handling live funds across currencies. Built: custody integration, transfers, USD/EUR/GBP conversion, revenue-share dashboard and a public API — React Native and Fireblocks.
- Blockchain gamingFull stack
From token design to live game client.
Challenge: a play-to-earn platform needing one coherent build. Built: Unity3D game client, mobile apps, web platform, token infrastructure and smart contracts.
Anonymised by necessity, honest by design — our case studies carry no logos.
Why founders choose the studio
Built like the partner we wished we'd had.
Studio model, not services model
Ownership-minded co-building, not billable hours. If we were optimising for billable hours, equity would be a terrible business model. That's the point.
Founder-led, founder-answered
Both founders are hands-on in every engagement. We think like founders because we are founders — pre-seed trade-offs, seed-stage hiring, Series A scaling: our leadership has navigated each of them as builders, not observers.
Integrated pillars
Strategy, build and operations under one roof means the plan, the product and the operating machine are made by the same accountable team.
Skin in the game
Select equity partnerships put our incentives on your side of the table.
Global reach, local instinct
Led from Auckland with senior delivery capability in Islamabad — access to one of the world's deepest engineering talent pools, with NZ-company governance and a named principal answerable for the work.
Mission commitment
We back founders and communities that mainstream technology routinely overlooks — because great ideas from those communities fail for lack of execution infrastructure, not lack of vision.
The people you'd be building with
Two founders, one complementary unit.
Vision and ecosystem from Auckland; execution and operations from Islamabad. You get both, on every engagement.
Verify us the way you'd verify any partner — our founders are on LinkedIn under their own names.
Anthony Malaki Foua
Co-Founder & CEO · Auckland, New Zealand
A New Zealand Pacifika entrepreneur and community builder, Anitoni drives the studio's vision and ecosystem partnerships, and stewards its mission: connecting people to meaningful opportunity across health, commerce, creativity and community.
Muhammad Amin Jan
Co-Founder & COO · Islamabad, Pakistan
A technology operator and product builder rooted in Pakistan's tech ecosystem, Amin leads day-to-day studio execution and partner engagements — the architect of how Entry Life delivers, translating strategy into the systems, processes and teams that make ventures work.
Straight answers
Questions founders ask us first.
If your question isn't here, bring it to the intro call — it's a conversation, not a pitch.
A startup studio is a hands-on company builder. Rather than advising from the outside or delivering a project and leaving, a studio embeds its own team inside a venture — working across strategy, technology and operations as a committed co-builder, often with shared incentives. Entry Life applies this model to partner ventures at every stage, from concept validation to global expansion.
An agency is paid to deliver a scope; we're structured to deliver an outcome. Agencies hand over code and leave. We stay inside the venture — across strategy, build and operations — and on select engagements we hold equity, which no agency does. If we were optimising for billable hours, equity would be a terrible business model. That's the point.
No. Equity is one of four engagement models — full-fee delivery, hybrid fee-plus-equity, embedded studio support, and strategic or operating partnerships — and it's never a requirement. Where equity is used, the structure is documented plainly for your lawyer and your cap table. We'd expect it to get proper scrutiny; that's healthy.
We work from pre-idea through to expansion, and flex the support to fit. Pre-seed founders typically need concept validation, market research and business model design; seed-stage teams draw on CTO-as-a-service and investor readiness; Series A and growth companies use us for scaling architecture, operating model design and leadership hiring. If you're unsure where you sit, that's a normal first-call question.
No — and you should be wary of anyone who says otherwise. What we do is make you genuinely investor-ready: a defensible business model, a credible pitch narrative, financials that survive diligence, and a product that demonstrates execution. The raise itself is yours; our job is to make sure the venture deserves it.
Ready when you are
Building something that matters? Start the conversation.
We take on a small number of partner ventures at a time — small and senior is the design. If you're a founder with an imminent build decision, a fund with a portfolio company that needs execution capability, or an innovation team that needs startup velocity, the first step is the same: a 30-minute call with a founding principal. We'll tell you honestly whether we fit — and if we don't, we'll say so.