Built by Nair is Jake and Carter Nair, brothers based in Chicago. Two people, both writing code — and between them covering the engineering, the economics, and the conversation you start with.
Jake leads the engineering. He holds a bachelor's and a master's degree in accounting from the University of Missouri — an unusual route into writing production code, and one that turns out to be an advantage. He built TeeBox, a golf equipment marketplace, from nothing to a live platform with payment processing and an iOS app, single-handedly. Doing that alone meant learning the parts of shipping software most developers get to hand to someone else: payment compliance and identity verification, App Store review, email deliverability, and incident response at two in the morning when money is moving between strangers.
Most software gets built by people who have never had to run the thing afterwards. That changes what you build.
Carter writes code alongside Jake and runs business development and client relationships, so he is usually the first person you speak to. He is a senior at North Central College in Naperville finishing a degree in computer science, with experience in cybersecurity and technology consulting. That matters more than it sounds: the person scoping your project builds software himself, so nothing is promised in a first call that has to be walked back later. His job is working out what a project actually needs — and what it is worth — before a line of it gets quoted.
The accounting training shows up in the work. Before a feature gets built, the first question is what it costs to run and what it earns — which is why clients here tend to get talked out of at least one expensive idea per project.
We take on a small number of client builds at a time. What's for sale is attention, not a team's spare capacity.
