Waterloo, Ontario • Since 2010

Your SaaS is earning. Your stack is burning runway.

I help founders and technical teams ship lean AI and SaaS systems without enterprise bloat. Multiple $10K MRR products on a $20/month stack. Real revenue, no VC theater.

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$10K+
MRR per product
$20/mo
Infrastructure cost
25+
Years shipping
4
Live SaaS products
0
VC dollars taken

What I Do

I fix what's costing you — and build what moves the needle.

No slide decks. No "digital transformation" jargon. Just direct, experienced engineering help for founders who need things shipped.

🔍

Lean Architecture Audit

I'll review your stack and find where complexity is burning your runway. You'll get a concrete plan to cut costs without cutting capability — often by 60–80%.

🤖

AI Integration That Ships

AI should create leverage, not COGS. I help you integrate AI where it actually helps — using local infrastructure when cloud costs don't make sense.

🛟

SaaS Rescue & Scaling

Your product works but it's fragile. Deployments break. Tech debt is piling up. I stabilize, refactor, and set you up for the next stage — without rewriting from scratch.

How It Works

A process that respects your time.

1

Discovery Call

30 minutes. No pitch. You tell me what's broken. I tell you if I can help.

2

Diagnostic

I dig into your stack, your costs, and your bottlenecks. You get a written assessment.

3

Strategy

A concrete roadmap. What to fix first. What to leave alone. What it will cost.

4

Implementation

I ship. You focus on your business. Regular check-ins, no surprises.

Case Studies

Real products, real revenue, real constraints.

These aren't hypothetical case studies. These are products I built, launched, and still run — on a shoestring.

SaaS • UML

WebSequenceDiagrams

Sequence diagram editor used by engineers at Stripe, Google, and thousands of startups. Converts plain text into professional UML diagrams in seconds.

$10K+ MRR on a $5 VPS

Built with a single Go binary and SQLite. No microservices. No Kubernetes. No cloud vendor lock-in. Twelve years running, zero full-time maintenance.

SaaS • Collaboration

Zwibbler

Collaborative drawing and whiteboard tool. Canvas-based, real-time, works on any device. Used for wireframes, mind maps, and quick sketches.

Serves thousands with near-zero overhead

Built on a minimalist stack. The expensive part wasn't servers — it was getting the canvas performance right. Focused on what users actually needed, not what was trendy.

AI • Fintech

eh-trade.ca

AI-powered financial analysis for Canadian investors. Deep research on 11,000+ stocks using local GPU infrastructure.

4× RTX 3090s, $0 cloud AI costs

Instead of paying hundreds per month for cloud AI APIs, built a local GPU cluster. Same quality, zero recurring cost. A "Ralph Loop" architecture processes financial data that would be cost-prohibitive at API rates.

NLP • Multilingual

RhymeBrain

Multilingual rhyming dictionary and NLP engine. Supports English, French, Spanish, German, and more. Used by songwriters and linguists worldwide.

5 languages, one lean pipeline

Built custom NLP processing — phonetic analysis, stress detection, rhyme scoring — without leaning on expensive third-party APIs. Proving you don't need a cloud bill to do serious language processing.

Insights & Frameworks

I write about what I've learned shipping real products.

No recycled thought leadership. These are frameworks built from shipping — and surviving — on software income.

Architecture

How I run multiple $10K MRR companies on a $20/month stack

Single binaries, SQLite, and zero cloud vendor lock-in. The real cost of modern infrastructure isn't the bill — it's the complexity.

Read on my blog →
AI Strategy

A Ralph Loop for Reading: Beating GPT with a 4k context window (and 4 GPUs)

Deep financial research on 11,000 stocks. Local GPUs instead of cloud APIs. The architecture that made it work — and where it breaks.

Read on my blog →
Leadership

I learned Mandarin. Here's what it taught me about B2C SaaS.

The learning curve for language and the learning curve for building products are the same shape. What the early wins teach you — and what they don't.

Read on my blog →

What Clients Say

"I needed someone with a sharp perspective on how to think about some of the architecture and critical components of my voice AI technology stack. Steve Hanov gives me that assurance. I'm lucky to have met him at Builders Club, now I have a heavy hitter in my corner when I need to make critical business decisions about complex engineering problems that are way out of my league."

— Ian Timotheos-Pilon, Voice AI Founder

About

I've been shipping software that earns real money for 25 years.

Steve Hanov

The short version

I started building software in the '90s — Corel, Quack.com (acquired by AOL), then BlackBerry's Office of the CTO. Since 2010, I've been independent: building, launching, and growing my own SaaS products from Waterloo, Ontario.

I don't have VC funding. I don't have a team of 20. What I have is a track record of building products that make real money on minimal infrastructure — and the scars that come from surviving on software income for over a decade.

I also care deeply about finding overlooked technical talent. Some of the best builders I've worked with were the ones the hiring market missed. I believe experience lets you see execution before the market validates it.

🔧 M.Math Computer Science, UW
🏗️ Ex-BlackBerry (Office of the CTO)
🖨️ 3D printing enthusiast
🇨🇳 Mandarin speaker
🏃 15K steps/day for years
🔨 Rebuilds hardware by hand
📝 200+ technical blog posts
⭐ 11.5k Stack Overflow rep

Read my blog →  |  LinkedIn →  |  GitHub →

Let's Talk

Not every project is a fit. Let's find out if yours is.

What happens next

You send me a message. I reply within 24 hours — usually faster. We schedule a 30-minute call. No pitch, no pressure. You tell me what's broken, and I'll tell you honestly whether I can help.

If it's not a fit, I'll point you to someone who might be. If it is, I'll outline a concrete next step — usually a lightweight diagnostic before any major commitment.

Email: steve.hanov@gmail.com
Location: Waterloo, Ontario, Canada
Remote: Yes — I work with teams worldwide

Prefer to schedule directly?

Or email directly: steve.hanov@gmail.com