Studio — AccordHK

THE STUDIO · IN PERSON

A small room in Hong Kong.

No glass-walled marketing floor. No reception with a brand wall and a coffee bar. One studio room, a long shared desk, daylight, and a kettle that has been on since 2014. Visitors come by appointment, and we still answer our own door.

CHAPTER01ORIGIN

Why we exist.

Founder's note · 2014 — today

In 2014 we started AccordHK because every founder we knew had the same complaint: the agency was great in the pitch, absent at launch, and impossible to reach six months later.

Ten years on we are still a small senior team. We have grown only when the demand was real and the people were right. Every engineer on staff has shipped a product to the App Store with their own name on it — most have shipped several.

We are not building the world's largest agency. We are building the studio we would have wanted when we were the founder on the other side of the table.

CHAPTER02VALUES

Three things we will not compromise on.

Senior people, on every project.

We do not bait-and-switch. The engineers who scope your project are the engineers who write the code. If they leave the company, you are told the same day.

Honest scoping, even when it hurts.

If your project is too big for us, we say so. If it is too small for an agency, we say so. If your real problem is hiring and not software, we say so — and recommend a recruiter we trust.

iii

Hand over well, or not at all.

Your code, your cloud, your repo — from day one. The hand-over (when it comes) is built into how we work, not bolted on at the end. We measure ourselves on how comfortably a client can run the system without us.

CHAPTER03STORY

A decade, in five chapters.

2014

Two founders, one room

AccordHK was incorporated as Accord Apps Development & Marketing under CHI Group Holdings. First office: a 200-sqft shared room in Sheung Wan. First clients: two restaurant chains and one logistics SME — all three still work with us today.

2017

The shift to embedded

A logistics client asked if one of our engineers could just 'come to the office on Thursdays.' That experiment became our Forward-Deployed practice — today the highest-leverage thing we sell.

2020

A pandemic, and a pivot

Hong Kong F&B clients needed online ordering overnight. We shipped six small commerce apps in eight weeks at cost. Half of those clients are still on retainer.

2023

AI, the slow way

While the market chased generative novelty, we built our own evaluation harness and quietly shipped four internal copilots for financial advisors and law firms. We still don't use the word 'revolutionary' on a slide.

2026

Today

Same small team, three practices, one Hong Kong office. We still answer our own phones, and most of our work still comes from the people we’ve already built for.

CHAPTER04THE TEAM

The people you'll actually work with.

Founders

Studio leadership

STRATEGY · ENGINEERING

The two people who started AccordHK in 2014. Still write code, still on every first call, and the ones who decide whether a project is honestly worth taking.

Engineering

Mobile, web, backend

iOS · ANDROID · WEB

A senior engineering bench across iOS (SwiftUI), Android (Kotlin), React, and Node / Python backends. Every engineer on staff has shipped to the App Store under their own name.

iii

AI Practice

Applied ML & evaluation

LLM · RAG · CV

The team that decides which model to use, how to evaluate it, and how to run it on infrastructure that meets a HK client's data-residency rules.

Design & Growth

Product design & loops

UI · UX · ACQUISITION

Bilingual design from the start — every screen ships in EN and 繁. Growth partners then wire up the acquisition, retention and analytics loops on top.

CHAPTER05PRINCIPLES

How we work, in writing.

PRINCIPLE / 01

Write less, ship more.

A weekly demo over a quarterly review. A pull request over a Confluence page. We make decisions out loud and in writing, where the team can see them.

PRINCIPLE / 02

No estimates we don't believe.

If we can't scope it honestly, we say so. Time-boxed discovery is always available before a fixed price.

PRINCIPLE / 03

The client's name goes first.

In press, in awards, in the App Store listing. We are happy to be the second line, or no line at all.

PRINCIPLE / 04

Slow hiring, slow firing.

We hire engineers we would trust with our own product, and we keep them through downturns. The bus-factor of a project is a number we watch.

A small studio, building quietly, since 2014.