Work/Founding engineering and product team, with a stake in the company

Peppr

Better workflows for every kind of thinker.

Led
Engineering and product, as Peppr's founding technical team
Built
The platform: working-style passports, Slack and calendar integrations, meeting intelligence
Prepared
The 90-day pilot programme, pitch and sales decks, enterprise security and privacy documentation
Pilots
90 days, one flat price per organisation, measures agreed before day one

The client

Peppr is an early-stage workplace SaaS startup that helps organisations get the best work out of cognitively diverse teams, starting with dyslexia. The founders brought deep experience in strategy, neurodiversity practice and business development. They came to Voidforge for an engineering and product team that could turn a sensitive, people-centred idea into software people would trust.

From client to partner

The more time we spent with the founders, the more we believed in what they were building. Neurodivergent people lose a lot of time and energy to workplaces that were never designed for them, and this was a practical way to change that. So we joined forces. Voidforge took a stake in Peppr and became its founding engineering and product team: the engineers, the designers and the product lead, all from the studio.

We are building this one with our own skin in the game, and we hold it to the same standard we bring to every client build. That turned out to mean a lot more than code.

The challenge

Friction between neurodivergent and neurotypical colleagues is real and costly, but it rarely shows up as a clear problem. It shows up as rework, repeated clarification, slow handoffs and meetings that go nowhere.

Most tools in this space ask people to disclose a diagnosis or sort staff into personality types. That puts employees at risk and makes everyone else hesitate. Peppr had to help without labelling anyone, report on teams and never on individuals, and live inside the tools people already use.

It also had to sell into enterprises, where buyers want evidence before they commit budget and procurement wants security, privacy and data handling answered before a pilot can start. Building the product was half the job. Getting it through the door was the other half.

How we worked

With product and engineering under one roof, research findings flowed straight into the build plan, and the build plan flowed straight into the pitch. One team owned the whole path from idea to a signed pilot.

Start with where work breaks down
Before building features, we mapped where collaboration fails in daily work and separated emotional friction from structural workflow issues. Software fixes a broken handoff far more reliably than it fixes a relationship. That gave the build a clear target.
A passport, not a profile
Each person owns a working-style passport: how they work best, in their words, shared on their terms. Nobody is diagnosed or labelled. The platform turns it into practical cues for the people around them, and reports at team and organisation level only. Privacy is a design constraint from the first line of code.
Meet people where they already work
Slack and calendar integrations nudge teams inside their existing rhythms, so nobody has to adopt a new habit or check another app. The meeting intelligence layer learns from how teams actually work: who was in the room, what was decided, and what each person needs to carry it forward.
Designed for everyone
Not a tool for managers to run on their teams. Every person gets guidance that fits how they work, in calm, dyslexia-friendly interfaces with no walls of text. Managers get a small set of safe default actions that feel like good management: a clear next step, with no training course attached.
Ready for enterprise
We wrote the documentation procurement asks for before anyone asked: security, privacy, data handling and retention, and how AI is used. Organisations can run Peppr's built-in models or bring their own API key and keep full control of their AI spend. The answers were on the table before the first pilot conversation.
The pitch, the deck and the pilot
We built the pitch decks and sales material alongside the product, and designed the 90-day pilot programme itself: discover, profile, experience, embed, measure, review. Success is defined before a pilot starts, and at day 90 Peppr and the customer look at the evidence together and decide what scaling looks like.

The outcome

Peppr is ready to pilot. The platform, the 90-day programme, the sales decks and the enterprise paperwork are all in place, so a customer conversation can go from first meeting to a running pilot without a build in between.

What started as a client conversation became a long-term partnership. Voidforge is Peppr's engineering and product team and a shareholder, accountable for the product as owners, not just builders.

Your product handles people, trust and sensitive data.

Then privacy is architecture, not a feature. Tell us who the product is for and what must never happen to their data, and we will set out how we would build it without labelling anyone.

Project briefVF · 03
Standard

It has to work.

Running in production, used by real people, still standing a year later. Nobody budgets for a rebuild in eighteen months, so we build for that, not for the demo.

Priority

The mission is the brief.

We take on work we'd want to exist. Once we're in, your purpose sets the priorities, even when the thing that impresses the board is easier to build than the thing your users need. We'll say so when a plan doesn't serve it.

Bar

Senior people write the code.

The people on the first call are the people who ship. No account layer, no junior handoff once the contract is signed. You explain the problem once, to the people who'll solve it.

Team

Sized to the brief. Decided together, once we've read it.

Voidforge

A product engineering studio for people building something that matters. We ship software that works, and we care that it does.

Level 2, 8 Stafford Street · Dunedin Central, 9016 · Ōtepoti, working globally.

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Date
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Title
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A studio, drawn as its own blueprint.
Sheet
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Current issue
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