What founders told me once they stopped being polite.
Sato Builds didn't start with a business plan. It started with a sentence I kept hearing in first meetings, from people who had already been burned.
Sahar Hage
Technical Co-founder & Partner
From building for others to building my own
Started building
First development work. Learning the craft on other people's problems.
Fifty products in
Freelance work at full pace: e-commerce, platforms, performance and conversion work. Enough volume to start seeing the same failure repeat.
Bayté Azka
Co-founded a DTC brand for smart home gadgets with Tony. Sourcing, storefront, paid acquisition, retention. All of it in-house.
Sato Builds
Co-founded the studio to be the long-term tech partner I kept watching clients not have. Build, then stay.
treatd
A two-sided self-care booking marketplace for Lebanon. Zero commission on bookings, because studios pay a flat subscription instead. Entering Beirut and Metn.
"We don't trust developers anymore."
For six years I was the person founders called when something needed building. Around fifty products: storefronts, platforms, apps, and a fair number of rescue jobs.
Somewhere in year four I noticed the conversations had started opening the same way. Not with what they wanted to build. With what had already gone wrong.
- The last agency left mid-build
- The site broke after two months and nobody picked up
- There's an app live right now that no one has supported in a year
Eventually one of them said it plainly: we don't trust developers anymore. Once I'd heard it, I couldn't stop hearing it. It was underneath almost every brief.
Here's the part that turned it into a company. Those same founders trusted me. They trusted Tony. Someone would finish describing being burned twice and then hand us the whole thing without hesitating.
The trust hadn't gone anywhere. It just had nowhere to go. Every founder had a person they trusted and no company they trusted, and those were never the same thing.
So we built somewhere to put it. Sato Builds is Tony and me, formalised. The same working relationship those founders already had with us, made into something that can take on more of them and still be there in month seven.
We've done it twice more since. Bayté Azka in 2024, a home gadgets brand we run end to end. treatd this year, a booking marketplace for Lebanese self-care. Building for ourselves keeps us honest about what we ask clients to live with.
I still take client work. I just don't hand anything over and disappear. I spent six years cleaning up after people who did.
We stay
The relationship is designed around month seven, not launch week.
You own everything
Your code, your repositories, your accounts, your infrastructure. No hostage situations.
Nothing gets thrown over a wall
No handover document standing in for a person who understands the system.
Technical Excellence Meets Business Acumen
Frontend Mastery
Backend Expertise
Business Tools
Growth & Analytics
Results That Speak for Themselves
Ready to Build Something Extraordinary?
Let's combine your vision with my experience to create digital solutions that don't just work, but keep working.