THERMAL IMAGING FOR EVERYTHING YOUR BUSINESS CARRIES BUT DOES NOT NEED
Waste glows. We find it.Burn Rate Labs points a thermal camera at your business. The dead software, the debt-riddled code, the agency you're scared to call: it all lights up on its own. No workshops. No journey. A heat map and a kill list.
One week. Fixed. A third of your stack cancelled, typically, and nobody fucking notices.
Businesses don't die of ambition. They die of accumulation. The platform someone was talked into at a conference. The "temporary" fix from 2019 that became load-bearing. Four dashboards doing one job, badly. Tech debt quietly compounding like a credit card nobody opens the statements for.
None of it arrives labelled as waste. It arrives as progress, sold by people who are paid whether it works or not.
We're the lab that points the camera. Waste has a heat signature: money out, nothing back. It can't hide from itemisation, and it dies in daylight.
Burn is not the disease here. Burn is the treatment. A controlled burn clears the dead fuel before it takes the whole paddock. The only thing burning in your business should be the waste, and somebody has to be professionally rude enough to light it. That would be us.
We image everything: spend, stack, code, contracts, process. Nothing is off the table, especially the thing you're defensive about. That one's usually glowing.
Every heat source on one kill list, ranked by waste per month. Written in English, not consultant. One page. No deck. No fucking workshop.
Controlled disposal. Cancellations, renegotiations, rewrites, in an order that means nothing falls over while it burns. Then we hand you the ashes, itemised.
Every tool, licence and retainer under the lens for one week. The waste lights up, we cancel it. Typical result: a third of the stack gone, nobody notices. The audit usually pays for itself before the invoice clears.
Ninety minutes on your burn, line by line. What's fuel, what's furniture, what's already smoke. Verdict in writing. Bring the bank feed, not the pitch deck.
Interrogation of the idea before it costs real money. Market, buyer, build cost, and the question nobody asks out loud. Sometimes the deliverable is "no". You are paying for the no. It's the cheapest thing we sell per dollar it saves.
Every shortcut in your codebase catalogued with its interest rate: what it costs per month in slowed shipping, breakage, and fear of touching it. Pay down, refinance, or default and rewrite. Ranked, costed, in writing.
Your risky idea, prototyped under lab conditions with a hard budget cap and a kill switch. We burn small on purpose so you never burn big by accident. Kill-or-continue verdict per sprint.
Yes, real prices on a website. Radical. Every figure is fixed before we start, because surprise invoices are the exact species of waste we exist to kill.
Construction firm, east coast. Sold the dream of a bespoke ERP moulded to their procedures by a platform vendor who swore they could "make it work with the core product". Years in, hundreds of thousands spent, it was built rigid to their processes instead of as an engine, so every completed module broke a dependency behind it. Painting the Harbour Bridge, at software rates. Abandoned, unfinished, still invoiced.
Equipment hire, NSW. Quoted as a project, engineered as an annuity. The agency built the site on a CMS only the agency could operate, so every banner, button and price change ran through their timesheet. "Phase two" stayed six weeks away for nineteen months while the retainer rolled. The invoices were always real. The website never quite was.
Parts and dismantling, QLD. Eleven tools, 42 paid seats, 6 humans logging in. Three of the tools were bought by people who left years ago: the subscriptions outlasted the employment of everyone who chose them. Nobody owned the stack, so nobody was game to cancel anything in case something load-bearing died with it. We imaged the dependencies in four days. Nothing was load-bearing. The cancellations took an afternoon.
Burn Rate Labs is a Hyperdrive Ventures subsidiary, built by people who ran the yards and shipped the platforms before anyone let them near other people's budgets. We hold no reseller deals, no referral kickbacks, no software to sell you. The lab only makes money when your waste dies, which makes us the one vendor in your inbox whose incentives point at your bank balance instead of into it.
When a scan turns up problems bigger than software, structural ones, board-level ones, we hand you to our polished sibling LXCO and go back to the bench. When it turns up a founder building something genuinely good, Hyperdrive is one door down. Either way, the waste burns first.
Lab intake · replies within 48 hours
Describe what hurts. The tool nobody uses, the retainer you're scared to question, the codebase nobody will touch. The lab replies within 48 hours with a straight verdict: worth a scan, or not worth your $7,900.
Prefer to talk? 02 5565 2876. On a keypad that spells 02 5 LOL BURN. Not an accident.