Cloud Studios is an independent product studio that designs, builds, and publishes its own apps. It operates as Cloud Studios UG (haftungsbeschränkt) in Berlin and was founded by Eli Läufer. The studio builds its own products end-to-end - design, engineering, and launch in one team - rather than working as an agency.
Most software studios sell hours. Cloud Studios sells nothing by the hour. The studio picks a small number of problems, builds products for them, and ships those products under its own name. That is a slower way to make money and a better way to make software, because nobody has to be convinced to fund the part of the work that does not show up in a demo.
It means the studio decides what to build by how a product feels to use, not by how its feature list compares. A feature that adds capability but costs clarity does not ship. This is why listn has one thing to do on its main screen, and why Cloud Studios releases fewer products than a studio its size could.
Feature lists are easy to argue for. Each one has a reason, each one wins its own meeting, and none of them individually makes a product worse. The damage is cumulative and it lands on the person using the thing, who never attended any of those meetings.
So the studio works the other way around. The question is not “what else could this do” but “what is this like to hold”. Everything starts as a design problem - prototypes, real people using them, revision - before a line of production code is written. Engineering follows the design instead of constraining it.
The test is subtraction. If removing something makes the product clearer without making it less useful, it was never a feature; it was an unresolved decision that got shipped. Most software has a lot of those.
This is not minimalism as an aesthetic. It is a claim about where quality actually comes from: from the number of decisions someone made on your behalf so you would not have to.
The studio is deliberately small, self-directed, and self-funded. Two people, one product at a time, no outside pressure to grow headcount before there is work for it. Choosing projects deliberately is not modesty, it is the only way the standard above survives contact with a deadline.
Everything is built in-house. There are no handoffs between a design team and an engineering team, because there are no separate teams. The person who decided how a screen should feel is the person who builds it, which removes the translation layer where most product quality is lost.
Work ships early and gets revised in public. Products change based on what the people using them actually do, not on what a roadmap committed to six months earlier.
The Founder Residency is how the studio starts new companies without giving up that shape: a paid venture-building residency where one entrepreneurial person discovers, validates and builds a venture with the studio’s base, tools and standards behind them, then spins it out and leads it.
Eli founded Cloud Studios in Berlin to build products that feel effortless, for the people the industry usually overlooks. He is the studio’s managing director and leads design, engineering, and product direction across everything it ships, including the interface work, the iOS engineering, and the decisions about what does not get built.
Find him on LinkedIn.
Digvijay leads go-to-market strategy and business development at Cloud Studios, helping the studio turn finished products into ventures that reach the right people. He works across positioning, distribution, and the commercial side of every launch.
listn is the studio’s first published product: a voice-first iOS app that helps older adults preserve their most treasured stories in their own voice and share them with the people who matter most. No typing, no learning curve, one thing to do on the main screen. It is in private beta.
get mow is the second: an AI visibility service that shows companies how they appear inside AI search and recommendation systems - ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude - and does the work to change it. It is live and taking clients.
Cloud Studios is not an agency and does not want to be one. It does take on a small number of partnerships a year, usually with founding teams building something where design and engineering cannot be separated.
If that sounds like what you are doing, here is how partnering works, or email the studio directly.
Cloud Studios is an independent product studio that designs, builds, and publishes its own apps. It operates as Cloud Studios UG (haftungsbeschränkt) in Berlin and was founded by Eli Läufer. The studio builds its own products end-to-end rather than working as an agency, and takes on a small number of outside partnerships each year.
Rarely, and never as its main business. Most of the studio's capacity goes to its own products. It takes on a small number of partnerships a year, usually zero-to-one work where a founding team needs design and engineering from the same people.
Eli Läufer founded Cloud Studios in Berlin and is its managing director. He leads design, engineering, and product direction across everything the studio ships. Digvijay Rathore joined as Founder's Associate and leads go-to-market and business development.
Berlin, Germany. The registered address is Wiclefstraße 59, 10551 Berlin. The studio is registered at the Amtsgericht Charlottenburg under HRB 280883 B and works hybrid, with remote-friendly arrangements for most roles.