Design studios are partners, not competitors

For years, every studio in the area was, to me, a potential project thief.

In November we started a project with one of them.

Here's what happened.

We started a website with a design studio from Girona. From day one, each to their own. They took the design. We took the development.

No overlap. No fighting over who owns the client. Each studio doing the part it does best.

Written down, it sounds like common sense 101. It didn't always feel that way to me.

Fishing in the same pond

From the outside, a design studio and a web studio look like the same business. Both "make websites". Both show up when a client asks around.

So I eyed them sideways. Polite, yes. Open, not so much.

Until earlier that same year, turning down a design intern, I had to admit the obvious: design isn't what we do every day. We maintain, we integrate, we build software. Design we'd been handing off to collaborators for a while.

And once you say that out loud, the competition story falls apart on its own.

A studio that designs beautifully and doesn't want to hear the words servers, plugins or integrations isn't competing with me. They need me. And I need them. Like the baker and the sandwich shop: they don't steal each other's customers, they send them over.

The studio that does what you don't isn't your competitor. It's half of your next project.

Pretty, and working

That same month, dynamic pricing went live for a rural accommodation portal. Prices that adapt, instead of the same rate every night.

It's work that has nothing to do with how a site looks. And everything to do with how a business earns.

That's our side of the line. Logic, data, systems that keep working long after everyone has forgotten the launch.

Seeing both projects in the same month made it crystal clear. One studio makes it beautiful. The other makes it work. The client gets both.

I suspect my wariness cost us a collaboration or two. Nothing dramatic. Conversations that never happened because I assumed we were fishing in the same pond. And when two studios don't talk, sometimes it's the client who loses: a gorgeous design with weak development, or solid development with a design nobody remembers.

The rules, in the end, are playground rules. Be clear about what you do and don't do. If another studio brings you the project, the client is theirs: protect it. Agree at the start who talks to the client. And when someone asks you for design, return the favour.

It also fits how we want to grow. We don't want to hire every skill there is. Partnering lets a small studio take on bigger projects without becoming a bigger company.

I'd take that freedom over size.

For years I saw other studios as competition.

One of them ended up handing us, wrapped and ready, exactly the part we're best at.

P.S. If a design studio brings you a project and you try to keep their client, congratulations: you've just been paid for your last job from them.