Projects pay the bills. Products pay for freedom

A project is a promise with an end date.

A product is a promise with no end at all.

That's why one pays the bills and the other, if you're lucky, pays for something better.

For years, I only knew the first kind. A client asks. We quote. We build. We deliver. We invoice. Then we start again from zero, because a finished project doesn't keep paying. It just keeps asking for support.

It's honest work. It kept us alive through 2020. I'm not going to pretend I'm above it.

But there's a ceiling built into it, and it's made of hours.

The arithmetic nobody likes

In services, you sell time. Even when you call it something else — a package, a fee, a plan — underneath there's always a person at a keyboard.

So if you want to earn more, you have two options. Work more hours or charge more per hour.

The first has a limit called sleep. The second has a limit called the market. Between the two, a small studio can make a decent living. What it can't easily make is room.

Room to say no to a client you don't like. Room to take a month to think. Room to build something without asking anyone's permission.

Projects buy you a salary. Products, if you're patient, buy you the right to say no.

Why we're not choosing one

The fashionable answer is to quit services and go all in on a product. Burn the boats. Raise some money. Ship.

We're doing the opposite. Keeping the boats.

The services are what pay for the product. Every hour a client pays is an hour of runway nobody had to lend us. No investor asking for growth curves. No clock ticking on a round. Just clients paying invoices, slowly funding something that belongs to us.

The price is speed. Every client hour is an hour that doesn't go into the product. We'll be slower than a funded startup with the same idea. Probably much slower.

What we get in return is the right to be wrong without explaining ourselves to anyone. If a feature doesn't work, we remove it. If an idea dies, it dies quietly, and nobody has to sign off on its funeral.

I think that's a good trade. I suspect anyone who has had to report to a board would agree.

The uncomfortable middle

None of this feels heroic from the inside.

From the inside it feels like doing two jobs at once. Answering a client about their website in the morning, trying to think about a product at night. Feeling guilty about the product when you're doing services, and guilty about the services when you're doing the product.

I don't have a trick for that. I just remind myself that the guilt is the price of not having a boss. Or an investor. Which, seen from the outside, often look like the same thing with different titles.

So we'll keep both. Projects for the bills. Products for the freedom.

And when someone asks me whether we're an agency or a software company, I'll give the only honest answer.

The agency is paying for the software company to find out.

P.S. If you're a client: yes, your invoice is funding our product. No, that doesn't get you a discount. Nice try.