We'll tell you when you don't need us
Some of the best advice we give ends without an invoice. Why saying no is part of the job, and how to tell when a spreadsheet beats software.
A surprising number of our first calls end with us recommending that the person on the other end does not build anything yet. It is not a sales technique. It is that most businesses reach us with a problem, and only some of those problems are solved by software. Building the wrong thing well is still building the wrong thing, and we would rather be the studio that said so.
When a spreadsheet wins
If the process changes every week, software will freeze the wrong version of it. If three people run it and they sit in the same room, a shared sheet with clear columns will beat a custom tool on cost, speed and the ability to change its mind. Software earns its place when the process has settled, the volume has grown past what people can hold in their heads, and the cost of a mistake has become real. Before that point, the spreadsheet is not a stopgap. It is the correct tool.
When off-the-shelf wins
Invoicing, booking, email, accounting, a basic online shop: these are commodities, and the products that do them are better than anything a studio would build for one client. We say buy, and we mean it, even when building would have been a bigger project for us. Custom work is for the part of the business that makes it different from its competitors, not for the parts that make it the same as everyone else.
When to wait
When nobody can say what the current process costs, because then nobody will be able to say whether the new one helped. When the problem is that two departments disagree, which no system fixes. When there is no one inside the company who will own the tool once we have gone home. In each case the honest recommendation is a smaller, earlier step: measure it, agree it, name an owner. Then talk to us again.
What we say yes to
Work that is repeated, measured and owned, where the thing we build is worth clearly more than it costs, and where someone on the client's side will be glad to run it. A catalogue of thousands of products from dozens of suppliers that two people are updating by hand. A branch of a company that has outgrown living in the shadow of head office. A booking flow that is losing customers at the third screen. Those are the projects where a small studio makes an outsized difference.
Why we work this way
Partly temperament: we would rather build less and be right. Mostly arithmetic. We are a small team, and small teams live on referrals. The people who send us work are, more often than not, the ones we once told to wait. They remembered that the advice was free, and that it was true.