Most software agencies are workshops. Every project starts from a blank bench, a new team is assembled, and the quality of the result depends on who happened to be free that month.
That model worked when building software was mostly about typing. It works less well now. The typing got cheap. What stayed expensive is deciding what to build, and knowing it works.
The problem with selling hours
When you bill by the hour, every inefficiency is revenue. Nobody says it out loud, but the incentive is there, and teams feel it. Estimates pad themselves. Reuse feels like lost income. Automation is something you'll get to after this sprint.
Clients feel it too. They can't see the work, only the invoice, so trust becomes the product. That's a fragile thing to sell.
The typing got cheap. Deciding what to build, and knowing it works, did not.
What a factory looks like
A factory isn't an assembly line of junior developers. It's a system that makes the good outcome the default. In practice that means four things:
- Standard starting points. Every project begins from a maintained base, not an empty repository.
- Checks that run themselves. Tests, reviews and release steps happen because the line enforces them, not because someone remembered.
- Small, stable teams. People who have shipped together before ship faster together again.
- Measured output. You track what reached users, not hours logged.
Where the craft goes
The usual objection is that factories kill craft. I'd argue the opposite. In a workshop, craft lives in individuals and leaves when they do. In a factory, craft is written into the line: the templates, the checklists, the review habits. Every project inherits the best of the last one.
It also changes what senior people do. Instead of rescuing projects, they improve the system that runs all of them.
What I'd tell another founder
If you run an agency, try one experiment: pick the step that goes wrong most often and make it impossible to skip. Then pick the next one. You won't wake up as a factory, but you'll stop being a workshop one step at a time.
And if you're hiring an agency, ask one question: what happens on every project, no matter who's on it? The answer tells you which kind you're talking to.