A lot of this rings true for a development agency, in 2026:
> You cannot succeed in design services unless you really believe in your clients and your client’s products. Just as it’s essential to enjoy working with the people you form a company with, working with clients that you like is essential too.
Yup. Otherwise you're just "implementing specifications", which I'd argue is generally not the best form of collaboration.
> I’ve known lots of people who got into services thinking that they can use the income from clients to bankroll their own product ideas. That is not an impossible scenario — it’s been done before more than a few times, and it’s a beautiful thing when it happens. But it’s very, very difficult to pull off. To do services, you need to wake up in the morning with a different approach to life from the way you wake up in the morning to do products, and only a few people have the skill — and stamina — to juggle both at once.
Yup, I don't think anyone I know (and not myself either) pulled this off. I bet many did, just from anecdotal evidence I'd consider it rare, and subjectively, I agree that it's hard.
> Most clients, when they hire a design studio, take the attitude that the studio is lucky to work with them, that they selected them from a plentiful pool of design companies bidding on their business. To many clients, design studios are, in a sense, interchangeable. [...] This is a deadly position for a design studio because it essentially commoditizes the studio’s value.
Yup. If clients start comparing hourly rates, they are a) making a rather meaningless comparison, looking only at a single factor in a larger equation and b) going to try and haggle you down, which is unpleasant for both sides.
I usually give a rough estimate of what I think it's gonna cost, and then we talk about what _not_ to do and where to cut corners to get it down to the ballpark of the budget, if needed.
That's not even all, but I have a feeling my comment shouldn't end up exceeding TFA in length.
That commoditization already happened for software developers, years ago. (Just look at the big-tech commodity worker interview process that even startups now mimic.)
Kudos to design studios who can still avoid that, and shine as unique talent.
Businesses naturally see their "suppliers" and "resources" as exchangeable. And to a degree, they really are, at the end of the day.
But it's still a non-trivial activity with long feedback loops, that requires a level of expertise.
Making workers easily exchangeable requires processes that ultimately underutilise their abilities, finding the lowest common denominator. Some businesses clearly can and want to afford that. Pretty much by definition, that leads to mediocre work.
From what I gather, a good chunk, if not the majority of agency work serves that particular need. But there's plenty of clients out there that want something else. Like all of mine.
A lot of this rings true for a development agency, in 2026:
> You cannot succeed in design services unless you really believe in your clients and your client’s products. Just as it’s essential to enjoy working with the people you form a company with, working with clients that you like is essential too.
Yup. Otherwise you're just "implementing specifications", which I'd argue is generally not the best form of collaboration.
> I’ve known lots of people who got into services thinking that they can use the income from clients to bankroll their own product ideas. That is not an impossible scenario — it’s been done before more than a few times, and it’s a beautiful thing when it happens. But it’s very, very difficult to pull off. To do services, you need to wake up in the morning with a different approach to life from the way you wake up in the morning to do products, and only a few people have the skill — and stamina — to juggle both at once.
Yup, I don't think anyone I know (and not myself either) pulled this off. I bet many did, just from anecdotal evidence I'd consider it rare, and subjectively, I agree that it's hard.
> Most clients, when they hire a design studio, take the attitude that the studio is lucky to work with them, that they selected them from a plentiful pool of design companies bidding on their business. To many clients, design studios are, in a sense, interchangeable. [...] This is a deadly position for a design studio because it essentially commoditizes the studio’s value.
Yup. If clients start comparing hourly rates, they are a) making a rather meaningless comparison, looking only at a single factor in a larger equation and b) going to try and haggle you down, which is unpleasant for both sides.
I usually give a rough estimate of what I think it's gonna cost, and then we talk about what _not_ to do and where to cut corners to get it down to the ballpark of the budget, if needed.
That's not even all, but I have a feeling my comment shouldn't end up exceeding TFA in length.
That commoditization already happened for software developers, years ago. (Just look at the big-tech commodity worker interview process that even startups now mimic.)
Kudos to design studios who can still avoid that, and shine as unique talent.
Businesses naturally see their "suppliers" and "resources" as exchangeable. And to a degree, they really are, at the end of the day.
But it's still a non-trivial activity with long feedback loops, that requires a level of expertise.
Making workers easily exchangeable requires processes that ultimately underutilise their abilities, finding the lowest common denominator. Some businesses clearly can and want to afford that. Pretty much by definition, that leads to mediocre work.
From what I gather, a good chunk, if not the majority of agency work serves that particular need. But there's plenty of clients out there that want something else. Like all of mine.