Starting a product engineering agency in 2023 felt a little like opening a bookshop in 2007. The macro conditions were not encouraging. Offshore studios offering React development at $20/hour. AI coding assistants promising 10x developer productivity. Every VP of Engineering we spoke to had a story about a bad agency experience that made them reluctant to try again.
The case against generalism
The first decision we made was to stop trying to serve everyone. The agencies that compete on price and breadth are racing to the bottom against competitors who will always be cheaper. We chose a different constraint: only take projects where senior judgment — about architecture, product tradeoffs, and delivery risk — is the primary value being delivered.
That meant turning down projects regularly. A Shopify theme customisation for a DTC brand. A mobile app with a feature list that screamed "the spec was written by a committee." A data engineering project that was really just ETL work dressed up as product engineering. Each refusal was a short-term revenue miss and a long-term positioning gain.
What boutique actually means
Boutique is not a synonym for small or expensive. It means that the person who sells the engagement is the same person who does the work — or is directly responsible for it. It means the client has a relationship with a named engineer who understands their business context, not a ticket queue.
Two years in, our retention rate is over 80% and the majority of new business comes from referrals. The market is not commoditised for everyone. It is commoditised for the undifferentiated.