Why Every Modern Dev Agency Should Run Its Own Product Portfolio
Dev agencies building products become sharper consultants. Here's why the studio model wins.
I was on a call with a potential client last month. Standard discovery stuff — their stack, their timeline, their budget. Then they asked a question that caught me off guard: "What products have you actually shipped? Not client work. Your own stuff."
I rattled off the list. ClickzProtect for bot detection and click fraud protection. JustAnalytics for privacy-first observability. JustEmails for custom domain email hosting. VeloCalls for AI-powered calling. Eight products total across Velocity Digital Labs.
"That's why we called you," they said. "Everyone else just showed us Dribbble mockups."
The Claim: Pure Service Agencies Are Becoming Obsolete
Here's the position I'm taking — and I know some agency owners will hate this: the pure service agency model is dying. Slowly, but dying. The agencies that thrive in the next decade will be the ones running their own product portfolios alongside client work.
Not because products are more prestigious (though they are). Not because recurring revenue is sexier than project fees (though it is). But because building products makes you a fundamentally better consultant. And clients are starting to figure that out.
I'll be honest — I resisted this for years. Kept telling myself client work was enough. It wasn't.
The agency that only does client work is like a personal trainer who's never competed. They might know the theory. They might even be certified. But there's a different quality to advice from someone who's been on stage, made weight, felt the pressure. Clients can sense it.
The Evidence: What's Actually Happening in the Market
Three trends are converging right now.
Trend 1: Clients are more technical than ever. The founders hiring agencies in 2026 aren't the "I have an idea for an app" crowd. They're ex-FAANG engineers, technical PMs, people who can read code. They ask questions like "why Postgres over MySQL for this schema?" and "what's your observability strategy?" If your answer is "we'll figure it out," you've lost them. If your answer is "we run JustAnalytics on our own products and here's what we learned about tracing across microservices," you've won.
Trend 2: The race to the bottom on hourly rates. Offshore dev shops charge $25-40/hour. AI coding assistants are making individual developers 2-5x more productive. Agencies competing on price? Squeezed from both directions. But the ones competing on expertise — the ones who can say "we've shipped this exact thing before, here's the architecture doc from our own product" — they're commanding premiums. I've seen agencies with product portfolios charge 3-4x what pure service shops charge for similar scopes. The client isn't paying for hours. They're paying for certainty.
Trend 3: The indie hacker playbook went mainstream. Five years ago, running multiple products was a niche strategy. Pieter Levels, Marc Lou, the tiny-product crowd. Now it's practically conventional wisdom in certain circles. The studios running 5-10 products with small teams — Tiny, Late Checkout, Founder Studio — they've proven the model. What hasn't caught up: agencies realizing they're perfectly positioned to do the same thing. Took me a while to see it too.
Think about it. You already have the team. You already have the tech stack. You already have the deployment pipelines. You're building products for other people every day. Building one for yourself isn't a pivot — it's a natural extension.
The Contrarian Take: Products Aren't a Side Project. They're Your Training Ground.
Here's where I lose most people: I don't think agencies should build products for the revenue. Not primarily, anyway. Revenue is nice. Recurring income smooths out the feast-or-famine cycle of client work.
But that's not the real value.
The real value is what products teach you. And what they teach you is worth more than the revenue they generate.
When you build your own product, you live with your decisions. That database schema you shipped "good enough"? You'll be maintaining it in six months. That monitoring you skipped because the timeline was tight? You'll regret it at 3am when something breaks. That authentication flow you copied from a tutorial? You'll rewrite it when it doesn't scale.
Client work lets you escape your mistakes. You ship, you invoice, you move on. Products don't let you escape. Products are feedback loops with teeth.
I've become a better technical consultant since we started building products. Not because I read more blog posts or took more courses. Because I've felt the consequences of shortcuts. When I tell a client "don't skip the API versioning, you'll regret it," I'm not guessing. I'm remembering the week I spent migrating VeloCalls endpoints because we didn't version from the start.
Embarrassing? Sure. Useful? Extremely.
That's not something you can fake. Clients sense it immediately.
What This Means If You Run an Agency
So what do you actually do with this? Three things.
Start with your own pain. Don't build a product for some imaginary market. Build something you need. We built JustAnalytics because the existing observability tools were either too expensive, too bloated, or too privacy-invasive. (GA4 + Sentry + Datadog + Pingdom bills add up fast.) We use it ourselves every day. That means we're our own first customer, our own QA team, our own feature-request backlog. The product gets better because we need it to get better. We covered similar thinking in our lessons from building 9 SaaS products.
Use the same stack as your client work. This is crucial. Your products should share infrastructure with your agency's projects. Same deployment pipelines, same monitoring, same databases. We run everything on Railway and Cloudflare with Postgres as the primary datastore. Every improvement to the infrastructure helps both products and clients. Every client project teaches us something we bring back to products. It's not extra work — it compounds.
Treat it as a portfolio, not a lottery ticket. Most indie hackers are swinging for home runs. One product that explodes. That's fine if you're a solo founder with nothing to lose. But as an agency, you want a portfolio. Some products will make money. Some will break even. Some will just be useful internally. The value isn't in any single product — it's in the aggregate capabilities you build. Eight products means eight sets of problems solved, eight architectures designed, eight production systems maintained. That's the resume that wins clients.
A Prediction for 2027
By end of next year, the question "what products have you shipped?" will be standard in agency evaluations. Not universal — but standard among technical buyers. The agencies that can't answer will lose deals to agencies that can.
Frustrating if you're starting from zero? Absolutely. But that's the game now.
I'm betting on this hard enough that we're doubling down on product development at VDL. Not reducing client work — but making sure we always have active products in the portfolio. Always shipping, always learning, always stacking up proof that we know what we're doing.
Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe clients will keep hiring agencies based on portfolios of other people's work. Maybe the pure service model will stay viable forever.
But I don't think so. The market is shifting. The agencies that shift with it will win. The ones that don't will find themselves competing on price with offshore shops and AI tools.
I know which side of that I'd rather be on.
(And yeah, I'm probably biased. I run a studio. Take this with the appropriate grain of salt.)
Frequently Asked Questions
How does building products make you a better agency?
You stop guessing and start knowing. When you've shipped your own SaaS, you've felt the pain of bad architecture decisions at 2am. You've debugged production issues with real users waiting. You've made tradeoffs between shipping fast and building right. That experience changes how you advise clients — you're not repeating blog posts, you're drawing from scars.
Won't products distract from client work?
Only if you let them. The trick is treating products as infrastructure, not side projects. They share your agency's tech stack, your deployment pipelines, your monitoring. Every improvement to a product improves your agency's capabilities. Every client project teaches you something you bring back to products. It's a flywheel, not a distraction.
What's the minimum viable product portfolio for an agency?
One internal tool you use daily. Not a fantasy product — something that scratches your own itch. Maybe it's a client onboarding system, a proposal generator, or an uptime monitor. The bar is: would you pay for this if someone else built it? If yes, you've got the seed of a product.
How do you balance client deadlines with product development?
Products get the scraps — but consistent scraps. Two hours every Friday. One weekend per month. The constraint forces focus. You can't build everything, so you build only what matters. Client work pays the bills and funds product development. Products build long-term equity and make you better at client work. Neither starves the other.
Follow the Studio
Velocity Digital Labs is a multi-product studio building 8 active SaaS products with a 1-founder + 1-manager + N-AI-agents structure. Receipts, dollar-signs, cap-table-honest. No VC platform-play — just shipping.