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.
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.