Why an agency builds its own products: what we learned by being our own client

We are an agency. We make a living building websites, brands, content and software for other people. And yet, if you look at our catalogue filtered by “own brands”, you will find six products nobody commissioned: an ERP, an app for Tesla owners, a website that tells you what eclipse you will see from home, a municipal voting compass, a Catalan spell checker and a volunteering platform born during a lockdown. People often ask why. The short answer is that we do not know how not to. The long answer is this article.

When the client is you, you cannot blame the brief.

Ajudem.cat: the first one came out of a lockdown

March 2020. Everything closed, a hackathon organised by the Catalan government and i2CAT with over three hundred participants, and a simple idea: a platform connecting people who could help with people who needed it, with no money involved. Ajudem.cat was up and running by Sunday night, in Catalan, with a brand and a video. It won the Hackovid and seven thousand euros to keep developing it. It is still online, and part of its code lives on in later projects. It taught us the first lesson: a weekend with a clear goal produces more than a month with a vague one.

Hexio: the ERP we could not find

We got tired of paying for six tools that did not talk to each other and built our own. Hexio is the ERP, CRM and HR system we run the agency and all our clients on: proposals, contracts, invoicing, projects, tasks, payroll, time tracking, tickets. Over fifty modules you switch on when you need them, hosted in Europe. It is about to go on sale, and the reason we dare is that we have been using it every day for years. When your own tool fails you at nine in the morning, you fix it at five past nine.

Wattly: a bet we put our name on

Wattly is a precision app for Tesla owners: real-time telemetry, charging data, trip analysis and battery health on a single screen. We are part of the project, not just the supplier, which is why we do not let go on launch day: we make sure it works, grows and gets known. That is the difference between delivering and accompanying, and the only way to learn what happens after launch.

eclipsi.info: a personal question that went public

It started with a doubt one of us had: will the eclipse of 12 August 2026 be visible from home, or will the mountain hide it? The maps said whether you were inside the band, not what you would see. eclipsi.info answered that question for any point, using the real terrain, and on eclipse day 50,899 people used it. We tell the numbers here. The lesson was about infrastructure and communication at once: if you solve a question nobody else answers, the press calls on its own, and your server has to be ready for when it does.

quivoto and Corrector Català: civic tools

The last two share one idea: some things should exist and did not. quivoto is a voting compass for the 2027 municipal elections and an open observatory of the 947 municipalities of Catalonia, with every figure linked to its source and without telling anyone how to vote. Corrector Català is a free, open-source browser extension that brings spelling and grammar checking back to the browser after the tool half of Catalonia used went paid-only. Neither makes money. Both have taught us more about open data, privacy and product than any course.

What you learn when the client is you

The brief becomes honest. You cannot hide behind “the client was not clear”. You discover how hard it is to decide what stays out, and from then on you understand the person across the table better.

Maintenance has a real price. A living product means servers, updates, support emails and nights on call. When you pay for it yourself, you stop promising “maintenance included” lightly. We put numbers on it here.

Measuring properly hurts. Looking at the data of your own product, undecorated, cures you of counting visits as if they were customers.

“One more little thing” costs what it costs. Every extra feature we have asked of ourselves cost exactly what it would cost a client. We quote better now.

What you learn gets reused. The hosting that held up eclipsi.info is the one we offer clients. Hexio’s modules adapt to very different companies. Ajudem’s code survives in other projects. None of it would exist if we only did commissions.

What it costs

Time, above all. A product of your own competes with client projects for the same hours, and clients pay while the product does not always. Focus: it is tempting to open the seventh before finishing the sixth. And support: when thousands of people use something of yours, they write to you, and you have to answer. We say it so nobody thinks it is free: it is not, and it is still worth it.

Why we keep going

Because an agency that only executes commissions ends up knowing how to do what it is asked and nothing else. Our own products are our gym: where we test technology before recommending it, where we make mistakes with our own money before anyone else’s, and where we remember that what we do is good for something beyond invoicing. If you have an idea that should exist and does not, let’s talk: it is exactly the kind of conversation we like most.

Frequently asked questions

Do your own products take time away from clients?

They compete for the same hours, yes. We run them as one more project, with a calendar and a priority, and clients always come first. What we learn from them flows back into client work.

Can I use your products?

eclipsi.info, quivoto and Corrector Català are free and public. Hexio is about to go on sale. Wattly is a company we hold a stake in, with its own calendar. Ajudem.cat is still online.

Do you build products for other people?

Yes: that is what we call tech solutions. Web applications, integrations, automations and custom software, with the experience of having done it for ourselves first.

Why do you publish the code of some of them?

Because with civic tools you earn trust by showing how they work. Letting anyone review the code or host their own server is part of the product, not an extra.