Why We Build Products, Not Projects

When we started Seven Hills, we had a choice to make. We could build an agency, taking on client projects and trading time for money. Or we could build an agentic product organization — creating AI-powered software that we own and operate ourselves.

We chose the latter. Here's why.

The Agency Trap

Agencies are a well-understood business model. You find clients, scope projects, deliver work, and get paid. Rinse and repeat. Many successful companies have been built this way.

But there's a fundamental problem: your income stops when you stop working. Every month starts at zero. You're constantly hunting for the next project, the next client, the next paycheck. The work you did last year doesn't compound into this year's revenue.

We've seen talented developers burn out after years of client work. They build amazing things for others but own nothing themselves. The code they wrote belongs to someone else. The product insights they gained benefit someone else's business.

The Product Studio Model

A product studio is different. Instead of building for clients, we build for markets. Instead of trading time for money, we trade products for recurring revenue.

Every product we launch is an asset that can generate revenue while we sleep. The work we did on Sentinely last year still brings in customers today. The improvements we make to StoreBlog compound over time as more merchants discover it.

This model has several advantages:

• Ownership — We own what we build. The code, the customers, the brand.
• Compounding — Good products get better over time. Revenue grows, not resets.
• Focus — We choose what to work on based on impact, not client demands.
• Learning — We see the full lifecycle: ideation, launch, growth, iteration.

The Portfolio Approach

One product is a bet. Multiple products is a portfolio.

We intentionally build across different markets and platforms. Our AI-powered SaaS products serve specific niches — CutMagic for e-commerce image editing, Sentinely for monitoring. Our Chakril Shopify apps use agentic AI to automate content and operations for merchants. BlurShield is a focused privacy utility — no AI needed, just fast reliable code.

This diversification isn't just risk management — it's learning acceleration. Every market teaches us something. The growth tactics that work for Chrome extensions are different from Shopify apps. The onboarding that converts SaaS users differs from what works for one-time tools.

These learnings cross-pollinate. A pricing insight from one product informs another. A feature pattern that works in StoreBlog might apply to InvoiceNudge.

What We Give Up

To be clear, the product studio model has tradeoffs:

• Slower initial revenue — Client work pays immediately. Products take time to find market fit.
• Higher uncertainty — We might build something nobody wants.
• No guaranteed income — There's no client writing checks every month.
• Wearing many hats — We're not just engineers. We're marketers, support reps, and product managers.

These tradeoffs are real. The first year was harder financially than taking agency work would have been. But we were building assets, not just billing hours.

The Long Game

Product studios that succeed tend to share a few characteristics:

They ship fast. Not recklessly, but with urgency. A mediocre product in the market teaches more than a perfect product in development. We aim to go from idea to launched MVP in weeks, not months.

They kill quickly. Not every product works. The ones that don't get market traction after genuine effort get sunset. We'd rather have five products with signal than ten products in limbo.

They double down on winners. When something works, it gets more attention, more features, more marketing. The portfolio approach lets us discover winners; focus lets us scale them.

Is This Model For You?

The product studio model isn't for everyone. It requires:

• Comfort with uncertainty and delayed gratification
• Ability to wear multiple hats beyond just coding
• Runway to survive while products find traction
• Genuine interest in markets, not just technology

If you're a developer who's tired of building for others and wants to build for yourself, the product studio model might be worth exploring. Start small. Build one product on the side. See if you enjoy the full journey from idea to growth.

For us, there's no going back. The ability to wake up and work on our own products, solving problems we find interesting, building things that compound — that's worth the tradeoffs.

Seven Hills Software is an agentic product organization building AI-powered SaaS and Shopify apps, alongside focused utility tools. We share what we learn along the way.