Journey Of Starting An Agency

Journey Of Engineer Building An Agency

TLDR: This essay shares my experience transitioning from a software engineer to running a development agency, highlighting the challenges, freedoms, and key lessons learned.

It's been a while after my last essay. I've been quite busy with getting my hands dirty with building Mazeg. I have to be honest - it's quite an interesting journey. Lots of failures, lots of mistakes but what's more important - lots of realizations & learnings. For the context - i was a software engineer for 5 years before starting Mazeg and i think i have a great perspective on what are the initial steps like when an engineer starts his/her own software development agency. In this essay i want to share exactly that. More specifically - here i'll talk about what are some of the things i enjoy in building software agency.

More freedom & autonomy

You have more freedom to make technical & non-technical decisions, since you are one of the few decision makers in the company. For the people who don't like to follow structures or processes created by others - it's a heaven since one of the most resource intensive steps on initial steps for you as a founder is to build these structures & processes yourself.

Wearing Lots Of Hats Simulteniously

You have to do sales, manage your team, manage the product, write code (if you want & in some cases even if you don't want), test, maintain and what's the most important manage the business. In my opinion, this is the hardest, but at the same time most stimulating and fun part. You have to develop skills on so many verticals.

Being On The Edge Of Technology

As a new agency you have to keep up with what businesses want. Most of the time - businesses want whatever is hot on the market at the moment. For us it's AI and all the related systems. It means that apart from regular boring coding jobs, where you might need to work with bunch of legacy systems - you are on the edge of technology, keeping up with all of the newest things.

Note: This doesn't mean that you won't have to work on boring but necessary things as well, but in constrast to regular jobs here you'll for sure have to incorporate something cutting edge & get to learn it.

Learning To Do Business

One of the most crucial steps is to learn to do the business and not only code. It turns out that these 2 fields are totally different and have very little in common. The paradigm of thinking is different and it's quite hard to change the mindset.

Learning To Make People Work Together

You might think that it might be so easy to hire people and make them do stuff as a team - but while building agency, it appears to be one of the hardest parts. You'll meet different types of people, and one of your main jobs is to figure out how to make them work together. To do this you need to actually listen to the people, understand what their needs or problems and do whatever they need. Taking in mind that you need to do this potentially for every person in your company - It sounds to me that every person is your boss (Compared to the opposite view that - while building a business you are everyeone's boss)

Everyone Is Your Boss

You might think that running a business means spending your day telling others what to do while you enjoy a cup of coffee. While it’s true that I drink quite a lot of coffee throughout the day, the reality is quite the opposite—most of the time, it’s everyone else telling me what they need from me. To put it another way, your “bosses” include employees, clients, co-founders, and sometimes even random people. If your main motivation for starting a software agency is the idea of being the boss, I strongly advise against it. You might be better off pursuing a more traditional business instead.