The agency trap
Most software agencies have one product: their own time. They bill hours, they deliver a scope, they move on. There is nothing wrong with that model, but it creates a particular blind spot. When your business runs on billable hours, you never have to live with the consequences of the decisions you make. You recommend a stack, someone else maintains it. You architect a system, someone else operates it.
We wanted to close that loop.
What we built and why
Rating Radar started as an internal tool. We were tracking client reviews across multiple platforms manually — Google, Trustpilot, Facebook, industry-specific directories — and the process was slow and inconsistent. So we built a system to aggregate and analyse reviews automatically, to surface trends before they became problems. We use it for our own clients. We also ship it as a standalone product, because the problem is not unique to us.
My Cookies came from watching clients lose conversions to bloated, poorly-implemented cookie consent banners. GDPR compliance should not cost you performance. We built a consent layer that is minimal, fast, and legally sound — then deployed it everywhere that needed it. The constraint of performance forced us to understand the regulatory requirements deeply, which made us better at advising clients facing the same problem.
Web Wizard is the answer to a question we kept getting: how do we get a professional web presence without the overhead of a full agency engagement? We built a template system optimised for conversions, deployable in days, fully owned by the client after handoff. It runs on the same infrastructure decisions we make for larger clients — just packaged differently.
What this changes
When you build and operate your own products, you stop having opinions about technology and start having experience with it. You know what breaks at scale because you have watched your own systems break at scale. You know what monitoring matters because you have been paged at 2am because something was missing. You know what performance optimisation is worth because you have measured it against your own conversion rates.
This makes us genuinely better at client work. Not because we are applying best practices from a textbook — because we have already made the mistakes and built the fixes. Skin in the game is not a philosophy for us. It is the actual mechanism by which we stay sharp.