how I run an agency and build products at the same time

Most people who run agencies don't ship their own products. Most people who ship products don't run agencies. I do both at the same time, intentionally. This post is about why.

The short version: agency revenue is meant to fund product development while we're working toward outside investment. The same team can do both kinds of work. That's the structural argument and it's the honest one. There isn't a romantic story underneath it.

the structural reason

Nordic Design Collective is the agency. Five products are in the development portfolio behind it, with launches spread across the next two years. Each one is a multi-month build with its own discovery, design, engineering, and go-to-market cycle.

None of those products are revenue-positive yet. Most of them won't be for months after they launch. In the meantime, the team has to eat and the build has to keep moving. Client engagements are how that happens. Every paid project shortens the runway to the next product launch.

I'm also raising outside capital. The agency side reduces how dependent the whole portfolio is on the timing of any single investor conversation. That matters more than it sounds like it should.

the honest tradeoff

The two tracks demand different things from me as the operator. Client work is reactive: timelines belong to the client, scope is bounded by the contract, and the cadence is calendar-driven. Product work is the opposite. Timelines belong to us, scope is bounded by what we decide matters, and the cadence is build-driven. Switching between them through the day is a tax that doesn't show up on any P&L but is real.

The harder one is the pipeline. Client engagements don't sign on a predictable schedule, and the team is funded out of that pipeline. Depending on something that doesn't sign on a schedule creates real stress, and I have not solved that part of it.

The third tradeoff is identity. Companies that try to be more than one thing get taken less seriously than companies that are clearly one thing. The risk of not being taken seriously is real. I don't intend for NDC to live in that ambiguity long-term.

why this works at all

Running both tracks with a team that totals about ninety hours of weekly capacity should not be possible. The reason it works is the systems layer underneath both tracks.

I have spent the last six months building an AI agent system called NORD that handles a meaningful chunk of the operational work behind both the agency and the product portfolio. Ticket generation, briefings, documentation drift, routing work to the right specialist, capturing decisions into a memory that the next session reads from. The kind of repeated, low-leverage operator work that quietly consumes a founder's day. Most of mine doesn't anymore.

I wrote on LinkedIn a while back that systems beat talent. I still believe that. Talented people produce great work. Systems produce great work consistently across people, projects, and weeks. At a small team running parallel tracks, consistency is the only way the math works.

Without the systems work, the dual-track model wouldn't be feasible at this size. It would still be possible in principle. It would also be exponentially more time-expensive for me personally, and that time is the actual constraint in the business.

where this is heading

The eventual shape is two separate entities. The agency is its own thing. The product development arm is its own thing. Each one gets a focused identity, its own go-to-market, its own team structure, and its own narrative.

That's the right resolution to the identity tradeoff above. A company built to do two things well will eventually become two companies that each do one thing well. The combined entity is a transitional structure, not a permanent one.

For now, both tracks run in parallel under one roof. The agency funds the runway. The products are the destination. The systems layer makes the parallel run feasible. That's the shape today, and I'm comfortable with it as long as I'm honest about what's transitional and what isn't.

If you're a founder running an agency and considering shipping a product, or running a product and considering taking client work to extend runway, the question worth asking is not "can both fit." Both can fit. The real questions are: do you have the systems to absorb the operational tax, and are you honest with yourself about the identity cost.

The first question is solvable with work. The second one is solvable with a plan to eventually split them apart.