March 31st, 2009 by John Reeve

It is becoming more common now for service companies, like our own Pelago, to launch a web-based product built from their business experience. In our case we built Intervals, hosted project management software for service companies — web designers, graphic designers, marketers, PR firms, IT companies, and anyone else who bills by the hour.

Why would a company want to be both a product and a service company? Why would we want to split our time between developing, supporting, and marketing a product, and maintaining working client relationships? We have some pretty good reasons.

We want to share our business experience with others

Having been a web design & development agency for the last nine years, we have encountered just about every situation you can think of. We’ve had successes, failures, and plenty of questionable experiences that fall somewhere between the two. But we got through them all and the “how” is what is important. We’re not looking to monetize that knowledge with books and white papers. We just want to help other businesses like ours experience the same successes and avoid similar pitfalls. It’s rough being a small business, and even rougher to manage one. Intervals is a culmination of those experiences. Each feature was built with our past experiences in mind. The result is a web-based project management application that is extremely and intentionally purposeful for small creative businesses and other similar businesses who are familar with the struggles of managing several projects and billing by the hour.

We want to keep our heads in the game

We’ve gotten this far as a small business, but there are still many challenges on the road ahead. Creative small businesses are going to continue to evolve, especially in this economy, and we want to evolve as well. By maintaining a handful of selective clients we can continue performing the work, all the while managing it with our own product. The ongoing process of web design & development keeps our minds fresh and enables us to evolve Intervals, adding new features and enhancing existing ones, as we encounter new experiences with clients. We want to be a company that offers a product that we know inside and out, and what better way to do that then by being in the trenches with our own customers.

We want to keep our creative minds working

Intervals is a great product to work on. It’s been fun and challenging for all of us here at Pelago. But we’ve also had the opportunity to work with a selective group of clients in a symbiotic relationship. Often times the creative challenges they bring to us have some overlap with Intervals and we are able to engage the client in a more enthusiastic manner knowing that the work we do will be applicable to our product. In addition to client work, we just love designing and developing web sites and other web related tools. Our sidecar projects are a result of our love for tinkering, something we hope to do even more of this year. By keeping our minds sharp we are able to stay on the leading edge as we develop Intervals, maintain great client relationships, and continue making small contributions to the web-o-sphere.

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