Eight years ago we registered a software studio in Silang, Cavite. The plan was to ship serious digital products from outside Metro Manila and prove that the work would speak for itself. The plan, more or less, worked. Here is the honest look back, written for anyone considering whether a Cavite-based studio is the right partner for the next thing they need to build.
The portfolio in 2025
Across the eight years the studio has shipped seventy-plus products. Healthcare platforms for clinics and dental offices. Logistics and fleet management software for transport operators. E-commerce platforms for retailers who needed more than Shopify could give them. SaaS products that started as MVPs and now serve real customer bases. AI features inside operational software where they actually pay back. The portfolio is broader than we expected when we started and narrower than it would be if we had said yes to everything.
About a third of the studio's clients have been with us for three or more years. Half have been with us for at least two. The studio's revenue from existing-client expansion is now larger than its revenue from new logos. We did not plan this. It happened because the early decision to treat engagements as partnerships, not projects, paid off slowly and then a lot.
What worked
A few things were right from the beginning and have not changed.
Strategy before code. Every engagement begins with a written thesis. The thesis sometimes ends the engagement, when we conclude the client does not need to build what they were planning. Those conversations cost us short-term revenue and earned us long-term trust. Several of our largest clients today started with a thesis that recommended they wait six months before building anything.
Fixed quotes. The fixed-quote model put pressure on us to scope carefully. The pressure was painful in the early years; the muscle it built is one of the studio's competitive advantages now. We rarely miss estimates badly. When we do, the cost falls on us, not on the client.
Long engagements over volume. We do not try to ship more projects per year. We try to ship better projects, with clients who stay. Studios that maximize project throughput end up with high acquisition costs and high churn. We have lower acquisition costs because clients refer us; we have low churn because we earn the partnership.
Based in Cavite, serving everywhere. The Cavite address has not been a constraint. Half our revenue today comes from Metro Manila clients we serve remotely and quarterly on-site. The rest comes from international clients who hire us across time zones. Cavite is where we hire, build, and live. It is not a limit on the kind of work we can take.
What almost did not work
A few near-misses are worth being honest about.
We came close to expanding the team too fast in 2019 and 2020. Inbound was strong, the pressure to scale was real, and we briefly considered hiring eight people in twelve months. We hired three instead and the studio was healthier for it. Senior engineers we cannot afford to lose stayed because the team did not grow into a manageable mess.
We considered opening a Makati office in 2022 because several clients had said they would prefer a "Metro Manila partner." We did not. We invested in an honest framing of our Cavite location instead. The clients we worried about losing did not leave. The clients we would have gained at the cost of an unnecessary office never appeared in numbers that justified the cost.
We made one specific bet on a now-defunct AI platform in 2023 that did not pay off. We were over-confident in a single vendor's roadmap. The lesson got baked into our current approach: design integrations to be swappable, never bet the studio on a single provider.
What we are doing differently in 2025
A few priorities have shifted as the studio has matured.
We publish more deliberately. The studio's blog, the AEO and GEO surfaces, and the public content map are now treated as engineering deliverables, not afterthoughts. Inbound from search and from AI search engines is a real channel.
We have expanded our marketing and social media work into proper retainers. For the first six years we resisted this. We changed our mind when it became clear that several clients wanted a single partner across software and growth, and we had the team to do it well.
We are investing in AI features as a first-class capability rather than a one-off offering. The studio's senior engineers all ship AI features regularly. We are publishing more about what works.
We are deliberately not chasing scale. The studio could hire faster. It could open offices. It could promise faster delivery by adding bodies. We have decided, again, that the version of the studio that ships better products to fewer clients is the version we want to run.
What the next eight years look like
We do not know precisely. A few things are clear.
We will keep shipping from Silang. We will keep hiring engineers who live within reach of the studio. We will keep refusing engagements that do not fit. We will keep writing about what we learn.
If the work the studio does today still has the integrity and craft of the work it did in year one when we get to year sixteen, we will count that as success. Everything else, including revenue, follows from the craft.
If you are evaluating who should build your next product, the question is not where the studio is. It is whether the studio will give you the strategy, design, engineering, and partnership that turn into a product you can grow. Ask for those. They are the things we have been working on for eight years.