Why we take four clients a year

We get asked this often. “Four clients a year is a strange number. Why not scale up?” The honest answer is that scaling up gives you optionality you didn’t need at the cost of attention you did.

Most software work we love doing has a specific shape. A founder, an operator, or a CIO walks in with a real problem. We sit with it. We try the wrong thing once, learn, try the right thing, then ship. Then we iterate beside them for months. That shape doesn’t parallelise well.

What four lets us do

• Reply to a Slack message within an hour, most days.
• Hold the whole client’s system in our head, not in a wiki.
• Refuse work that doesn’t fit, without rationalising.
• Compound across the year instead of rebuilding context every sprint.

What four costs us

We turn down work we want to do. We don’t take retainers we’re not sure about. We say “not this quarter” a lot. The trade-off is real — but it’s the trade-off we want.

If you’re thinking about working with us, the right thing to do is just ask. If we’re full, we’ll tell you. We won’t string you along.