An agency finishes. A product company keeps going. That one difference decides how you hire, what you refuse, and what happens to your software three years after launch.
A project has an ending. A product does not.
The clearest way to tell the two apart is to ask what success looks like. On a project, success is delivery: the scope was met, the invoice was paid, the work is done. On a product, delivery is the moment the real work starts — because now people are using it, and everything you assumed is about to be tested.
We chose the second model deliberately. CricoSoft builds and owns its products: BackTheme, CricoScore and BongoKhata. Nobody hands us a brief, and nobody signs off the final milestone. The only signal that matters is whether people come back.
It changes what you are willing to say no to.
When you are paid to deliver scope, a new requirement is revenue. When you have to live with what you build, a new requirement is a liability you will be maintaining for years. That reframing is uncomfortable and extremely useful.
So the question we ask is not “can we build this?” — we usually can. It is:
If the answer is not a clear yes, the idea waits. Not rejected, not shelved out of principle — just not yet worth the permanent cost of existing.
It changes how you build.
Code you will maintain for five years is written differently from code you will hand over in five weeks. Concretely, for us that means:
It changes what “finished” means.
None of our products are finished. They are shipped, used, and continuously shaped by how people actually behave rather than by what looked sensible in the original plan. That is not a failure to complete something. It is the job.
It is also why we are careful about what we launch. Every product we release is one we have committed to maintaining — so the decision to start is far heavier than the decision to ship.
The trade-off, stated honestly
This model is slower. It means turning down work that would pay now, carrying the cost of support indefinitely, and being judged on retention rather than delivery. It also means that when something breaks at an awkward moment, there is no question about whose problem it is.
We think that trade is worth making. Products that earn trust over time are the only ones people keep coming back to — and coming back is the only metric we have ever really cared about.