So, what's going on at WDDW?

Nam asked me to write a Q2 wrap-up.

It is 24 August.

Those two facts probably tell you everything you need to know about how closely I have been following our marketing calendar this year, again.

In my defence, Q2 was busy. And then Q3 started busy. And somewhere between delivering projects, growing the team, talking to clients and occasionally trying to run a company, writing about what we were doing kept moving slightly further down my list.

So rather than pretending this is still a perfectly timed Q2 wrap-up, I thought I would make it a more general update on what's going on at We Do Dev Work.

Quite a lot, as it turns out.
Again.

More people, more knowledge

The team continues to grow, and recently William and Sun joined our development team.

Hiring developers is always an interesting exercise for a software company, because adding people is relatively easy, while adding people who actually make the team stronger is much harder. We don't want to grow for the sake of putting a bigger number on the About Us page; we want people who bring knowledge, take responsibility and make the people around them better.

William and Sun are doing exactly that, and it is great to see our engineering team becoming broader and stronger.

It also means that when I walk through the office now, there are increasingly people working on projects where I have absolutely no idea what the ticket they are discussing is about.

I consider that progress.

From curry to AI

One of the things I still love about agency life is the variety.

In the same week, you can have a conversation about AI, Shopify architecture, financial software and curry.

And yes, the curry is a real project.

We recently launched a new e-commerce store for Pak Prik, which sells locally made curry products from Nakhon Pathom. It is exactly the type of e-commerce project I enjoy: there is a real product behind it, a local story and something tangible that you can actually put on the table afterwards.

Preferably with rice.

At almost the other end of the technology spectrum, we have moved into the next development phase of UniMeasureAI.

What started as an ambitious AI product is becoming an increasingly mature platform, and one of the latest additions is its Shopify integration, with the app now making its way into the Shopify ecosystem.

These are very different projects, but that is also increasingly what WDDW looks like. We don't specialise in one particular type of website or one particular industry. We specialise in figuring out what needs to be built and then assembling the right people and technology to build it properly.

Sometimes that means an e-commerce store selling curry.

Sometimes it means putting AI into a much more complex product.

Both need to work on Monday morning.

WDDW, the client of WDDW

Client work still comes first, but over the past year we have also become much more serious about building products for ourselves.

Part of that started simply as a way to keep our developers busy between projects and give them room to experiment with technologies or ideas outside the constraints of client work. Increasingly, though, some of those experiments are turning into actual products.

Thairanked is probably the best example. What started as an internal project around our love for Thailand now generates sales consistently. They are not numbers that will make our accountant fall off his chair, but people we don't know are finding something we built, using it and paying us for it. That's a pretty satisfying milestone.

Next up is Standup, the SaaS version of the task management and tracking tool we originally built for ourselves. It has become part of how we run WDDW day to day, so we decided to see whether other teams might find it useful too. There is also a commitment app on the way, built around the slightly uncomfortable idea that making a commitment should actually mean doing it.

And then there is SpotterBro, our newest experiment and probably the fastest example so far of going from an idea to a real customer. We built it as a sales and client management product for personal trainers, launched it, and welcomed our first trainer onto the platform.

None of these projects needs to become the next billion-dollar SaaS company. That's not really the point. Building our own products forces us to deal with all the things our clients deal with too: finding users, deciding what not to build, pricing something, marketing it, listening to customers and discovering that the feature you personally loved is apparently of absolutely no interest to anyone else.

It makes us better product developers because, occasionally, we also have to be our own difficult client.

WDDW, without the WDDW logo

Another development I'm particularly happy about is that we have signed two new white-label partnerships in the BeNeLux.

White-label development has quietly become an important part of our business. There are a lot of good agencies in Belgium and the Netherlands with strong client relationships, strategy, design or marketing capabilities, but they don't necessarily want to build and maintain a complete software engineering department themselves.

That's where we can fit in.

Their clients continue working with the agency they know, while our team works behind the scenes as their development team.

No WDDW logo. No need for us to be in the spotlight. Just good software delivered as part of their offering.

For someone writing an article because his marketing manager says he doesn't talk enough about the company, building a service where nobody knows we did the work is perhaps very much on brand.

Something changed for me too

There is another milestone that doesn't appear on a revenue chart or project dashboard, but for me might be one of the most important signs of how far we have come.

When I started We Do Dev Work, I had to be in Bangkok.

Not because Bangkok is a bad place to be, obviously, but because the company depended heavily on me being physically present. I was involved in almost everything: projects, clients, hiring, planning, sales, problems and probably quite a few things I shouldn't have been involved in.

That is normal when you start a company, but it is not particularly scalable.

In June, I spent time in Belgium visiting clients.

And the company simply continued.

Projects moved forward. Decisions were made. Clients were taken care of. The office did not burn down.

At least nobody told me it did.

That might sound like a small thing, but as a founder it is a pretty significant moment. Building a company isn't just about hiring more people or generating more revenue. At some point, you need to build an organisation that doesn't require you to sit in the middle of every conversation.

We're not completely there yet, and I don't think I ever want to become disconnected from what happens inside WDDW, but the balance is changing.

And I like it. Sometimes.

In September, I'll be back in Europe, spending time in both the Netherlands and Belgium. Partly for existing clients, partly to meet new people, and partly because after building stronger roots in Bangkok, it feels like the right moment to spend more time strengthening the other side of our business as well.

So if you're in Belgium or the Netherlands and we've been saying for the last two years that we should finally have that coffee, September might be a good time to actually do it.

What's going on at WDDW?

We're growing, but trying not to grow for the sake of growth.

We're adding people, but trying to keep the culture that got us here.

We're building AI products, e-commerce stores, custom platforms and increasingly working as the invisible development team behind other agencies.

And somewhere in between all of that, WDDW is becoming less dependent on its founder being everywhere at once.

For me, that last part might actually be the biggest update.

So there you go, Nam.

Your Q2 wrap-up.

Only 55 days late.

I would promise that the Q3 update will arrive on time, but after 18 months of working together, I think our marketing team deserves more realistic expectations. Let’s aim for 55 days late. Because we aim for progress over perfection.

Vincent Trienpont
CEO, We Do Dev Work