Building in Public as a Software Agency

Building in Public as a Software Agency sounds like strategy work, but it is mostly a series of small, unglamorous decisions made consistently. Here is the version we use with founders who need results this quarter, not a deck.

Start from the constraint, not the ambition

Every team has one real bottleneck: distribution, retention, delivery capacity, or cash. Naming it honestly is worth more than any framework, because it tells you which 80% of the plan to ignore.

The core principles

• Fewer bets, executed fully. Three half-finished initiatives beat nothing but lose to one finished one.
• Evidence over opinion. Ship something small, then argue with data.
• Short cycles. Two-week loops keep mistakes cheap.
• Write it down. Undocumented strategy becomes whatever the loudest person remembers.

A 90-day operating plan

1. Days 1–14: baseline the numbers you claim to care about.
2. Days 15–45: execute one focused initiative end to end.
3. Days 46–60: measure, cut what is not working, double the rest.
4. Days 61–90: systematise the winner so it runs without heroics.

What to measure

Pick one leading indicator and one lagging indicator. Leading tells you if the work is happening; lagging tells you if it matters. Reviewing more than five numbers weekly usually means nobody is accountable for any of them.

The mistakes we see most

• Rebuilding before understanding why the current thing underperforms.
• Copying a playbook from a company with a different distribution model.
• Optimising a channel that was never going to be big enough.
• Treating tooling decisions as strategy.

Where a partner helps

Outside help is worth it when speed matters more than headcount, or when you need someone who has shipped this before to shorten the learning curve. At Augere Labs we run this as a short engagement: audit, plan, build, measure.