I'm David Hart, Co-Founder and COO of ScreenCloud and other tech businesses, AMA!

[davidhart]

@naren

Hey David,

Thanks for doing this AMA.

I can relate to your detailed blog post on transitioning from an agency to a product company — I have been trying to do the same and been fairly successful in cutting down on taking up new work. However, I’m yet to make the complete transition. In this context, I have two questions:

1. If you had not sold the agency business, do you see yourself running it on the side perpetually by finding someone to lead it full-time?
2. How did you manage to say goodbye to your agency customers? In particular, the customers who had stayed with you for a long time (2+ years).

Thanks!

Regards,
Naren

Hi Naren

Great questions.

1. Honestly? No. You may not be running it, but if it’s yours, you will still get dragged into it. You have to rip the bandaid off and just commit to your new life. If we hadn’t sold it, we would have closed it down - but that would have been much harder. For a long time we could do both, but I can see now how wrong we were to imagine that would ever work. Mark, my co-founder said to me once when we were trying to do everything in tandem “imagine if all we had to think about was ScreenCloud, how much damage we could do”. At the time that really resonated with me - and he was right. Once we made the jump we never looked back (other than to say - we’re so glad we’re not doing that anymore).

2. We did two things: for the smaller customers who only really wanted us for bits of maintenance, we found a good, small agency who were willing to take them on. We didn’t ask for any payment: we just wanted to make sure that nobody was left in the lurch. For the larger ones, we explained what was happening and I had a lot of meetings where I was present just for reassurance rather than actually doing any work. So, for about 1-2 months, for the bigger clients, I would go along to the occasional meeting until I wasn’t needed any more. It was important to us that loyal clients weren’t suddenly dumped. I think we did a good job on that - well as good a job as we could.