Why Kraftware stays small on purpose

Sooner or later in a first meeting, someone asks how big Kraftware actually is. It usually comes up halfway through, right around the time they notice there's no account manager in the room. The short answer: we're small, and we chose to be.

We call it a micro agency. Bigger than a freelancer, a lot smaller than the agencies with a whole floor of developers. Below I'll explain what that model gets you as a merchant, and also where it stops. There is a limit, and you're better off knowing it up front than running into it halfway through a project.

You talk to the person doing the work

At a lot of agencies, your question makes a few stops along the way. You email the account manager, who creates a ticket for the project manager, who schedules it with a developer who has never seen your shop. If that developer has a follow-up question, it travels back the same way. A small change can easily take a week like that, and most of the week goes into passing messages along.

With us, you talk directly to the developer working on your shop. They know your codebase, know which integrations are running and still remember why we picked a certain solution last year. A technical question gets a technical answer, and it gets one quickly.

It helps internally as well. Because there are only a few of us, everyone knows what's going on with your shop. Whoever is working on your checkout also knows there's an ERP integration update planned for next week. Nobody needs a status meeting for that.

Deep in Shopware, broad in e-commerce

We work with one platform, and we know it inside out. Shopware 6 is our trade: we build custom shops on it, take over existing projects, keep shops up to date and publish our own plugins in the Shopware Store. When you spend every day in the same codebase, you learn where the traps are. Which extension point to use, why a particular update breaks some shops and not others, what the cache does when you call it the wrong way. You don't build up that kind of knowledge when Shopware is one of five platforms you offer.

Of course, a webshop runs on more than its platform. Hosting, payment providers, shipping, ERP and PIM integrations, SEO, product feeds and conversion all come with it, and we deal with those every day too. We're not the top specialist in each of those areas, but we know enough to ask the right questions and spot where your shop is struggling. When something really calls for a specialist, we'll tell you.

Less overhead, and you'll see it on your invoice

A large agency carries costs that have little to do with your webshop: a sales team, account managers, project managers, an office with a nice meeting room. All of that has to be paid for, either through a higher hourly rate or through hours on your invoice with no code behind them.

We don't have those layers. Nearly every hour you pay for goes into work on your shop. That doesn't make us the cheapest option out there, and we're not trying to be. You're paying for senior work, and next to nothing for the structure around it.

There's another side to it. Someone who already knows your shop doesn't need half a day to figure out how everything fits together before they can get started. A two-hour fix easily turns into four when the developer has to start from scratch every time.

The honest downside: there aren't many of us

A small team has a ceiling. I'm not going to pretend otherwise.

No 24/7 guarantee. Our developers work during the day, and there isn't always someone ready to jump in at night or over the weekend. For Care clients, we agree in the contract which days and hours we're available, and what happens when something urgent comes up outside those hours. But we're not a team with a developer on call around the clock.

No 90 days of work in two weeks. If you need 90 days of work done within two weeks, you need around nine developers working on your shop together from day one. We don't have them sitting on the bench. We spread a large project over a realistic timeline. That usually leads to better code, but it does need a deadline that leaves room for it.

If those two things are exactly what you need, a larger agency is probably the better fit. I'd rather say so in our first conversation than have you find out when the deadline is coming up.

How we deal with it

The downside doesn't go away, but we do what we can to limit its impact.

For production shops we work with a premium hosting provider that does offer 24/7 support on the infrastructure. If your server goes down at three in the morning, someone there is ready to pick it up. On top of that, monitoring is part of every project we take on, so we usually spot a problem before your customers do.

We're deliberate about when big releases go out. We'd rather ship on a Tuesday morning than on a Friday afternoon, and never right before Black Friday, so someone is around in the days after to follow up. And because we're not juggling dozens of clients at once, we know early on what's coming our way in the next few months. That lets us tell you in time whether something fits, or doesn't.

Who is a micro agency a good fit for?

The model works best for merchants looking for a long-term partner who want to be able to talk directly to a developer. Usually that means shops that grow step by step, rather than through one big project every three years.

If that sounds like you, I'd be happy to talk about your shop. Get in touch and we'll see whether we're a good match. And if the answer is no, you'll hear that from us too.