Hounder — a ten-person agency at $2M on five or six projects a year, now spinning out its own SaaS

01The full story

Josh Northcott was a web director at a large enterprise software company, and in that job he spent years handing work to the biggest agencies and service providers in the country. What stuck with him was not the work, it was the pattern: "I always wondered why stuff didn't get done on time on budget and all those things, like why is it always a mess, like why does it suck." He and his co-founder Justin left their corporate jobs and started Hounder — he puts it at late 2016 and "about seven years now," while the host's introduction dates the launch to 2015. The firm does large web system implementations: marketing system builds, CMS work, custom design, product applications. The clients he names are Adobe, Shopify, the NHL, UL and the City of Los Angeles, and he describes the platform companies among them as clients and partners at the same time. The numbers are unusually clean for an agency. The first million-dollar year came in 2021. 2022 doubled it to $2M, after roughly 80% growth the year before. The 2023 target is $2.5M. Doing that are 10 full-time employees, 12 people in total, with no army of on-and-off contractors: "we're only growing as the demand grows." Nathan Latka does the arithmetic on air — about $200,000 of revenue per employee. The last thread is the one Josh is hardest on himself about. Seven years of enterprise projects surfaced the same problems again and again, which is the raw material for a product, and he sat on it: "I epically failed by taking us almost seven years to get there." The product, SEO Central, was in beta at the time of the interview.