Amber Matz
You just signed a new client. In any economy, that's a relief; in this one, you needed work to begin yesterday. So it stings that you're still stuck on a detail that has nothing to do with the work itself: the client hasn't picked a hosting provider. It doesn't make sense that a decision about where the finished product will eventually live should block you from starting to build it. And you're right, it shouldn't. Shouldn't this be a solved problem? Right again. It is.
Every time your agency kicks off a new project, getting the team into a flow is equal parts exciting and an uphill battle. You need to know the hosting provider because you need the staging environments that come with it for peer review, QA, and demos. And don't get me started on the limitations there. Those environments are scarce. They’re fine for the "big" tickets and the end-of-sprint demo, but you're not about to spin one up to review a single ticket. (And scheduling that demo? That’s got its own delays and problems.)
And when you get the hosting decision, it could mean dread, resignation, or relief. Each host comes with its own tooling and process that your team has to learn. And then learn again when the platform is updated. That makes onboarding devs to a project a challenge.
You wish you could just convince all your clients to use the same host, so that you could standardize on tooling. Right destination, wrong route.
Wouldn't it be great if your agency had one consistent way to get work in front of peers, QA, and the client? An environment that works for any client, any project, any stack, any Git repo, no matter the host. Every contract. Every time. Something that keeps your whole operation moving, project after project. Excuse the pun, but maybe what you need is a boat.
You may already know that Tugboat builds a working preview of every pull request. But have you thought of Tugboat as agency infrastructure?
Picture this.
Same new client. Same relief. Only this time, you're ready to hit the ground running. You know the scope and the stack, and while the hosting decision waits (because it can), you've got the one thing you actually need to start: a Git repository.
Your team's familiarity with the stack is what won you the client in the first place, so your team lead already has a Tugboat config ready to customize and ship with the initial commit. You create a new project in the Tugboat Dashboard, authenticate the Git repo, and build that first preview. (And you’ve got the Tugboat team to help if needed.)
Your project is kicked off in earnest. Each ticket, each feature gets pushed up and opens a pull request. With Tugboat wired up, peer review stops meaning just code review. It means a working website where anyone can check out that one piece of work before it gets swept into the flow of everything else.
Maybe you've also wired up automated tests and other status checks to run on every PR. With Tugboat Plus and higher plans, you’re also getting automated visual regression testing and Google Lighthouse reports for every PR.
Early feedback is the cheapest feedback there is. It catches the misunderstanding while it's still a ten-line ticket, not a hundred merged commits and a tense conversation about who's paying for the rework.
Tugboat is agency infrastructure for every project with a Git repository. In fact, Tugboat was built by an agency to solve this very problem. Your teams don't wait for a hosting decision to get to work. Your developers don't learn a new onboarding process for every new client. Quality moves to the center of how you work, rather than sitting too close to deployment, where hot fixes and expensive rollbacks are the norm.
Standardizing your agency’s infrastructure gets your teams started faster. As work progresses, you get feedback fast, instead of waiting around for stakeholder availability. Wouldn’t you rather pay for quality development work that builds your agency’s reputation and delights your clients than delay with onboarding, sign-offs, and hot fixes? We want that for you, too.
We'd love to help your agency do what it does best: ship websites your clients love, with everyone on board before you sail. Schedule a friendly demo and chat today. No high-pressure sales. Just an honest chat about your software delivery life cycle and how it could be better.
Tell us about your project, schedule a demo, or consult with a Tugboat Technical Account Executive.
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