Product vs. Service: The Dangerous Middle for Automation Companies

Matt and Michael dive into a question many automation companies eventually face: are you building a product business or a service business—and what happens if you try to do both? Michael reflects from a corporate retreat on the tension between scaling product-driven revenue and supporting the service-heavy work that often surrounds automation deployments.

Meanwhile, Matt shares what growth pressure looks like on the integrator side. With a single customer consuming a large portion of Develop’s engineering capacity, the team is racing to hire new engineers, restructure financial forecasting, and build the systems needed to support multiple large automation builds without sacrificing delivery quality.

They also discuss pricing strategy for automation products, how operator skill level affects real-world reliability, the risks of customer concentration, and why founders often become the bottleneck again during rapid growth phases. Along the way, the conversation touches on marketing slowdowns, hiring challenges in engineering roles, ERP experimentation with AI, and the constant balancing act between execution today and building the systems needed for tomorrow.