---
title: The New Era of thoughtbot, inc.
teaser:
tags: news,playbook
author: Chad Pytel
published_on: 2007-02-27
---

We are excited to announce that as of February 26th, thoughtbot, inc. is no
longer a full service IT consulting company.  We are now exclusively a software
and web application development company.

For some time now, we have been pursuing (and finding!) business growth on the
development front—and the technical support side of things has made up
less and less of our business, but continues to take up much of our time.

Since day one of thoughtbot's existence, now almost four years ago, our clients,
friends, wives and business advisors have questioned our decision to remain a
full service IT firm.  Throughout that time, I have been stubbornly persistent
and held that it was possible to provide great IT service of all kinds at a fair
and profitable price, to small and medium size businesses.  While I still
believe that this is true, we believe that it is no longer the correct course
for us to pursue as a company.  Instead, with a renewed energy, we will be
focused on providing ridiculously competent development services for
organizations of all shapes and sizes.

As a business, this is a big step for us.  It will change relationships with
many of our clients, and will affect the types of new work we pursue.  On a
personal level, it's just as big - if not bigger - of a step, and the business
analysis has been coupled with an equally challenging emotional analysis.

As we made this decision, it was important to realize what we needed to do as
business owners and employees:

* Identify what we are best at and focus on that
* Identify what makes us happy and focus on that
* Identify how to maximize value to our customers and focus on that

Software development and the business consulting that comes with it are not only
things that we excel at as a company, but they are things that make us happy as
well, and that is incredibly important to us.  Because of our expertise and
because we are happy flexing that expertise, we can provide immense value to our
customers by focusing strictly on development services.

As a final note, while this is not purely a technology-driven decision - there
is no denying that Ruby and Ruby on Rails have played an incredible role in the
development of our company over the last 18 months.  This framework and the
community around it have allowed us to solidify our ideas about software
development and design methodologies, embrace and enforce best practice design
in our projects, and as result - develop excellent software for our clients and
ourselves.  Without the enjoyment we've found in the framework and its
conventions, we may be where we are today—but we would certainly not be
having as much fun now that we're here.

Stay tuned for more exciting news out of thoughtbot—we hope you'll join us
for the ride.