Hi – Luke here. I'd like to explain a little about why Luna exists.
The hardest part about running a WordPress agency is engineering. You might have an amazing creative team, brilliant designers, talented social media marketers… and you might even have some on staff devs who know their way around Elementor like it's nobody's business.
But at the end of the day what your agency is (hopefully) going to keep encountering is work that require custom development. Those jobs that go beyond your standard template, and begin to require a more complex engineering effort.
And while it's possible to do this with an in-house engineering team, or by hacking together a few plugins with what feels like digital duct tape, every single job is going to involve discovery, technical spikes, and a lot of time and focus. It's really hard to do well.
I've been involved in the WordPress agency game since the early days, and I've encountered it time and time again. You start a dev team, maybe with a lead dev. You tread water long enough to put some processes in place, and then WordPress changes, or your lead dev resigns, or new engineers bring different ideas about what the right approach might be.
Constantly having to manage the talent / solution cycle is a constant stress. That's not to say you can't figure it out – but it's a very different type of work than the creative design, branding, and marketing solutions that WordPress agencies do so well.
So the solution is simple: You outsource your engineering.
And one approach (very common in the agency world) is that you outsource it offshore, cheap. To be fair, you can get some decent work out of India or Poland these days – but those developers don't charge the same rates as the more budget options. At the end of the day, you always get what you pay for – and you don't want to be shipping rubbish code.
And besides, offshore dev teams are really just trading one problem for another. Instead of struggling to make the most of an internal team, you're running into translation and communication problems, or having to employ a project manager to keep everything on schedule.
So where do you outsource your engineering, then? You know where this is going, I suppose. I don't really want to be giving you the song and dance here, but I really do think that what I'm saying should come across as common sense to any agency owner.
You outsource to an engineering team who knows what they're doing. You outsource to an engineering team who's going to do it right the first time. You outsource to an engineering team that is going to reflect well on your business.
Whether you're referring your clients directly to Luna, or whether we're working by proxy, you want the work to reflect well on your agency. You can't afford to ship a mess. You can't afford to ship code that is a pain in the ass to maintain. You might be able to afford the extra 3 weeks it takes to onboard a new developer into a spaghetti code of a project, but who wants that? (Not the new developer, that for sure!)
And if you're outsourcing to a team that specialises in WordPress engineering, you shouldn't expect any run-of-the-mill, mid-level WordPress devs. You should be getting top-tier talent. When I say top-tier, I mean engineers who are active contributors to WordPress. Engineers who are training and mentoring. Engineers who are not only coding to the standard, but part of the conversation that decides what the standards are in the first place.
And it turns out that this engineering agency doesn't really exist. I mean, it sort of exists, in some places, if you have enterprise clients with multi-million dollar projects. But for most agencies, the ability to outsource to a team of world-class WordPress experts is not particularly accessible.
So that's why we started Luna. That's the gap in the market that we're here to address. Luna is a WordPress engineering agency. We spend a lot of our time contributing WordPress Core – not only out of a sense of obligation to maintaining the commons, but also because it's the best way of learning, keeping up-to-date, and having access to important conversations about the future of WordPress. And when we're not contributing to WordPress, we're helping WordPress agencies deliver world-class engineering, on time and on budget.
Luke
If you've got a project in mind, we'd love to help you make it happen.
hello@byluna.co