At MTechZilla, we don't talk about our founding story often enough. Today, our founder and CEO Sharvin shares the real version - the early struggles, the mistakes, and what it actually took to build a 30-person engineering team with a 98% client retention rate.
I started MTechZilla in 2021 with no clients, no team, and a theory that most software agencies were broken in the same way. Five years later, we're a 30-person engineering team serving clients in the US and Western Europe, with a 98% client retention rate and our longest engagement running past four years.
This is not a "how I 10x'd my business" post. A lot of things went wrong. I want to talk about those too.
The Gap I Couldn't Stop Thinking About
Before starting MTechZilla, I was writing technical articles for freeCodeCamp and building a following on Twitter. The articles brought inbound interest - people read a deep-dive on React or Node.js, saw I knew what I was talking about, and reached out about projects.
What surprised me was the pattern in those conversations. Founders kept telling me the same story: they'd hired an agency, got burned on quality or communication or both, and were looking for someone who actually understood their codebase - not just billed hours against it.
One founder told me he'd gone through three agencies in eighteen months. Each time, the sales pitch was great. Each time, the senior engineers from the pitch disappeared after the contract was signed and got replaced with junior developers he'd never met. He was spending more time onboarding new agency devs than building his product.
The problem wasn't that there were too few agencies. There were plenty. The problem was that most of them ran a body-shop model. They'd throw developers at your project, rotate people out when someone better-paying came along, and leave you training someone new every few months. The client ate the cost of that churn, even though the agency created it.
I thought there had to be a better structure. That's what MTechZilla was built around: dedicated teams that stay with a client for the long haul, not temps you have to re-onboard every quarter.
Year One Was Rough
I won't sugarcoat it. The first year was mostly me figuring out what didn't work.
Finding clients was hard. I had some inbound from my content, but not enough to build a real business around. Cold outreach felt unnatural to me - I'm an engineer, not a salesman - and the first few attempts were bad. Generic pitches, no targeting, low response rates. I'd send a hundred LinkedIn messages and get three replies, two of which were "not interested." The third would ghost after one call.
What eventually worked was leaning into what had gotten me the initial interest in the first place: writing. I kept publishing technical content, kept being visible on Twitter, Linkedin, and slowly the inbound picked up. Not fast enough for my liking, but enough to keep going.
The lesson was that for a technical founder, your credibility is your distribution channel. Nobody cares about your agency's homepage. They care whether you know what you're talking about.
Hiring was harder. I needed strong engineers who were also good communicators, because our clients were American and European founders who expected to talk directly to the people writing their code.
A lot of Indian dev shops hide behind project managers and ticket queues. I wanted our engineers on calls, in Slack, part of the client's daily workflow. Finding people willing and able to do that took longer than I expected.
The first five hires were make-or-break. Two of them are still with us. The other three taught me what to screen for differently: not just technical ability, but the kind of ownership mindset where you push back on a bad product decision instead of just writing whatever ticket lands in your queue.
I started paying attention to how candidates asked questions during interviews. The ones who just wanted to know the tech stack and the salary were usually not the right fit. The ones who asked about the product, the client, the timeline - those were the people who'd treat the work like it mattered.
The Turning Point Was Staying Long Enough to Get Good
For the first year and a half, everything felt like a cold start. New client, new domain, new codebase, new context to absorb. We were doing fine work, but we were always in learning mode, never in flow.
The shift happened when a few of our early clients stuck around. One engagement—a Swiss eMobility platform - has been running for over three years now. That kind of continuity changes what you can deliver. When your team has been inside a codebase for years, not months, the speed and judgment compound in ways that are hard to explain to someone who's only experienced the agency sprint-and-handoff model.
There's a thing that happens around the six-month mark with a client. Your engineers stop needing to ask "why is it built this way?" because they were there when it was built. They know the tradeoffs, they know the tech debt, they know which parts of the system are fragile and which are solid. That institutional memory is worth more than any documentation. And it only exists if people stay.
We saw the same thing repeat across different industries. The longer we worked with a client, the more domain context our engineers absorbed, the better the decisions got, and the fewer things we had to ask about. We've ended up building serious depth in areas like EV charging infrastructure, travel and hospitality tech, and fintech - not because we decided to specialise from a slide deck, but because clients in those spaces stayed and the work kept getting more complex.
We work across a lot of industries - EV, Travel and Hospitality, Real Estate, marketplaces, and more. The common thread isn't a vertical. It's that we're built for founders who want an engineering team that learns their business deeply and sticks around, not one that disappears after an MVP.
Building a Team That Actually Stays
I talk a lot about client retention because it's our headline number. But behind that number is a less visible one: engineer retention. You can't keep clients for years if you're cycling through developers every six months.
Early on, I made the mistake of thinking competitive salaries would be enough. They're not. Engineers leave agencies in India for the same reasons they leave anywhere else - they get bored, they feel like a cog, or they don't see a path forward. The body-shop model makes all three problems worse because you're a "resource" assigned to whoever's paying that month.
Our pod model fixes some of this by default. When you're on a dedicated team for one client, you're not bouncing between random projects. You own something. You see the product grow over months and years. You have context that makes you more valuable, not just more busy.
But the structure alone isn't enough. We also had to be honest about what kind of company we are. We're not a startup with equity upside. We're not Google with free lunches and campus bikes. What we can offer is interesting work on real products, direct relationships with founders, and enough autonomy that an engineer can make actual decisions - not just close tickets.
For a certain kind of engineer, that's a better deal than a bigger paycheck at a company where they'll never talk to a user.
We also invested in hiring well, which meant hiring slowly. We get 1,600 to 1,800 applications per job post. We could fill roles in a week if we wanted to. Instead, we run a multi-stage process - internal interviews first, then assessment, then client-facing panels - because a bad hire doesn't just cost us money. It costs the client trust, and trust is what the whole model runs on.
How We Keep 98% of Our Clients
I'm aware that 98% client retention sounds like a marketing number. So let me explain what's behind it, because it's not one thing.
We use a dedicated pod model. A client gets an assigned team - two to six engineers depending on the engagement - and that team stays with them. Not for a sprint. For years, in some cases. Our average client engagement is about 3.5 years, which in this industry is unusual. Most agencies measure engagements in months. We call them "dedicated teams" because that's what they are - your team, embedded in your product, for as long as the work makes sense.
We price for commitment, not transactions. Our pod pricing starts around $5,500/month for a lean MVP team and goes up from there. It's a monthly commitment, not a per-ticket billing model. That means we're incentivised to make the relationship work long-term, not to inflate scope on individual tasks. When you bill by the hour, you're rewarded for things taking longer. When you bill by the month, you're rewarded for things going well.
Engineers talk to clients directly. No game of telephone through layers of account managers. The person writing the code is the person on the standup. Clients know their engineers by name. When something goes wrong - and things always go wrong - the conversation is direct, not filtered through someone reading off a Jira board.
We don't oversell and then underdeliver. I've been on the client side of a sales process where the agency wheeled out a CTO and two senior architects for the pitch, then staffed the project with mid-level developers I'd never seen before. We don't do that. If you meet an engineer in the sales process, that engineer is working on your project.
We fire ourselves when it's the right call. Twice, I've told a client that what they needed wasn't a dev team - it was a product rethink, or a hire, or a pivot. That cost us revenue in the short term. Both times, the client came back later with a project that was a better fit. Trust is worth more than a contract.
What I Got Wrong
I took too long to realise that retention was our real growth engine. I spent the first year chasing new logos when the smarter move was making existing clients so happy they referred us to everyone they knew. Most of our best client relationships started as introductions from someone we'd already worked with. If I could redo year one, I'd spend less time on cold email and more time making our first three clients absurdly successful.
I also underestimated how much time sales would take. I thought good work would speak for itself. It does, eventually. But "eventually" doesn't pay salaries in month four. I should have invested in outbound earlier and more seriously. We're fixing that now - building a real sales engine with dedicated people handling outreach - but it cost us growth time I won't get back.
And I held onto a few early hires too long out of loyalty. When someone isn't the right fit for the role, keeping them hurts the person and the team. The person knows they're struggling. The team knows it too. Having the conversation early is kinder than letting it drag on for months.
I learned to have that conversation faster, but I wish I'd learned it sooner.
One more: I underpriced us in the beginning. I was so afraid of losing deals that I quoted rates that left almost no margin. That meant we couldn't invest in better tooling, better hiring, or better ops. Pricing is a confidence game, and confidence comes from knowing what you deliver is worth what you charge. It took me about eighteen months to get comfortable with that.
What I'd Tell a Founder Shopping for a Dev Agency
If you're evaluating agencies right now, here's what I'd ask them:
Ask who will actually write your code. If the answer is "we'll assign the right resources," that means they don't know yet, and the person you meet in the sales process won't be the person on your project. Push until you get names.
Ask about team turnover on their client accounts. If they won't give you a number, that's the number.
Look at how long their client engagements last. An agency that's worked with a client for three years has absorbed domain context you can't replicate in a kickoff meeting. Ask whether they've done repeat work in your space - not because specialists are always better, but because context compounds.
Ask about their pricing model. Hourly billing creates bad incentives. Monthly retainers or pod-based pricing means the agency is incentivized to be efficient and deliver value, not to drag things out. Understand what you're paying for and how it aligns with what you actually need.
Check if they've been covered or featured anywhere. Not because press means they're good, but because it means someone outside their marketing team was willing to vouch for them. We were featured on Starter Story and appeared on the MobileAppDaily podcast - that kind of third-party visibility is hard to manufacture.
Where We Are Now
MTechZilla is 30+ engineers, based in India, working with clients across the US and Western Europe. We run on a dedicated team model and we've built deep experience across various industries. Our longest client has been with us since nearly the beginning.
I still write code sometimes. I still take sales calls. I still make mistakes. But the thing I'm proudest of isn't a revenue number - it's that we've built something where engineers want to stay, clients don't leave, and the work is actually interesting.
If you're a founder who needs a dedicated engineering team that learns your business and sticks around, we should talk.