Ten years. 300 projects.
Still obsessed with shipping.
Southville started in 2016 with a simple premise: build a company engineers actually want to stay at — and everything else follows. A decade later, it's still the plan.
How we got here.
No aggressive funding rounds. No pivots. Just a steady line of clients who kept coming back.
Three engineers and a spare bedroom.
Two co-founders and a QA specialist start taking freelance contracts out of a shared Lahore apartment. First client is a Shopify theme build for a US retailer. It takes a week. They ask for another.
First twenty hires.
A proper office, a proper name, and a small bench of full-time engineers. Staff augmentation becomes a real service line alongside custom builds. We set the 1-in-30 vetting bar that's still in place today.
Remote-first, permanently.
The pandemic accelerates what was already happening. We go fully remote, hire across four countries, and double headcount. Clients barely notice the change — the work keeps shipping.
The Shopify practice.
We stand up a dedicated Shopify and Hydrogen team — stores, themes, 10+ custom Shopify apps, headless storefronts on Hydrogen, checkout extensibility, and platform migrations off WooCommerce and Magento become a standing service line.
The AI practice.
We stop calling it "data science" and start calling it what it is. Our AI & ML team ships the first RAG-in-production deployments, then agentic workflows, then fine-tuned open-weight models for enterprise clients.
You, reading this.
1,000+ engineers in the talent pool, 300+ shipped projects, a 1-in-30 vetting bar, and still bootstrapped. Next chapter's being written by whoever books a call from our contact page.
Three principles. Applied daily.
We tried writing a longer list. These were the only three that survived contact with actual work.
Ship the thing.
Strategy that doesn't end in shipped code is a PowerPoint. We optimize for working software in production over comprehensive documentation about hypothetical software.
Say the real thing.
If a deadline's at risk, we tell you on Monday, not Friday. If a decision is bad, we push back with data. Sugarcoating wastes everyone's time — especially yours.
Stay boringly reliable.
Fancy process is a substitute for trust. We show up on time, send the demo every Friday, and answer Slack threads in hours, not days. That's most of the job.
The folks running the place.
Still in the code, still in client calls. Not the kind of founders you see in the slide deck and never again.
.png)
.png)
The trophy cabinet.
We don't chase awards — but here's what the work itself adds up to.