[ozim]

If you would have a SaaS product idea then you could invest in a product that will bring stable income. That is the way back to sanity so instead of going into that madness of chasing bigger contracts you invest time of employees that are on bench into building your own SaaS.

Then you keep one of employees, later maybe more, on that SaaS and slowly change your revenue mix. Then you still might get some additional projects but you always have something to spend your FTE time on. In the end you change the company profile where you chase different things than just having butts in the seats.

But that might mean you are not getting any salary for months because you have to reinvest in your SaaS idea. Of course having a viable product idea is another very important point.

Upside on the other hand is that selling viable SaaS business will be easier than selling dev shop, because dev shop only has developers. When developers quit dev shop value goes immediately to 0, with SaaS you still might have IP and paying customers.

[redis_mlc]

That's a common strategy in the West. Basecamp basically did that, and Slack was a parallel project while developing something else.

One Michigan company was doing CRUD apps on contract, wrote a nice code generator, then swiched over to using the code generator internally (not for sale) to scale up to state government contracts.

In Asia (China, Indonesia), it's common for unfunded startups to start an internet cafe for revenue/office space, then once that's operating do product or contract software development.

(Internet cafes require constant staffing, so any "profit" is mostly paid out in salaries to the owners and family.)