Ask HN: Who's running a profitable productized service?
What's the service? What are you generating? What's your biggest takeaway?
The service is competitor product monitoring. I essentially get recordings of competitor products and highlight any changes since the previous recordings. It's common for product managers etc to check what their competitors are up to, so this saves them time and ensures they don't miss anything.
Or people?
What I'm generating is improved skills & results in terms of data processing for the team, accelerated ETL workloads or "onboarding" on new ETL.
My biggest takeaway is that it's great to have both a sellable toolbox & a closely related consulting offer, because the components are nurtured by my consulting experiences and the reverse is also true. My efforts are fairly aligned together, which is great.
Before starting that, I made sure to be clear on IP and build a contract which makes me keep ownership & IP of the code I write & adapt, all while apportioning rights fairly for my consulting clients to use.
they are not: apps, saas, products (books, courses,..), fixed bids on custom projekts or anything you bill by the hour.
a productized service is:
something you do very well, has a very narrow and fixed scope, you normally would bill this by the hour. think of it like writing a custom proposal but sell it to anyone at the same price.
some examples:
- i change the car oil for x usd.
- checking a website for responsiveness and show you the biggest mistakes and how to fix them for x usd. (website teardown)
- a/b testing an online shop to increase conversion by 5%
i myself am in the middle of turning my freelance sysadmin/devops business into a productized service, so i am eager to hear what ppl on hn had success with - and what did not work out for them.
a great ressource on this topic is pretty much anything Jonathan Stark is publishing: https://expensiveproblem.com/ and http://www.ditchinghourly.com/
My training service qualifies. It's private on-site training; with a small but growing course catalog. After a couple of false starts, I've priced it to guarantee profitability: I take into account my time off regular work (initially salaried, and now hourly-billed consulting), travel expenses and student materials.
List price is 3K per day plus 2K admin fee. My last sale was 5K for a day of training on GitLab CI. My biggest sale was 25K for two one-week classes on configuration management.
Productizing my service allowed me to streamline sales -- I don't have to think about how much to charge -- and it guarantees profitability.
I need to learn/do more marketing and sales to get to 6 figures. This is still "hobby" grade, income wise. (Can't support a family on it!)
It's probably because the deliverable is hard to narrow down. Whenever I see examples of productized service businesses, it's something that provides relief for an on-going pain or has a clear deliverable.
Examples of the former: A/B testing, App After Care, Dan Norris' Wordpress support, FB / Google Ad management
Examples of the latter: Design a thing and deliver it to you, Write a blog post/do content, SEO.
Anybody have any luck approaching doing a productized service as a developer?
I think I'm approaching it wrong. I think what it should look like is that you have a 'product' or set of components built and you do a little bit of customization for each client and deliver it.
Web page screen shots as a service.
My biggest take away is that Hacker News is typically not my target market. I don't think I have ever converted HN user into a paying customer.
While "Capture full-size or full-height screenshots" is likely a large selling point for less-technical users, I would initially close the tab right after thinking it was yet-another-make-screenshotting-fullpage-websites-easier-tool for less technical users. The thinking for Firefox users probably goes "Why would I pay for `screenshot --fullpage`" or for many others, "Why would I pay for what is essentially Sharex?"
They likely ignore the automation parts of the service, because they aren't making it that far into your marketing:
>store them, serve them, and make sure they stay fresh and updated.
Just my $0.02 for why you probably don't get any HN users. I think your marketing is better as-is catering to either the less-technical crowds or the technical-crowds that make it far enough in your marketing than if you changed it to market towards technical people who make assumptions after reading one feature. :)
Source: rolled my own screenshot-diffing webdriver service
You would be amazed at what the average person considers hard. For example, the idea of converting a repeatable calculation into an Excel worksheet is regarded as arcane black magic by a fraction of the professional population.
Automating a repetitive task with Excel macros? Whoa there, cowboy... Gonna have to get IT involved...
It's a niche site for printing panorama photos.
Profit under 1k/month.
It's been doing well, with over $80k made last year.
Biggest takeaway is that packaging a service like a product doesn't just make things easier for the service provider, it's actually a much better/smoother experience for the customer.
Profitable, and 80k revenue, I presume? (Original question asked whether profitable, but these kinds of discussions often mention revenue.)