I've been curious about the viability of this sort of advisory retainer model for other areas. Has anybody tried something similar?
I think of it like a stripped-down agency model. From a customer perspective, you have no long-term contracts or commitments, and you can get normally cost-prohibitive expertise at a steep discount. The catch is that the execution falls squarely on your shoulders.
But for a startup with a limited budget and lots of sweat to offer, in certain areas that can be totally fine as the difficult part isn't necessarily in the building but in making sure the right thing is being built.
To the OP, I have a few questions:
1. How would you define your ToS so as to ensure profitability? I could see people taking advantage if it were all you can eat and constantly asking for answers on slightly different designs to make sure they had you making the bulk of the decisions.
2. Time=money in this case. How scaleable is this model? Or do you not plan on it scaling to a large number and would be happy if you only had a relatively small number of customers to pay the bills?
3. What would your deliverables look like? Would you provide actual sketches/comps? Detailed write-ups? Or just brief written responses to very specific questions?
4. To add to #3, if you limit it to answering questions, how will you keep user satisfaction high if you get a lot of overly broad questions/asks that you then need to push back on to keep the scope limited and profitable?
5. 24h turnaround is nice in theory, but do you really plan on being available during weekends and holidays? What if you get sick? If this is in essence a productized one-person consultancy, how do you manage expectations around that?
6. In general, what's your game plan for needy customers? If you fire them, you get a bad reputation. If you give in, you kill your margins. If you push back, you risk churn.