📜 Startup Chronicles: 📦 Productized Services - Idea
The idea of moving away from exchanging my hours for money has been on my mind for a pretty long time. I remember reading about a new format of charging for creative services a few years ago - Productized services. I have to admit, the idea sounds very appealing. Assuming all goes well, you can create a recurring income stream. What not to love?
Recently, I stumbled upon a video about one of the founders of such agency Designjoy. He briefly overviews his model, process, and of course earnings - more than a million per year. For a one-person show - unbelievable and inspiring (Youtube →)
A few days later, I found out that he was also promoting his course on how to build the same model for others. When a person is marketing themselves as an extremely successful entrepreneur with a ton of easy money flowing in, and then, they start offering a course where they share their secrets, is a huge red flag 🚩.
There have been too many stories of such “entrepreneurs” who hype the idea of how they are making easy money, but in reality, they make money on the course that promises to sell the secret (that doesn’t exist). Coffeezilla has done some great work exposing such folks.
Not surprisingly, I quickly found a few not-so-rosy comments from his agency customers and also people who purchased his course -
I’ll be honest. After watching the video, I got all pumped and excited with the idea of launching a similar service focusing on my strengths - UX design, research, prototyping, testing, etc., instead of branding, graphic design, illustrations, etc. I even jumped forward and purchased a domain, set up a WordPress site, and to save time, purchased a theme that I liked to compile the landing page that I wanted.
Sadly, I didn’t do my due diligence of doing more research about this person and how realistic such an agency/model is. After reading that Twitter thread, and some other opinions, plus analyzing further who would be the customer for UX design subscription services, I stumbled. My excitement went down and made me question if the subscription model would work for my kind of design work.
UX design is very different compared to logo, graphic, and web design which can be turned out much quicker. Does a subscription service really fit here? How many requests within a month can a company really generate? Am I overthinking this? I don’t know 🤷♂️.
So, I decided to try and test the value proposition of the subscription model, but with some experimental adjustments. Also, I want to try the package’s pricing. Experimentation is needed.
Still, I believe that going the route of “productizing” yourself is the right path for me. This design agency can be one of the ways to start building this.
As a potential marketing channel, I’ve already started thinking about how I can pivot my podcast interviews to focus on the needs of my target audience, and what content I can start creating on youtube to start bringing value to the target audience of this agency.