What service to productize: the one you repeat.
To decide what service to productize, sort the last twelve months of work into three piles. Use the most repeated, most profitable and most painful. Then look for overlap, because repeated and painful is usually your sweet spot.
Three piles from your own records.
Open invoices, project folders or a year of sent email, whatever you actually have. Then sort what you delivered into repeated, profitable and painful. Painful means you still do it by hand. Repeated means you have already learned how. So the overlap is where you find repeatable client problem patterns worth packaging. That overlap is your first filter for what service to productize.
How many times is enough.
A practitioner rule says to productize after five clients, or five to ten solutions of one problem. However, that number comes from practitioners, not any study, and nobody has validated it. Still, the reasoning holds. With fewer than five, whatever you package is a guess wearing a price tag. The author noticed at five, eighteen months in.
Use their words to choose what service to productize.
Write down the sentence your clients use when they ask you. Use their words, not your description of the work. For example, the author's request was six words long, heard a dozen times. Then pick your rung, choosing the fixed-scope, fixed-price, named version unless you have a strong reason. It is faster, and it uses what you already know.
Choose what service to productize tonight.
Search your sent folder and copy the request sentence clients repeat most often.
Sort last year's projects into repeated, profitable and painful piles on one page.
From the book.
There is a rule of thumb in this trade that you should productize once you've solved the same problem five to ten times. Let me be straight about that number. It comes from practitioners rather than from any study, and nobody has ever validated it. The reasoning underneath it is sound enough, though, because fewer than five and you haven't yet met the ways it goes wrong, which means whatever you package is a guess wearing a price tag.
I Want to Start a Business but I Don't Have Money, chapter 8: The service to product pivot
Questions about what service to productize.
How do I know what service to productize?
Look for work that is both repeated and painful. That overlap means you know it well and still do it by hand.
Is five clients a proven threshold?
No. It comes from practitioners rather than any study, though the reasoning behind it is sound.
Which rung should you choose first?
Pick the fixed-scope, fixed-price, named version of what you already do. It is faster and uses what you know.
Read the whole chapter.
This lesson covers one section of chapter 8, “The service to product pivot”. The book goes further, with the full evidence, the stories and every exercise.
Lessons in this chapter.
- 01 Consultant stuck trading time for money: why it stalls.
- 02 Service to product model: build for one, sell to all.
- 03 Productized service vs product: pick the right rung.
- 04 Basecamp origin story: one year versus six.
- 05 What service to productize: the one you repeat.
- 06 Why side products never launch: two clocks at once.
- 07 Productizing pitfalls: three things that break.