Productizing your service
I will try this approach for a while
Hey, listen!
Some solopreneurs do B2C.
Some solopreneurs do B2B.
Some solopreneurs do freelancing.
And there are some solopreneurs that productize their services.
I quit my 9 to 5 job in 2023 and started freelancing for a client for 6 months.
After finishing the gig, I had saved a 1-year runaway so I decided to full time indie.
It’s been a year now and, even though I managed to be barely ramen profitable, my savings got a serious cut.
So I have three options:
Enter in monk mode and spend only for food and living, until shipping a product that “makes it”.
Accept some freelance gigs.
Productize a service.
Even I’ve been in option 1 for some months, I wouldn’t want to live like that for so many time.
Option 2 would be my last choice, since it means cutting so many time from my indie projects.
Thus, I’m going to try the third approach: sell my development service as a product.
This is a growing trend lately within the indie hacker community.
I came across this term for the first time last year, when I watched a video by Starter Story. They told how Brett was making more than $1M a year productizing his design services.
As far as I know, you can follow two approaches:
Selling your services as a subscription
Selling a closed package: a design, an MVP, etc..
I will follow the second approach: selling the development of an iOS MVP as a product.
Developing an MVP is pretty broad or generalist to be sold at a closed price.
It depends pretty much on what features the client needs and how complicated are them to implement.
Therefore, it would mean having lots of calls and meetings with clients — and I don’t want that.
However, using my boilerplate (WrapFast), I can narrow down an app type to be sold as a product: AI Identifier apps.
Why identifier apps?
It’s a great trend on the App Store since vision capabilities for AI came out.
They are easy to build, easy to monetize and the requirements are pretty defined.
Plant Identifier, Rock Identifier, Fish Identifier, Insect Identifier… there are plenty of them making insane monthly amounts:
For sure, the App Store is flooded with them and the competition is huge.
With time and patience, playing around with ASO and doing some tactics like launching for free in platforms like AppAdvice or Indie App Santa, you may climb up on keyword rankings and eventually do some decent money.
I have some indie friends on twitter doing it, like Adam Lyttle:
Or Mario, which is an expert in build and selling this kind of apps:
So, from now on, I’m going to experiment with this productized thing and see how is it going.
And, to promote this, I will be live streaming a challenge — starting next week:
“7 days, 7 apps”
I will build and publish to the App Store one AI Identifier a day during a week.
Do you think I would make any sale?
Do you have experience productizing your services?
I would love to hear from you.
See you next week,
Juanjo