Building My Own Productized Service Business: Day 1 (initial ideation, naming, logo & site design)
Disclaimer: This is part of the daily update series on my site called BMOPSB (Building My Own Productized Service Business) where I document my journey into (you guessed it) building my own productized service business.
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Productive first day! Let’s get into it.
Brainstorming my idea
After tearing through endless example lists of productized service businesses, I had hit a wall.
Each list had some recurring models in them that I could run with: design-on-demand, leads-on-demand, copy-on-demand, etc, but none of them were directly inspiring me.
Of course, working from one of these more popular models would likely have the best chance of succeeding. Market demand, feasibility, and benchmarking numbers had already been figured out.
But in the back of my head, I knew that I had tried to start a copy-on-demand service at one point, and just wasn’t interested enough to follow through.
I wanted to come up with something I felt more passionate about. An idea that I’d have more ownership towards, even if it hadn’t been validated yet.
… ill-advised I know.
This shifted my mind towards Evergreen Contest Marketing. A unique idea I had brainstormed up a while ago. I still can’t stop thinking about it, so let’s productize this and give it a shot.
Why Evergreen Contest Marketing? A few reasons:
- Contests are the most effective form of interactive content, something which is only trending upward in interest.
- Making them evergreen offers clients with a machine, and the business with recurring revenue.
- It’s something I believe can actually help many businesses grow.
To validate the idea a smidge, I hit the mean streets of Fiverr.
There, I found a list of people offering contest marketing and management services. After some added research, and thinking on the idea more pragmatically, I think I can make it work.
Either way, let’s keep moving forward. No analysis paralysis here 🙅♂️
Deciding on the name
This was an easy one for me.
Back in 2017, when I was first starting Lime Maids, I read a solid piece of naming advice. This was in a Reddit post written by Launch27 founder, Rohan Gilkes.
The advice was simple. Essentially, go with: 1/2 functional and 1/2 sexy.
In the case of Lime Maids, this was 1/2 Maids and 1/2 Lime. For my productized service, I’ve decided on ContestKoi.
1/2 Contest for functional and 1/2 Koi for… sexy?
Whatever. Let’s keep moving.
A quick search on NameCheap and… yup its available. I went ahead and bought that for $6.06 (thank you for the nice discount, Honey).
Selecting site theme
From the start, WordPress has been my go-to CMS for many reasons (more on that another time). In the case of this project, we’ll keep that pattern going.
Though I love building on WP from a blank canvas (usual stack is Elementor Pro + Hello Theme), I decided to keep the process quick and go theme-based.
I’ll reinvest into something more custom if this pans out well.
After some browsing on Themeforest, I chose to go with the Stratus Theme.
It’s well-designed, built on Elementor, affordable, and has that SAAS look to really push the productized component of the business.
Let’s toss it in the cart, and move onto the next one.
Making a logo
My process for this has gotten pretty bare bones.
I’m not a graphic designer, and don’t pretend to be. So, to keep it easy on the wallet, I used the tried and true ‘icon + name’ method.
For the icon, I went onto TheNounProject, and found a nice Koi fish graphic.
For the name, I hopped onto Canva and typed out ‘ContestKoi’.
Then I put the icon next to the name, took a screenshot of everything together, removed the background, and voila!
To see what I ended up with, read the post on my site (link below).
Good enough to start 👍
Begin setting up site
Well… I had planned to give my brain a bit of a break and save this for Monday, but I couldn’t resist.
The shiny theme was already paid for, so why not go ahead and brand it up?
For this portion of the day, I mostly re-designed the ‘SaaS 2‘ page of Stratus to match the logo colors.
To explain the USP a bit better, I added, removed, and redesigned some content blocks. Finally, I tossed in some new iconography and wrote filler copy.
The copy is coming along nicely right now, though I worry that I’m moving too quickly on it.
To make sure I don’t waste a pretty page on bad copy, I’ll probably take a moment in the near future to outline and re-write most of it.
Next steps
Even though today was productive, there’s still loads left on the list to get done.
My biggest short-term goal is to nail down the sales copy and language better.
Financial report
Total Spent: $71.19
Domain Name: $6.06
Theme: $65.13
Total Earned: $0
Question of the day
To help me out, and keep you engaged, I’d like to get into the habit of asking a question at the end of every day.
Today’s question: What are some strong examples, tips, and/or resources you have for writing sales copy?
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Until day two,
