How To Productize A Service Business And Earn Recurring Income
Struggling with a failing startup for 3 years, no growth while raising 2 kids, here’s what I’ve learned building an unlimited graphic design business for past 5 years.
Read it here: How To Productize A Service Business And Earn Recurring Income
Congrats on your success! How have you handled what is/isn't a reasonable request volume given the "unlimited" nature of the business? Likewise, how is churn? Do people deactivate their accounts at a high percentage after a project is done? I'm considering doing a similar thing for analytics.
Hey @blakerson, thank you for reading.
I've struggled with volume before, when customers start to ask things like "can you help do design 1, design 2 and design 3 all at one time?"
The first step is to define what you'd like to provide within the realm of "unlimited". There are things that have to be limited, but there are also areas that can be given "unlimited" access. Define that unlimited area (which is a solution to your customer's pain point) and stress on that.
For us, it means for one fixed-fee a month, you are assigned one designer, and you can ask for as many designs and revisions as you want without additional fees. It works similar to having an in-house designer. That's where the unlimited lies.
Then there are limits like time, expertise and processes. Since the customer is given only 1 designer, only 1 task can be done one at a time. If they wish to do design 2 and design 3 at the same time, they can sign up for 2 or 3 designers. We have customers who do that to expedite their urgent requests.
In general, there's still a need to spell out what the customer gets so that the right expectation is set right from the start. We still have to set the right boundaries.
We do have customers who understand this and we do have a handful who don't. Takes awhile to adjust on how to explain this to them.
For churn, yes we do have people who deactivate their accounts after a project is done. This has to do with who we reach out to when promoting our offer.
Those who tend to churn after just a month are those who are not creating lots of content that need design help. They only need, say a logo to get started, or just a website, lead magnet to get going.
If you do target people who have hired designers before, don't like to DIY and always need design help, then you won't see them churn. Right now we have more of them like this, and that helps to bring in the recurring revenue.
When starting out, we took in anyone just to test things out, and a lot of them stopped after a month.
One way to help this is to have a form with many questions. If this is something they are serious about, they will take the time to fill in the form and go on a call with you. This is one way to filter the right people.
Analytics could be an area that need ongoing help. Which are of analytics are you looking at? Great to hear more!
Wow, thank you so much for that killer reply! It's great that you're so generous with sharing your experiences and what worked well.
I'm an expert in web analytics tools like Google Analytics, Mixpanel, Adobe, etc. and work on those in high scale. The problems faced by IHers are, in comparison to my day job, similar to just needing a quick logo / website / lead magnet. That is, they're easy to solve and very reproducible. IHers just need a trained expert to do the work and/or provide guidance.
I would love to do this and give people "unlimited"-ish help on retainer (and I'm currently testing it out with one paying customer, woohoo!)
Your experiences with lead qualification is super helpful in that regard, and makes me optimistic that it's possible to do this in a sustainable fashion!
ahhhhh so excited now :D
ps - we almost need like a cabal of designers, analytics people, etc. to cross-refer and form one big indie digital agency...
Well done Marilyn, it's good to hear other peoples stories.
Hey David @astronaut, thank you for reading and your encouragement. Looking forward to reading yours :)