I built a SaaS app to manage my dev studio as a productized service 🏭
🤔 What do I do?
My solo-dev business is basically software as a service - as a service (I build web/mobile apps for people).
I began the process of productizing my business six months ago and the results have been really good!
Productizing has largely solved many of the biggest issues I had with doing fixed scope contracts, (uncontrolled scope creep, hourly billing punishing me for being good, matching pricing to expectations, and needing to communicate & get approval for every little change).
🏗️ Why I built Zeltta
My ADHD brain was battling to stay on top of managing projects. I was using Notion, Google Drive, Email, and Stripe but keeping all the information and context on each project was getting messy.
So over the last 4 months, I've been building and heavily using zeltta.com, an application for managing each project's roadmap, contractors, billing, and payouts all in one place 🙌
I'm super happy with it, even if I ended up being the only user it still would have been worth it lol!
📋 The core features are:
- Set up an agency account and connect Stripe for payouts
- Create projects with the roadmap, forum, files, client/contractor access & billing all built-in
- Set up productized subscription tiers & monthly billing for each project
- Pay external contractors directly in-app (they can connect Stripe to their profile)
- Let GPT4 summarize and email your clients with each week's progress
- See your MRR for each project and for your biz as a whole
🎤 Has anyone else solved this differently?
I would love to know if anyone else running an indie creative service has also struggled to keep projects organized. If so, how did you solve it?
If you run a creative service and this sounds useful to you you're welcome to give it a try at zeltta.com! - If you do, make sure to let me know how it could be better 😎
Great job! I'd love to learn more about how you transformed your offering into a software product. As a developer, I've been struggling to identify services that can be productized with concrete deliverables, and I'm envious of how designers and other service providers seem to have it easier in this regard.
Thanks! Yeah, it's much harder to break software development down into a productized service mostly because the delivery lifecycle is so much longer.
I ended up making this lifecycle itself the basis of my pricing. E.g. I've split my rates into "Active Development", "Steady Improvement" and "Stable Support" tiers. (If you're interested in trying this you can see all the details of how I've done it on my dev agency site - https://zeltta.co.nz)
I've found productizing this way to basically be a tradeoff between (a) eliminating all scoping/billing/time-tracking admin in order to spend 100% of the time actually doing useful work and (b) being able to charge more for really big jobs.
In the end, I'm happier building a more predictable and long-term focused business where I incentivize myself to build apps that succeed in the long run than trying to close and finish big jobs as quickly as possible (which seems to be the traditional dev agency model and requires good sales skills that I don't have haha).