SAAS vs Productized Service

Yep, here's how I see this:

• your through line on a business is going to be your customers, not your products. products can, will, and should evolve over time.
• small products can lead lead your customers to bigger products.
• it's much easier to sell services than products, with productized services splitting the difference.
• success with productized services and smaller (like, MUCH smaller) products earns you revenue AND trust.
• when you have enough revenue to cover all of your expenses, or enough trust to ask your customers to try things they aren't used to, you can build products that don't need to make money right away. until then, better to optimize for what people already want and are ready to buy.

I'll add that the reason service agencies struggle with products is two fold:

• it's very hard to be your own client. a client will always advocate for themselves and demand your time/attention, but you need to advocate for giving your products time/attention.

• selling services is very, very different from selling products (especially at the beginning. services can be tweaked and modified to make the client happy, whereas a product is already built and needs to both serve the customer enough on day one to be valuable AND (depending on your price point) you need to be good enough at communicating the value without having an in-depth 1-1 sales conversation with every new customer.