The rise of the productized-service solopreneur: How to do it right

*This post was made by notes from the most recent IH podcast featuring Brett Williams of DesignJoy.co

Business continues to get splintered into fractions of jobs. With the gig and freelance economy as common place these days, using your skills to work for yourself has never been easier.

Places like Fiverr and Upwork are born for solopreneurs to become established and make a buck, but what does it take to accelerate?

One solution is to create a productized service, which Brett Williams did from designJoy.

As Brett puts it, a productized service is providing a fixed outcome for a fixed price. He’s using the membership pricing model, and it's working.

According to Brett, his company is pulling $1M/Year as a Solo Founder.

Now, here’s how to start your solopreneur productized-service business:

Take an existing skill and offer a set package for a certain price.

Don’t worry if there’s already competition - in fact, look for that.

As Brett writes on his site, “We didn’t reinvent the wheel, just design.”

Next, here’s how to grow:

Choose a platform or two that you’re already familiar with. Use the megaphone of the web to broadcast your offer.

The platforms that Brett recommends are:

Product Hunt

Indie hackers

Twitter

Here’s how to get work when you don’t have testimonials:

Sure, getting your first clients can be tough because you don’t have a portfolio of wins to showcase, but don’t let that stop you.

As Brett points out, use your time at the beginning to make your own projects to show off the skills that you’re offering. For him, he created his own brand - DesignJoy. Then, when he didn’t have design work to be done for his own site, he made mock-ups of already established companies and sent them the designs showing how he could improve their existing business. That is brilliant.

Here’s how to continuously get better at your craft:

According to Brett, he said that he actively surrounds himself with good design by often visiting places like Dribbble. During the Indie Hackers interview, Brett also made a few under-the-cuff comments about design that I could tell that he just couldn’t hold back - for a quick moment, he started speaking about the current trends in design using lingo from Design Language - brutal this, and Figma that...  It was a moment of spark that only experts in their field can exhibit - and it happens when you have your finger to the pulse of your industry, which clearly Brett does.

What’s that I hear? After all that, you don’t know what to offer?

Use the sites mentioned above to do a bit of investigative research. Find the center of that Venn diagram between what’s working for others and what you know how to do quickly.

My question for you is, how would you replicate the solopreneur productized-service business, and what would (or do) you offer?

For me, I love writing - particularly copywriting, and if you’re feeling like you could use someone to check your sales copy, move on over to my IH profile page, find my email and send me a shout.

As for work, I’ve been doing exactly what Brett did when he started - making stuff to show. Here are a couple of my latest projects:

https://prepbright.thinkific.com/courses/Bundle

https://www.nomadicteachers.com/