Let’s say you’re a services business — you know, you make websites for people and sell them at fair market value. But, every so often, you get a little jealous about all of these product people running around printing money.

You want a piece of that action. Managing customer expectations are daunting.

Your master product plan comes together over night and you decide to cut off the deal flow coming into your business and even raise some capital to make this dream come true…

…but then two major moments happen: A huge client contract that you thought went dark pops up their head and says “Yes!” aaaaaand the world hits a global pandemic.

Now what?

You’re going to find out from today’s guest Amber Hinds, CEO of Road Warrior Creative and Equalize Digital.

Hey, if you like the show, how about a review on iTunes. And I’m looking for a quote or two put on the website — tweet at me @mattreport with a quote about how this Podcast has helped you.

MattReport.com/subscribe to join the mailing list — I may or may not be working on something new so stay tuned there.

Okay, tune in to find out how Amber handled all of this!

Download the Accessibility Checker Plugin

💥 Thank our sponsors!

SearchWP.com for the best search experience in WordPress & PaidMembershipspro.com for the most complete membership plugin in WordPress.

Amber Hinds on Matt Report

Amber: [00:00:00] I am the founder and CEO- is what I’m using these days- for Road Warrior Creative LLC and Equalize Digital, which is our side brand that we pivoted to in 2020. We do work as a marketing agency for Road Warrior Creative and we specialize under Equalize Digital with accessibility audits, remediation and accessible development.

Matt: [00:00:27] and you started the agency back 2015, roughly, you’ve grown to, I think when we last chatted, we’ve grown to about seven-ish team members. Correct?

Amber: [00:00:36] Yep. That’s right.

Matt: [00:00:38] I think, and I might be just talking for my myself here, but maybe not, because I’ve interviewed so many people, I remember starting my service agency and like after year one, I was like, I need to get into product.

Like, this client services thing is pretty darn difficult and my God, that product thing looks super attractive over there. Have you ever had that sort of longing to create a product or has this been a moment where you said, a product, a plugin is something we should have.

Amber: [00:01:07] Yeah my self and my partner, Chris, we were organizers for WordCamp Denver for a couple of years when we still lived in Colorado. And I can tell you, I had a moment during a WordCamp when someone was talking about their business, and they were talking about selling things that they had made and not having to remake it every time they made a sale. 

And it was between that, which was maybe only a year after I grew from, I’ve been working in WordPress as a freelancer since 2010, so very early days and shifting into the agency world, but then at a Word amp, at that exact moment when I went, “Man, we really need to figure out a product.”

And I think too, we’re a Certified B Corporation and we try really hard to be transparent and to do a lot of things. And there’s a couple of businesses that I really admire in that space. One of which is Buffer, and they, it’s, again, it’s a product, it’s a saas, right? And so for a long time, we’ve been watching them and talking about, “How do we get to that point?” 

And that’s when we realized we really needed a product last year. Actually, I should say, now that we’re in 2021: In 2019, we got really serious about it. 

And we actually said, if we’re going to be serious about building a product, we need to treat ourselves as the client, which means we need to commit to paying our developer, our designer, whatever, out of our pocket, instead of constantly scheduling them for client work to make us revenue. So we have to invest in this. 

And we- that’s really, when we started doing it, we weren’t totally sure what that product would be, but we started putting the plans in place in 2019. We actually raised some capital in order to do that.

Matt: [00:02:58] How did you start to say, “Well, should we detract from client services, take a hit, and then push that, those resources towards product development though?” I think you’ve just answered it by saying you’ve raised some capital, so maybe you had the foresight to say, “Oh yeah, we’re going to take a hit on client work to be able to produce something like this.”

Amber: [00:03:17] Yeah, so we realized that was pretty much what we had to do in April or May of 2019. We took out (I’ll be totally transparent) we took out a little bit over a $100,000 loan because on the business-end we said, we’re going to commit to it. 

We put some stuff on our calendar and then we got a massive RFP that we had previously written. We were selected for the project for a government agency, and then we did zero work on product development. We literally took that cash that we’d raised. We put it in a savings account and we’re like, just stay, it was just there. So what really drove us to do it?

I think there’s always this fear, right? It’s hard to say no to work. And when, especially for us, when we’ve got a team and we know that people are relying on us for their livelihood, it’s hard to take that risk of, if you dial back the client work and the product doesn’t take off right away, will the client work be there when you come back to it?

That sort of thing? Well, COVID hit. And the client work dialed itself back pretty severely

Matt: [00:04:35] Yeah, you didn’t have that made the decision for you

Amber: [00:04:38] in 2020. And that was the decision, and we said, “Well, a lot of people are laying employees off. We took out, we had committed to building a product. I think this is the universe telling us now is the time to build a product.”

And so we built – we actually had originally thought we were going to build and we have a free version of a plugin that does a conference schedule. And we had thought we were going to build a pro version of that, but, a year’s difference in time and we were looking at it and we realized that there’s a lot more, I think, space on the accessibility side and we have maybe a lot more that we could give and contribute there. 

Whereas there’s quite a few scheduling tools or displaying an event schedule plugins are already out there. Whereas there aren’t as much on the accessibility checking side. And so, we ended up deciding to launch a plugin that tests for accessibility problems in WordPress.

Matt: [00:05:38] Before we go down that path, I want to uncover the moment where you sat down and said, okay, we will dial back client services.

Did you put post-it notes on a wall to weigh the pros and cons...