Really really good episode for you today. I’m excited for you to hear it.

It’s a round table with Craig Hewitt, founder of PodcastMotor, and Russ Perry, from Design Pickle.

The three of us all running productized service businesses of varying shapes, sizes, and phases of growth.

We compare notes and share our experiences about why we started a service business in the first place, what where our first growing pains, how we were able to remove ourselves and what it looks today into growing sometimes massive teams with layers of management.

Then of course, we talk taking the turn into software products which is kind of a trend these days with a lot of productized service businesses taking that next step.

Enjoy!

Episode Notes

[9:00] Why Russ and Craig started a service business instead of a software company.

“I was broke. I needed money now. So I was motivated to get it going and launch it.” Russ

“The business model tends to build on itself as opposed to software.” Craig

“If initially you are limited to only software, or only training, there is kind of a limit to number of available problems you are able to solve.” Brian

“What’s the fastest way to reach a launching-to-revenue point where I can pay my own salary and fund new products down the road?” Brian

[14:49] Pricing and money conversation.

“Just raise your prices, you’ll probably have same trajectory of growth but with better clients and less headaches.” Craig

“Clients want to buy services like they buy products on Amazon.” Brian

[18:53] Russ plays the host: How to deal with Haters?

[25:12] Craig plays the host: How to grow 3x?

[28:15] Removing ourselves from the business. Thoughts on hiring.

“We created a hierarchy of advancement. Everyone comes in at the same level. We don’t hire at a manager level. We don’t hire at a level other than designers.” Russ

[41:46] Why going to other products and not just keep growing the service.

“A SaaS product is worth a ton more money for the same revenue. A software product business is more predictable.” Craig

“Design Pickle was the stepping stone to my SaaS empire, and… that didn’t happen” Russ

“The problem is our businesses are growable but not as scalable as a Saas could be.” Brian

[50:27] Work balance managing the services and the products development.

Links

Craig Hewitt on Twitter

Craig Hewitt’s company, PodcastMotor

Russ Perry on Twitter

Russ Perry’s company, Design Pickle

Russ Perry on the Productize Podcast

Y Combinator’s Startup School

Gary V

 

Janet Kafadar focuses on the online courses, online membership, online training space. Her clients are anyone who needs to launch, set-up, maintain, grow their online training.

Janet followed a similar path to the one that I took and I think, many people in the Productize Course have taken.

She left her full-time job, then went freelancing on her own doing generalized consulting work. Finally she transitioned pretty quickly to a productized service model which has allowed her to grow and scale up her team.

Janet discuss the importance to focus on her most ideal costumer and how important is the on-boarding process.

Enjoy!

Episode Notes

[1:36] Details of Janet’s product. One-time project vs recurring. Tools used.

“My clients call me the course midwife.”

[11:24] Tools

“Clickfunnels comes as a great an entry point: is what people think they need, but then once they get in they are ‘Oh, I don’t know if this is what I really needed‘.”

[13:47] How Janet came with the idea of helping entrepreneurs create better courses after purchasing low quality ones.

“It’s my job to make sure I’m working with the right clients, because it’s my job to make sure the people I work with want to create something that really, truly, helps someone get to an outcome.”

“People didn’t know how to put what they wanted to say onto paper.”

[27:09] From coaching services to a done-for-you product. Why Janet avoids selling marketing services.

[37:57] YouTube as a marketing channel and keeping a small team.

“If you want to bring a new team member you have to be prepared to train them.”

Links

Janet Kafadar on Twitter

Janet Kafadar’s website

Janet Kafadar on YouTube

ClickFunnels

Teachable

Barbara Turley on Productize Podcast

 

Greg Berry is the founder of Municibid, a marketplace for government organizations and agencies to sell their stuff, like cars, trucks, police cars, educational equipment, furniture, electronics, lawn and leaf maintenance, engines, electronics… I’m just seeing about everything on their site.

Greg comes from a background in serving in public office. That led him to discover this major problem: gov agencies accumulating a lot of stuff and not getting the full value from it.

We talk about building products for and selling to governments. What it’s like to work inside gov, the mentalities, and the problems they are facing that need to be solved one way or another. We talk about the inefficiencies and, at least, my frustrations with technology and how gov’s approach technology and why they seem to be living in the stone age.

This conversation gave me a lot of insights to think about, I’m sure it will do the same for you. Enjoy!

Episode Notes

[2:29] Where the idea of Municibid comes from. How Greg ended at his city council and what looks like working at a public elected office.

[13:21] Mentality and requirements at governments. How an entrepreneur can fit a business in public spaces.

“[At the council,] we have a list of problems, and we have to work them with a political agenda beside them.”

“The biggest challenge was getting governments to try something new.”

“I’ve got some municipalities to try it and it worked so well that they thought there was something wrong.”

“The challenge of working with governments is an opportunity for entrepreneurs.”

[24:09] Approaching, marketing, and selling to public agencies.

“Direct mail still is our number one marketing channel for getting governments on-board.”

“The proposal process can take from two months to a year.”

[33:10] Insights and opportunities for entrepreneurs in governments.

“When you are dealing with government you’re going have to plan to be in it for the long haul.”

“Make sure that they think they came up with your idea, and not that you did.”

Links

Greg Berry on Twitter

Greg Berry’s company, Municibid

Greg Berry on The Tropical MBA

Today you’re going to hear my conversation with my friend Jane Portman.

Jane is a very talented UI/UX designer and she’s become pretty well known for that as well as using the productized consulting model which has been very successful, one of the very first productized consultants that I knew of.

She’s built her portfolio of products starting with books on UI design for SaaS applications. Then Jane went into building some few SaaS applications on her own (Tiny Reminder), and recently, one bringing in partners (UserList.io, email automation for SaaS).

An interesting part of the conversation is about where she’s based: Russia! She’s one of the few people that come from that part of the world who really has been able to break out and build a name for herself.

Enjoy!

Episode Notes

[2:08] How Jane leveraged his business by meeting people at conferences.

[6:46] Why Jane learned that it is important to not overbook clients after her first experience with productizing her consulting services.

“Recurring revenue was amazing because I just racked in monthly revenue from 4-5 clients, and I didn’t have to hunt for any new project at all.”

[9:42] Tips for overcoming the fear of pricing by package instead of pricing by project or by the our.

[11:27] Insights of how an Eastern should position to offer services for the Western market.

[14:55] The birth of Tiny Reminder: from SaaS idea to MVP in 2 months. Benefits and challenges of not being a technical founder.

“Developing new features do not save you from the lack of product/market fit.”

“Freemium users and paying users are completely different people almost from day 1.”

[26:14] UserLis.io, on-boarding email automation for SaaS. Working with partners vs solo-founder.

Links

Jane Portman on Twitter

Jane Portman’s websites, UI Breakfast, Tiny Reminder, UserList.io

MicroConf

How I went from $100-an-hour programming to $X0,000-a-week consulting

People Mentioned

Brennan Dunn (on Productized Podcast)

Joanna Wiebe

Patrick McKenzie

Benedikt Deicke

Bridget Harris

Claire Suellentrop

Mike Hardenbrook is the co-founder of Growth Geeks, Growth Hacker TV and Workify.co.

There are many different properties in there but they are all intertwined as Mike will tell us.

Basically Growth Geeks is a marketplace for on-demand marketing service providers. It’s kind of marketplace for productized marketing services.

We cover a lot of ground as usual, got into the whole process of building this business starting with building a premium content site over Growth Hacker TV and how that pretty quickly evolved into a clear need for this type of marketplace. In off, Mike confessed to me they’ve grown above 6 figures a month in revenue, pretty exciting.

Mike shares how he and his partners manage the 2 sides of the marketplace, how they vet for quality and focus on the system for selling the service without getting too deeply involved in the day-to-day delivery which is where the freelancers and the agencies come in.

Mike went through the TechStars incubator/accelerator, and we talk about doing the transition from bootstrapping, self-funded, into the accelerator and Venture Capital.

Finally, we wrap up talking about Workify.co, which is a natural corollary for all of Mike’s projects. They’ve built this for agencies to white-label they services, which is another whole dimension to all this.

Enjoy!

Episode Notes

[1:53] Panorama of Mike’s projects. How Growth Hacker TV started, and how Growth Geeks developed from it.

“With Growth Hacker TV we recognized a wave coming in, and either you catch the wave too early, or you never catch it.”

[9:13] How to build a productized marketing services marketplace. How Growth Geeks originated, by listening what their audience was asking for.

“You keep hearing this over and over again, and we realized we had both the supply and the demand in our audience space.”

“On-demand marketing wasn’t a concept you would think about. I mean, Uber was still brand new [at the time]. We said: why we can’t do that for marketing?”

[18:59] Challenges that led to switch to a highly curated model.

“Marketplaces are tough. Is like building two products at once.”

[30:16] How Growth Geeks and Mike look like after TechStars.

“My claim to fame is that it is easier to get into Harvard than in to TechStars.”

Links

Mike Hardenbrook on Twitter

Mike Hardenbrook’s companies,

Growth Geeks

Workify.co

Growth Hacker TV

Knowledge.ly

BetaList

TechStars

David Cohen

LinkedIn is definitely a social network that I am not totally at a speed on. I had a profile on it, for ever, for years, but is just abandoned and not kept up to date. And I know there’s so much I can be doing on that platform to connect, network, and generate leads for my businesses.

Today you’ll hear my conversation with Jake Jorgovan, the founder of LeadCookie. It is a productize lead generation service focused on LinkedIn.

Jake’s been able to build and launch a really successful productize service offering in really short amount of time. In his very first 4 months he went from zero to nearly $20k a month in recurring revenue.

We cover the whole process of how he built this up, how he validated it, how he got his first customers, how he figured out the process to deliver it.

Enjoy!

Episode Notes

[2:12] What LeadCookie do, and how it grow spectacularly even turning away most of their leads.

“What we do it’s really really simple basic stuff, but it’s also very monotonous and repetitive.”

“I probably turn away 5 out of every 6 leads that I get.”

[10:43] How Jake transitioned into productized services and his first attempt packaging cakes as a marketing tactic.

“As I was doing consulting I was looking for tactics that could be repeatable and systematized.”

“What I ended up landing on is not even some crazy new innovation, it’s taking a bunch of other people’s idea and just turning it into a done-for-you service.”

“When someone doesn’t know how to sell they are actually not a good customer for us, because they won’t close the lead we get them.”

[32:59] Setting clients’ expectations and refining the on-boarding process. How LeadCookie is structured today and what roles are they filling up. Exact details of the on-boarding process.

“We’re not doing a sales pitch, it’s like conversational, really casual.”

Links

Jake Jorgovan on Twitter

Jake Jorgovan on LinkedIn

Jake Jorgovan’s company, LeadCookie

Jake Jorgovan’s company, Outbound Creative

Jake Jorgovan’s personal website

Jake Jorgovan’s podcast, Working Without Pants

Jake’s article:  Zero to $33k MRR Productized Service in 6 Months

Win Your Dream Clients – Book

A how-to guide on Linkedin Lead Generation

Pipedrive CRM

People mentioned

Philip Morgan – website – on the Productized Podcast

Kai Davis

Alex McClafferty

Spotlight Marketing – Dan Andrews (TropicalMBA)

Juliette Schmerler

Books mentioned

The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich

Unique Ability: Creating the Life You Want

Today on the show my conversation with Josh Hayman, co-founder of Interact, where they build Interactive Quiz Builder. This software helps building quizzes primarily for businesses to be used as a content marketing tool on Facebook or own’s landing pages. The quizzes help grow email lists and get leads into the sales funnel.

Josh and partners bootstrapped Interact, so he shares the story of starting from zero to growing up to over +35k users, coming up to 1M ARR. This is very impressive for a bootstrapped company, especially in a niche with highly funded competitors.

We discuss price points, freemium vs paid plans, and what experience Josh’s gained testing those models.

Enjoy!

Episode Notes

[3:58] What is Interactive Quiz Builder and what happened when they suspended their freemium offer.

[10:05] Josh’s teens experience in Central California: mowing and installing lawn, trading notebooks. How did they come up with the quiz idea.

“Literally the only metric we’d ever get asked about was: how many subscribers they’ve got. We just spent so much time doing stuff that is unnecessary, when this quiz does that on its own, and it can basically replace an entire website.”

“Because we were in the agencies world we new what problems businesses had, the biggest problem being needing more contacts.”

[19:08] Struggling getting the first while attending school. Testing marketing channels. Landing the first clients through content marketing.

“I’ve got so good at writing that I did one of my last finals in 45 minutes.”

[30:06] Experiences raising prices. Leveraging the “Adidas-influencers” marketing method to grow 300%.

“Good is the enemy of great.”

[41:24] How Josh managed to keep over the funded competition.

“I love the competition. It forces you to be on your own toes all time.”

Links

Josh Hayman on Twitter

Josh Hayman’s company, Interact Quiz Builder

Bootstrapped Web

Shopify

Leadpages

ConvertKit

JD Graffam is the founder Simple Focus, but has experience buying other products, services and agencies.

Simple Focus, his primary agency, is a design UX shop along with a development arm and whole line of SaaS applications. JD’s been able to acquire most of his SaaS products from others, take on them, and bring in to his operation.

It is fascinating how JD built his agency and made a turn to expand his portfolio combining both agency work and SaaS products. Listen to grab JD’s mindset when analyzing a potential acquisition, bringing it under his umbrella, and finally growing it.

Enjoy!

Episodes Notes

[2:00] Running an agency together with a products company. The constellation of products behind Simple Focus and Clear Function

“I love running an agency and I love running a products company. And they require a complete different skill-set and different kind of employees.”

[8:41] The evolution from creative writing at high school, working as a web designer at Hilton, and publishing a best-seller about CSS.

“I learned the best way to get something is not to ask it directly but be known for your passion for the industry.”

[15:53] Challenges owning and growing an agency and why JD went the product route. Buying a SaaS product as a viable way forward after unsuccessful built ones.

[24:17] The story and numbers behind PulseApp, JD’s first acquisition.

[36:42] The day after buying a SaaS app: handing off technical aspects, customer support, and marketing. The steps after building confidence in the service work-flow.

Links

JD Graffam on Twitter

JD Graffam’s agency, Simple Focus

JD Graffam’s Personal Website

JD Graffam’s Blog

CSS for Print Designers, book by JD Graffam

Pulse

Today on the show, Michael Erickson. Mike runs Search Scientists, a productized service/agency that focuses on marketing services like pay-per-click (PPC), AdWords, and Amazon Ads management.

What is interesting about Michael is that in 2017 he made the transition from the service into a Service-as-a-Software. Michael is building AdBadger which is an ad management platform for the Amazon Ads system.

I completely relate to Michael’s recent experience, so we compare notes on managing our agencies, putting people in place, restructuring our processes and team, and of course transitioning into building a software product.

Stay tuned to listen how to work with developers, ins and outs of a remote team vs in-house, and how Michael met his developer at a dog park ????.

Enjoy!

Episode Notes

[2:29] How started Search Scientists after Michael being disappointed when being a High School biology teacher. Mindset shifts from being a self-employed, to freelancer, to having a team. Separating deep practitioners and managers roles.

“When will AdBadger go public? people ask me. I want to be sure that when you put in your Amazon paid traffic campaign it will spit out a better campaign.”

[13:46] Roles at Search Scientists. Client Success Specialist, a role introduced whose only job is to brainstorm new initiatives auditing clients’ campaigns.

“One thing I decided early on is not having Customer Service dedicated people.”

[21:33] Why Michael stripped away all of their SOPs.

“If you have professionals on your team, let them be professionals.”

[27:20] Going from productized service to building software.

[34:59] Funding the launch of AdBadger. The rationale behind partnering with people vs hiring. Finding developers in dog parks. Remote vs in-house team.

“Business is really fun with great partners.”

“It’s OK to optimize for experience too.”

Links

Michael Erickson on Twitter

Michael Erickson marketing agency, Search Scientists

Michael Erickson new SaaS, AdBadger

Mike’s Personal Blog

Michael Erickson on The Tropical MBA

Design Pickle

The Lean Startup book by Eric Ries

 

Today on the Productize Podcast a special episode wit Kat Boogaard and Raj Chander, long team members of AudienceOps.

I invited Kat and Raj to have a conversation about behind the scenes at AudienceOps (AO).

Hopefully you’ll get some insights, a window on how things work, the various roles in the team, what makes a really good team member at AO, which clients tends to stay for the long haul, and how clients get the most value from AO.

Enjoy!

Episode Notes

[2:33] What is AudienceOps in the eyes of Kat and Raj. Why AO is not the typical agency, and why focusing brings much better outcomes to the clients as to the team.

Kat: “We have the advantage of doing this one thing and doing it really well”.

[9:38] Why AO gives such importance on the clients on-boarding process. Common traits of AO clients.

[18:22] What does our team look like. Roles and responsibilities to run everything smooth even if fully remote. How Kat and Raj roles evolved while AO was growing. What type of person makes a good fit for working at AO (and what doesn’t).

[36:45] Processes. Key improvements made to AO processes so far. Challenges and opportunities to improve the service.

Kat: “At this point I think our processes are one of our biggest advantages. They make on-boarding new team members easier, they make communicating with clients easier, they make everything just far more streamlined.”

Raj: “You are able to answer a lot of the questions that you have yourself when there’s that documented process that you can tell has been run a bunch of times, and optimized, before.”

[40:40] Valuable lessons Kat and Raj learned while at AO. How thinking in processes helps their private projects.

Links

Kat Boogaard on Twitter

Kat Boogaard’s Website

 

Raj Chander on Twitter

Raj Chander’s Website

 

AudienceOps – Done-For-You Content Service

AudienceOps Podcast