Rob and Mike discuss when to consider outside investment for your startup.

Rob and Mike talk about key takeaways from MicroConf Europe 2014 and DCBKK.

Show Notes

CasJam.com - Brian Casel's website

Bootstrapped Web podcast

Productize - a course on productizing your services

Restaurant Engine

Transcript

[00:00] Mike: This is "Startups for the Rest of Us," episode 208.

[00:02] Music

[00:10] Mike: Welcome to "Startups for the Rest of Us," the podcast that helps developers, designers and entrepreneurs be awesome at launching software products, whether you've built your first product, or you're just thinking about it. I'm Mike.

[00:17] Brian: And I'm Brian.

[00:18] Mike: And we're here to share our experiences to help you avoid the same mistakes we've made.

[00:21] Well, Rob is still away on vacation, so I have the pleasure of having Brian Casel on. If you're not familiar with who Brian is, he the founder of Restaurant Engine. He writes and teaches at casjam.com, and he's the co-host of the "Bootstrapped Web" podcast.

How are you doing today, Brian?

[00:36] Brian: Doing great, Mike. Glad to be here. Thanks for having me on.

[00:39] Mike: The topic that you wanted to talk about was productized services, and this is a topic that Patrick McKenzie has brought up a couple of time at previous MicroConfs about how people can essentially move from more of a consulting model into a software model, where they're selling software instead of selling just services. But, you know, there's this gap there where you don't necessarily have enough money to be able to just work full-time on the product, but you're making so much money from the consulting, you can't necessarily just drop everything and move over to product; because then you've got this mismatch between what your cash flow looks like and what your future revenue looks like. So, a productized service essentially kind of bridges the gap a little bit where you have this product that you're selling, but it's still a service on the back end.

[01:21] I wanted to have you on and discuss that quite a bit more, because I think it's a very interesting way that people can essentially take their products that they're working on, that is still essentially a more of a beta format, and not necessarily ready for the open market. Or, they haven't quite figured out exactly how to address the marketing and use that as a mechanism for bringing in revenue while they're still developing those products.

[01:43] Brian: Yeah, exactly. I mean that's a perfect example of it. What's really exciting to me about productized services is that there're a number of different directions that you can take and kind of plug them into your business, whether you're just starting out, or you're in that transition, like you said, between consulting and moving into a products business; or, you know, what I've even seen as well is you already have a product - you know, some kind of software product, plugging in a productized service component to that - another trend that I'm seeing. I've been researching this quite a bit, writing about it, seeing it in my own business as well. So, really excited about talking about productized services.

[02:16] Mike: There's two, different perspectives that I can see here. One of them is from your customer's perspective, and then the other one is from the founder's perspective, the person who's actually putting together the service. So, why don't you talk about those two, different things and kind of what some of the research you've done has come up with and what some of the different things you've done in these scenarios is.

[02:33] Brian: Yeah, exactly. And, you know, if you're a freelancer and you're used to billing by the hour, or working project to project, productized services work a little bit differently. So, from your customer's perspective, a productized service offers a specialized, done-for-you solution with a compelling value proposition. And it's packaged at a set price and scope, so there's really no negotiation, or writing a long proposal, or going into these discovery meet[...]

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