Issue#31: Building $1K -$10K MRR business around Productized Services

Upen

Feb 11

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No fluffy content. If your goal is to build a $100m ARR business, this is not the right post. Here I am are NOT going to talk about building the next Facebook or Twitter. If your goal is to make a $1K to $10K MRR, continue reading.

This post will cover one SAAS area and talk about multiple niches in this space. This post also explains more on how to do tech implementation, do market analysis, how the current players are doing, and also ends with a cost analysis to understand the overall cost for 100 users.

“Productized service” is a process of bundling your service in the form of a product for a fixed price and promised effort. In short - you promise what would be done in a fixed time (maybe hours, days, months) or you promise what would be done for a given task and you charge a fixed price for that without hourly billing. So, this is not exactly a Micro SaaS as you aren’t delivering software but it's still a Micro Business that gives you recurring revenue.

Let’s see some of the players who are making thousands of dollars around ‘Productized Services’. Note that some of these are doing this as a one-person team. Yes, that is possible.

DesignJoy: A design agency with a twist. Unlimited design subscriptions to scale your business.

DesignDash: Unlimited Web Design Subscriptions for Growing Startups. Get unlimited web design requests and revisions. No expensive hourly billing or contracts, cancel anytime.

DraftDev: Technical marketing content for software startups for a fixed monthly cost. DraftDev creates blog posts and tutorials designed to reach software engineers for a fixed monthly cost.

ManyPixels: Get Your Graphic Design Team in a few clicks. Your on-demand unlimited graphic design service for a fixed monthly cost.

HelpfulDocs: HelpfulDocs team writes and updates the content your users need be it Knowledge base and help articles, FAQs, change logs, product updates, onboarding guides, and more - all for a fixed monthly price.

GetRhys: Your on-demand SaaS marketing consultant. An on-demand, skilled and experienced SaaS marketing consultant ready to solve your critical marketing bottlenecks for just $395/pm.

Kimp: Unlimited Graphic & Video Design. Flat Monthly Fees.

Penji: Hiring a designer should be simple.Unlimited design projects. Fast turnaround. and fixed monthly rate.

DesignPickle: Let Design Pickle handle all of your creative design needs for a fraction of the cost of traditional graphic design services.

Draftss: Unlimited Graphic design, web design, WordPress. Webflow design for a fixed weekly or monthly cost.

Kapa99: Unlimited graphic design projects. Unlimited revisions. One flat rate, starting at $249/month.

HatOfWizards: SaaS wizards, on-demand, for just $795/pm. Get access to marketing, paid search, SEO, conversion experts for a fixed monthly cost.

DesignTork: Create anything and impress everyone with unlimited designs from DesignTork. All for a fixed monthly cost.

GraphicsZoo: Graphic Designs Flat Monthly Rate. No need to hire in house graphic designers.

Gatsboy: Website design and maintenance for a fixed monthly cost.

HiScribble: An on-demand content marketing team to write & grow your blog on autopilot starting at $250/mo.

AudienceOps: Grow your audience, your email list, and customer-base with
done-for-you content by Audience Ops for a fixed monthly cost.

Scribly: Scribly.io is a content marketing agency offering scalable content marketing services for every business type. Boost traffic and generate leads, all for a simple monthly fee. No contracts. No hiring. No hassle.

RipplePop: Get Your Own Dedicated WordPress Developer For Daily WordPress Tasks and Projects for a fixed monthly cost.

WPBuffs: 24/7 WordPress website management and support services that power digital growth - all for fixed price.

Castos: Podcast editing service for a fixed monthly price.

Podigy: Podcast editing, show notes and podcast setup. - fixed price per episode. No commitments

99DollarSocial: Fresh content for your social media pages, 7 days a week, 365 days a year for one crazy low price: Only $99/month.

ZenKeep: ZenKeep takes care of your book keeping and payroll for fixed monthly charges.

TryCatalog: A full-service design studio that offers unlimited design services for a fixed monthly fee.

🔒 👉 [In Pro access only] See who is making $800K per year as a one man team
🔒 👉 [In Pro access only] See which company is making $4.2M/year in revenue with designing
🔒 👉 [In Pro access only] See which team is making $60K MRR with technical writing for a fixed monthly cost.
🔒 👉 [In Pro access only] See which startup team is making more than $600K in revenue per year.
🔒 👉 [In Pro access only] See who is making $6K MRR with on-demand marketing consulting.
🔒 👉 [In Pro access only] See who is making $1.2M/year in revenue with Wordpress development as a service.
🔒 👉 [In Pro access only] See which company is making $18M/year in revenue with designing.
🔒 👉 [In Pro access only] See who is making $150K ARR with Web design.
🔒 👉 [In Pro access only] See which company is making $120K per year with productized service.
🔒 👉 [In Pro access only] See who is making making $500K per year by growing audience as a productized service with various tools.
🔒 👉 [In Pro access only] See who is making $400K in revenue per year by writing content.
🔒 👉 [In Pro access only] See who is making $30K per month with Wordpress development.

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Negative Nancy says - Why not customers use freelancers or freelancing sites like Upwork?

Me - It takes a major chunk of time to post projects on Upwork (or any freelancing sites), interview candidates, process payments. The advantage of the “productized services” model is - customers don’t get tied down with complex project contracts and can assess ongoing costs easily as they pay a fixed amount every month. As you are not billing per hour, the customer doesn’t have to worry about the final charge.

Negative Nancy says - If I start my own productized service, am I not doing more for less money because most of these services offer “unlimited work? What is the catch?

Me - Even though most productized services mention the service as “unlimited”, in most cases the final deliverable is limited - for example, 5 blog posts/month, 12 designs/month, 10 maintenance issues per quarter, etc. For these deliverables, customers can request unlimited revisions with a turnaround time of 1-2 days. Also, most services make it a point that - there can be only one active request that will be worked while the rest of the request will be added to the pipeline. On top of that, you reserve the right to decline that ‘problematic customer’ if someone doesn’t understand this.

Negative Nancy says - Can I not make more money by freelancing?

Me - Probably Yes. But there is a problem with the freelancing model itself where you spend most of the time sending proposals when you work on multiple small projects. Contrary to that, in the ‘Productized service’ model, customers come to you. Over a period, you can build good contacts with nice customers. The first client would be the toughest to get and as you build social proof, it becomes relatively easy to get new clients. ‘Productized service’ is more about recurring revenue and money flow where freelancing is more about one-time payment for work.

Deep-dive & some niches

Most people often think and wonder how can someone give unlimited services and still charge a fixed monthly price. The catch is simple - In most cases, only one of your requests will be worked up with a turnaround time of 3-4 days. During this time, the customer can still add his/her requests to the queue. So, technically, the maximum request that can be delivered in this case is only 7 requests per month considering the 4 days turnaround time. Most productized services charge a few hundred dollars to a few thousand dollars considering the time spent.

Services like these are not always charged per month. Some of these charge per episode, per site, per design, etc as well. The whole point is not to charge per hour and make the customer not worry about final charges.

Also, note that these services charge on the higher side. For example, DraftDev charges $4800K/month for customer. DesignJoy charges $2499/month DesignDash charges $1600/month. With prices like these, all you need is 4-5 clients to hit a $100K annual revenue. If you have a decent online presence and a decent number of professional connections, this isn’t tough. If you have a network but do not have the skills/time to finish the tasks, get a resource who can be paid per client/project.

Let’s see some of the niches in this space that can be turned into a ‘productized service’

Unlimited WordPress development/support: Create an unlimited WordPress development/support service. Even though it says - “unlimited”, mention the turnaround time as 3-4 days so that the maximum request per month cannot be more than 6-7 requests. You can charge either monthly or weekly or quarterly. You can also position the pricing based on the number of sites as well.
Unlimited Graphics Design: This is another category that is getting extremely popular. Most of the current players like DesignJoy and DesignDash are charged $2K per month and at this price, all you need is 5 clients to hit $100K in revenue. Most customers who come for Graphic design could be interested in other things like web development as well. If you have enough bandwidth and resources, bundle both Graphic design and Web development as a package and propose to customers.
Unlimited Web development: Web development is always a requirement that is going to stay here no matter how much automation comes in. Create a Micro Business around ‘web development for a fixed price. Be careful with what you offer. Sometimes web development is broad with a lot of technologies. Mention what you support and onboard clients manually once you think it fits your case. You can also classify this into Front-end development, Back-end development as well and provide different pricing too.
Shopify development: E-commerce stores are on the rise. Many agencies are running purely on Shopify development. If you can build a business around Shopify development by providing a fixed monthly cost package, it will be an easy choice for most founders You can extend this to other platforms like Magento Development, Woocommerce Development, Prestashop development as well.
Cloud Development/Cloud support: Cloud is growing at a phenomenal rate and everyone is adapting to the cloud. Providing a fixed number of hours of availability every month for cloud development/support can be a winner. Compared to other technologies, you can charge slightly charge more for cloud development. You can extend and create multiple flavors out of this model to support all cloud platforms like AWS, GCP, Azure, or a multi-cloud support model. Services like these are usually charged on the higher side of $5K/month.
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