A productized service is exactly what it sounds like – you provide a service that is packaged as a product. This means that customers pay you up front, and have very set, standardized expectations as to what they’ll be receiving.
Benefits of a Productized Service
No more asshole customers, no more written proposals, no more complicated sales pitches. And you are creating an ASSET that you can sell, which is something you can’t easily do with an agency. Because your product offering is standardized, you can also scale this incredibly easily and take advantage of outsourcing if you choose to.
MVP of a Productized Service
This is the easiest of MVPs, since the MVP is you actually providing a manual service. You want to test three things:
- What feature-sets are necessary (which is covered in the survey-based MVP page).
- How much are people willing to pay for the service with those features?
- Will employees help you scale this business profitably?
The easiest way to figure out what features your customers needs it to survey your audience.
How much are people willing to pay for the service?
To test this, all you need to do is craft a sales page. The sales page simply takes the minimum feature set your audience requested as the service. Go and create a leadpage for this.
It should hook into payment processing with Stripe or Paypal (I recommend Stripe), just change the buy now button to open up an external link, and setup that link in stripe/paypal.
What should the price-point be?
I personally like to test this with paid traffic at different price points.
The common price-points I like to test are $37, $67 and $97/mo. I host the lead-page on a separate page on my blog, but don’t link to that page from anywhere but my paid traffic campaign. Calculate your most profitable price-point and run with it.
How employees help you scale this business profitably
Before you can possibly answer this question, you need to concierge the service while creating a master list of how you will systemize it. Actually systemizing the business is beyond the scope of this post, I highly suggest you read “Work the System” by Sam Carpenter. https://datingadore.com
Where to go from here?
If you’re considering moving up the monetization value chain by creating a product, congratulations! If you approach it intelligently, you only have to put the work in once you know you’ll be paid for it. I’d suggest you check out what an MVP looks like for my three favorite products: an online course, a productized service, and lead sales.
