
Ask HN: Who's running a profitable productized service? - jiavascriptr
What&#x27;s the service? What are you generating? What&#x27;s your biggest takeaway?
======
khuknows
I'm running [https://userflowpro.com/](https://userflowpro.com/) which is
currently making just under 1k a month, so not quite profitable yet, but still
young.

The service is competitor product monitoring. I essentially get recordings of
competitor products and highlight any changes since the previous recordings.
It's common for product managers etc to check what their competitors are up
to, so this saves them time and ensures they don't miss anything.

~~~
mod
Your infrastructure costs more than 1k/month?

Or people?

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einarvollset
I ran Appaftercare.com until I sold it last year. Biggest thing after a while
became being able to sell using traditional SaaS/enterprise software methods

~~~
jiavascriptr
Wow! How did you manage to sell a service that relies on your personal
skillset? Care to share the $ region it sold for?

~~~
einarvollset
When it sold, I was not doing any of the technical stuff. This took some time
to execute on though, as it did start out with just me doing everything.

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thibaut_barrere
I'm in the process of productizing a part of my ETL consulting services
(building data intensive SaaS apps, ETL jobs or ETL-baked apps, or more
generally any data transformation / data sync / migration), by shipping a
reusable toolbox of Ruby ETL components (which is called Kiba Pro and is a
yearly subscription enhanced version of [http://www.kiba-
etl.org](http://www.kiba-etl.org)) then later training resources for
subscribers.

What I'm generating is improved skills & results in terms of data processing
for the team, accelerated ETL workloads or "onboarding" on new ETL.

My biggest takeaway is that it's great to have both a sellable toolbox & a
closely related consulting offer, because the components are nurtured by my
consulting experiences and the reverse is also true. My efforts are fairly
aligned together, which is great.

Before starting that, I made sure to be clear on IP and build a contract which
makes me keep ownership & IP of the code I write & adapt, all while
apportioning rights fairly for my consulting clients to use.

------
bmaeser
i think we need to define what a "productized service" is.

they are not: apps, saas, products (books, courses,..), fixed bids on custom
projekts or anything you bill by the hour.

a productized service is:

something you do very well, has a very narrow and fixed scope, you normally
would bill this by the hour. think of it like writing a custom proposal but
sell it to anyone at the same price.

some examples:

\- i change the car oil for x usd.

\- checking a website for responsiveness and show you the biggest mistakes and
how to fix them for x usd. (website teardown)

\- a/b testing an online shop to increase conversion by 5%

i myself am in the middle of turning my freelance sysadmin/devops business
into a productized service, so i am eager to hear what ppl on hn had success
with - and what did not work out for them.

a great ressource on this topic is pretty much anything Jonathan Stark is
publishing: [https://expensiveproblem.com/](https://expensiveproblem.com/) and
[http://www.ditchinghourly.com/](http://www.ditchinghourly.com/)

~~~
atsaloli
Thanks for defining "productized service", @bmaeser.

My training service qualifies. It's private on-site training; with a small but
growing course catalog. After a couple of false starts, I've priced it to
guarantee profitability: I take into account my time off regular work
(initially salaried, and now hourly-billed consulting), travel expenses and
student materials.

List price is 3K per day plus 2K admin fee. My last sale was 5K for a day of
training on GitLab CI. My biggest sale was 25K for two one-week classes on
configuration management.

Productizing my service allowed me to streamline sales -- I don't have to
think about how much to charge -- and it guarantees profitability.

I need to learn/do more marketing and sales to get to 6 figures. This is still
"hobby" grade, income wise. (Can't support a family on it!)

------
147
I find it challenging to figure out how to do productized consulting as a
developer other than the ol' 'I make you an entire MVP for X dollars'.

It's probably because the deliverable is hard to narrow down. Whenever I see
examples of productized service businesses, it's something that provides
relief for an on-going pain or has a clear deliverable.

Examples of the former: A/B testing, App After Care, Dan Norris' Wordpress
support, FB / Google Ad management

Examples of the latter: Design a thing and deliver it to you, Write a blog
post/do content, SEO.

Anybody have any luck approaching doing a productized service as a developer?

I think I'm approaching it wrong. I think what it should look like is that you
have a 'product' or set of components built and you do a little bit of
customization for each client and deliver it.

------
foxhop
I'm running a profitable productized service called LinkPeek
([https://linkpeek.com](https://linkpeek.com))

Web page screen shots as a service.

My biggest take away is that Hacker News is typically not my target market. I
don't think I have ever converted HN user into a paying customer.

~~~
mattnewton
Probably because we all think it's easier than it is to roll our own
webdriver-based solution.

Source: rolled my own screenshot-diffing webdriver service

~~~
sixtypoundhound
That's the blind spot of being technically competent.

You would be amazed at what the average person considers hard. For example,
the idea of converting a repeatable calculation into an Excel worksheet is
regarded as arcane black magic by a fraction of the professional population.

Automating a repetitive task with Excel macros? Whoa there, cowboy... Gonna
have to get IT involved...

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momentmaker
I'm running iPanoramaPrints
([https://ipanoramaprints.com](https://ipanoramaprints.com)).

It's a niche site for printing panorama photos.

Profit under 1k/month.

------
martinald
We started apptype.io as a service to convert PSDs, Sketch files etc into
mobile app front end code. Going well from our existing network but not sure
how to market it otherwise.

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fairpx
I'm running [http://fairpixels.co](http://fairpixels.co), a logo design
service which we've set up as a productised service (removing all the back and
forth hassle and packaging it as a product)

It's been doing well, with over $80k made last year.

Biggest takeaway is that packaging a service like a product doesn't just make
things easier for the service provider, it's actually a much better/smoother
experience for the customer.

~~~
jiavascriptr
I saw you guys launch [http://logodust.com/plus/](http://logodust.com/plus/)
the other day. Very cool

------
dagi3d
You can read about some of them at
[https://indiehackers.com](https://indiehackers.com)

~~~
jetti
Most aren't services but products and apps. Finding the services in a sea of
products/apps is going to be more work than it is worth for a question like
this.

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JackuB
[https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses](https://www.indiehackers.com/businesses)
Have a nice list with interviews

~~~
jetti
The problem with just linking to Indie Hackers is that most are not
productized services but actual products. That means people are going to have
to search through each business to try and find an actual productized service.

