My Challenge: From Service Business to Product Business in 1 Year

[pietere]

http://blog.eerlings.com/index.php/2013/02/20/my-challenge-from-service-business-to-product-business-in-1-year/

[jerrya]

Why are there so many posts about people selling ebooks? Is there truly an enormous market for these ebooks? Do Klout scores go up with ebooks?

Should I be writing an ebook?

[pietere → jerrya]

This post is not about ebooks, but yes i believe strongly in ebooks: they are products, relatively easy to make, and high margins

[pietere]

I'm looking for people that did the same: convert their service business into a product business. Anyone?

[jamesdeer → pietere]

I did it, well sort of.

My wife and I own a digital agency (deerdigital.com). We found a pain within the agency, built a product around it, and 6 months later we have a new start-up that has a few hundred paying customers and is growing about 7% week on week (gathercontent.com).

We decided to continue with the service business by giving more responsibility to employees, and having one of them buy in and becoming the CEO. We're no longer involved in the day-to-day ops and meet once or twice a year for high-level strategy planning. Best decision ever.

[pietere → jamesdeer]

James, great! Those are stories I'm looking for. I'd like to blog post about your story on my blog (http://blog.eerlings.com/), would you mind an email interview?

[hndude → pietere]

37 Signals did this, and they've written lots about their conversion. Check out the book REWORK by Jason Fried.

[pietere → hndude]

Thanks, I obviously did read all of their books :-)