What’s the deal with productized services?

The cereal-boxification of service offerings

Today’s edition of Wishful Working is a 4 minute read.

Last week, I wrote about my anti-bucket list — a list of career-related activities and goals I’m actively choosing not to pursue. I don’t want to scale my freelance business into an agency, for example, and I don’t want to be a fractional CMO.

For the sake of balance, I figured I ought to share some of the things I am interested in pursuing in my career 😂 

One of those things is productized services.

What is a productized service?

I realize it’s kind of buzzword-y, but a productized service is basically a way of “packaging” a service with a well-defined scope and fixed price. Here’s how I would explain it in comparison to other, more traditional, service offerings — let’s use web design as an example:

Traditional service offering (hourly): My rate for web design projects is $50/hour.

Traditional service offering (project rate): My rate for web design projects is between $3,000 and $7,000, depending on the size, complexity, and custom features.

Productized service offering: My rate for web design projects is $5,000. For that rate, you get a home page, about page, contact page, and services page.

I sometimes picture a productized service as a physical item, like a box of cereal sitting on a shelf at the grocery store. The packaging has all the information I need about the product, and I know exactly what I’m getting for the price I see on the tag.

It’s not a perfect analogy, but it captures the essence of what a productized service should be: clearly defined, predictable, replicable.

What’s the benefit of a productized service?

Since I first started freelancing, I’ve tried every type of pricing model, including hourly, per word, per project, and both hours-based and deliverables-based retainers. I’ve come to realize that pricing per project is usually the best option for me and my clients. And productized services are basically an evolution of per-project pricing!

One of the major benefits of productized services is that they can be streamlined and standardized. Custom quotes and tailored pitches are extremely time consuming, but a repeatable process with automation opportunities? Fast and efficient. Hell yeah.

Can you productize any service?

Probably not. Some offerings just need to be flexible and customizable. However, anyone can create systems and templates to make pitching, quoting, and organizing their work easier and more efficient. 

Also, this productized services megalist proves that lots of people are experimenting with the productized model. You might be surprised by what’s possible.

My productized service experiment

Back in April/May, I came up with an idea for a productized service called Naming. Although I launched in June, I recently revisited my processes, adjusted the offer, and revamped the website.

To be completely honest, it’s a big experiment. Like any experiment, I’m not exactly sure what the outcome will be, but I’m learning a lot and having a ton of fun. 

There’s a lot of uncertainty in the freelance writing world (and the world in general, tbh) right now, and experiments like this help me navigate that uncertainty, exercise my creativity, and find new opportunities to make money. In the future, I plan to create some sort of guide or course to share my naming process and tips, which presents yet another opportunity to diversify my income.

If you ever want to geek out about productized services or shoot ideas around, hit me up. I love this stuff.

See you next week,

Kara

Wishful Working is inspired by my desire to see more people enjoy a life not centered around work. For some, the path to freedom and flexibility is through self-employment, but we also need to challenge cultural norms and champion healthier working conditions and work/life balance for all types of workers.

Who am I? I’m a freelance writer and entrepreneur based in small-town Saskatchewan. I write longform content for B2B clients, and I help founders and independents name their brands and projects through a new venture called Naming. Connect with me by replying to this email or finding me on LinkedIn or Twitter.