Anyone here have successfully turned a service into a product? What did you learn while doing so?
Context:
We’ve been supplying Event Agencies with a service that they needed to complement their events. This requires us to customize the look and process they want and be on the actual event day to support the activation.
I wanted to scale up our business by productizing it so that eventually we won’t need to be there physically or there won’t be any developer time involved on the project.
The way I thought about this is that we will develop a new product that is self service and user friendly (for non technical people). We can offer this product in 3 ways, one is that we will use it to still provide service to our existing customers. Second is that we allow them to use the product directly with lower cost. Third is that we onboard other service providers to use our product to sell to their customers.
I’m having doubts tho whether we can convert our existing customers to self service (They basically pay us to do the stuff for them) or do we need to find new types of customer that are more tech savvy.
Try running as a tech-enabled service where you use the product yourself to provide a better version of what you currently do. It helps to build experience into the product and it’ll probably be more palatable for your current customers. For new customers you have the option to start with a product-first relationship.
That said don’t assume you can’t convert current customers to true product customers. Use them to understand what’s most important about what you offer so they can help you replicate in a product.
We’ve already been a Tech Enabled service from the very start. We’ve already built a platform for Events but we’re the one using it for the clients while also providing customized frontend and flow. But this requires developer time for every project we handle and the margins are small due to us being on optional part time of the event/program.
We would like to flip this out the other way and let them use it. But there’s a lot we need to build for that.