Episode 29: Launching a Productized Service w/Brian Casel

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Today’s guest is Brian Casel, a return guest, in a first for Chasing Product.  Brian is currently the founder of AudienceOps, a done-for-you content-marketing productized service. Before launching a productized service, Brian had successfully made the transition from freelancer to product creator over the past several years with his earlier businesses.

In this episode, Brian talks about what he’s been doing since we last heard from him, what he’s learned along the way, and shares some insights into what launching a productized service requires, without becoming overwhelmed.

Bootstrapped Product Talking Points

  • The importance of a team
  • Why “done for you” is the new hotness
  • Content marketing for personal vs business branding
  • Building an audience from nothing
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 Show Notes:

Casjam – the online home for Brians projects
Audience Ops – Grow your audience, your email list, and your customer-base with done-for-you content marketing
Restaurant Engine – Brians original Saas product
Content Upgrades – WP Plugin for use w/Audience Ops service
Software Product Marketing & Design (the previous episode of Chasing Product, featuring Brian)
How To Start A Freelancing Business That Won’t Fail

It was interesting to talk to Brian again after having him on the show so early on. He’s been talking about launching a productized service for a while now, even creating a course to teach others how to do it. Getting to sit down with him and actually talk about how a bootstrapper can go about launching a productized service was educational.

Brian learned that launching with a team was crucial – he wasn’t interested in going back into freelancing. Launching a productized service with a team behind it on day one allowed Brian to work ON the business instead of in the business. He had no interest in this business if he’d be the only one doing the work, which is reasonable.

The other part of launching a productized service that was crucial was focusing on doing ONE thing really well for an ideal customer. Audience Ops does content marketing for B2B software companies; that’s their focus. This powerful focus made a lot of decisions very clear in the new business.

The real wisdom in launching a productized service is in how easy it is to launch and how little infrastructure is needed ahead of time. Launching a service offering allows for lower costs and lower technical requirements on day one. Brian was able to launch the offer with a 1-page sales pitch and start signing up clients right away. It may *use* software, but software is not the offering.

Launching a productized service is not easy, but Brian was able to take the lessons learned from previous business efforts and roll them into this one. It’s a big inspiration for those of us who hope to eventually do the same thing.

Episode 13: Organic Product Development w/Josh Pigford

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Josh Pigford, serial maker of things, joins me for this episode.  Josh has a wonderfully diverse portfolio of projects.  Starting as a designer and gradually transitioning into launching web products, Josh has had both successes and failures as a founder.  We talk about some freelancing issues, how to do organic product development, and the exigencies of freelancing for equity.

Bootstrapped Product Talking Points

  • What prompted Josh to make the leap to products
  • The importance of filling your skill gaps when you can’t outsource
  • The most accessible go-to marketing techniques Josh has used
  • Organic product development vs plucking a product idea from thin air

Temper.io – Better Customer Service Over Time; measures how your customers feel about your business so you know what to improve
PopSurvey – Create Surveys People Want to Take; PopSurveys are beautiful, easy to create and more importantly, fun to take
Baremetrics – SaaS Analytics for Stripe
PugSpot – The spot for pugs!
Tiny Farmstead – Learning how to farm in the ‘burbs!

Fugitive Toys – an Urban Vinyl Toy Store
Ruby on Rails
Flippa
The Apple Blog – Started by Josh, later acquired by GigaOm
Track the Pack – Universal package-tracking app that Josh had to shutter
Track the Pack Post-Mortem – fantastic account of the story behind Josh shutting down his app
Package Fox – Stop losing money on late shipments
Rovio – creator of Angry Birds
Entrepornography – the overhyped productivity BS foisted on the startup community by the media
SmallSpec – Christopher’s product-in-development. Join the launch list!

The organic product development idea is interesting to me, as someone who has struggled to come up with product ideas out of the blue.  There are probably more examples of organic product development out there, where a founder distills a product from an existing app or starts out with a pain point to solve.  But there are also a lot of “if you build it they will come” scenarios playing out, and those often end in ters for the founder in question.

Josh also shares some of his biggest regrets about product development, and three action items for aspiring bootstrappers.

Enjoy!