Productised services: breaking free from your consultancy

Speaker(s): 
kvantomme
Experience level: 
Intermediate
Session Track: 
Business and Strategy

It is a common misunderstanding that, in order to build recurring revenue, you need to:

  • Give up on being a service company
  • Raise money from investors
  • Invests months or years of development

In this session I will explain why these are dangerous myths. ---- Join me in my quest for a web shop's Holy Grail: recurring revenue! Follow along as I recount the epic quest we undertook to build a product. How we locked ourselves in our batcave, not once, but many times. How we did a successful crowdfunding, and then failed a second round. How we tried to raise VC money, and then decided it was a bad idea to do so. Why we chose to open source our product, making it possible for others to just copy our service. And finally how we are now finding after years of experimenting that productised services can be built in weeks rather than years of development. Throughout my story you will learn:

  • The strategic concept of anti-fragility and how it can help you to be successful no matter what in an unpredictable environment.
  • What productised services are, and how you can start one in a single week of work.
  • How a rich background of random consulting projects can be a great source for patterns, and how you can construct a narrative for a meaningful unique product positioning from that randomness.
  • The difference between sowers and reapers and why you need both to run a successful business.
  • Why Drupal is a great market niche to cross the chasm, and how you can use the community channels to develop your product.
  • The different business models that work with open source projects.