I built a $18,000/month content writing productized service
The core issue is that I really didn’t set Scribly up to be able to cope with scale. There were too few processes in place, and everything was all stored in my head making it almost impossible for me to bring others into the team.
I’ve been aware for months that this is a big issue, and so I recently took an entire week off from running Scribly to focus on all the things that the businesses needed to become a scalable productized service.
I write about the whole process in more detail here, but some of the key changes I’ve made are:
Changing the business model
For the first 12 months, I’ve positioned Scribly as an Unlimited Copywriting Service. But it was only when I paused to reflect on my current clients that I realised that almost every sale was a custom package.
I thought the Unlimited angle was my productized hook, but it’s actually not what people wanted. I also thought people wanted general copywriting support, but the vast majority of sales were specifically for long-form content marketing.
Last week I decided to officially shift from a focus on Unlimited Copywriting 👉🏼 flexible content marketing packages.
This is not only what customers have told us they want, but it’s actually a huge leap towards actually productising Scribly for reals.
Until now, almost every sale was fairly inconsistent in terms of scope and pricing. Now I have very defined, clear offerings, each with set pricing, set deliverables, and set processes.
If none of these packages fit, customers can simply customise their own. An important part of making this possible is to document a fixed internal process and pricing for custom orders.
Documenting my way out of being a blocker
It might seem like overkill when you’re running your productized service solo, but I cannot overstate just how important it is to create a business that you can easily bring others into.
I didn’t, and it took so much work to rectify.
Though I knew how things worked, no-one else had any way of accessing that information. And I really needed to bring someone on board – I was drowning. In fact, back in April, I tried to bring a virtual assistant to help with some admin tasks and it was a total fail, as I simply hadn’t documented anything for her to take over from me.
The fix?
I’ve now documented absolutely every single process, from project management to sales. I’ve done this in Notion, but other helpful tools for this are Slite, Paper, or even just good old trusty Google Docs.
from Hacker News https://ift.tt/2XqtbzD