✍️ Essay
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Free
Intermediate
Why we picked it
This is the clearest honest look at why a services arm quietly starves your product: Jason Cohen (who bootstrapped WP Engine) shows the real math, that a billable person costs roughly double their nominal rate, so consulting rarely throws off the surplus you imagined for product work. He then lays out the five actual levers (scale, charge more, bill more, build a product, use subcontractors) and is blunt that building a product almost never works without deliberate, funded focus. Treat it as a starting point for deciding how much services you can carry before the product stops moving, not a promise that the mix is easy.
From
A Smart Bear (Jason Cohen)
by Jason Cohen
- The true cost of a billable person is about double the nominal rate, so consulting margins are thinner than they look and leave less to reinvest in product.
- Funding a product out of services only works if you carve out protected, funded time for it. Treating product as spare-capacity work means it never ships.
- Charging more and using subcontractors protect cash better than hiring a bigger bench, which just deepens the services dependence.
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📄 Article
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Free
Intermediate
Why we picked it
This is the most concrete piece on turning repeatable service work into a scalable offer, built around finding the 20 percent of your service that solves 80 percent of client problems and packaging just that. It carries real named examples with real pricing (a 2,500 dollar funnel audit that converts into 25,000 dollar-plus implementations, productized UX audits, membership models), so you can see the shape of an offer rather than a theory. Use it as a starting point for designing one productized package, not as a claim that productizing removes the services work entirely.
From
Consulting Success
by Michael Zipursky
- Productize the narrow, repeatable slice of your service that most clients need, rather than trying to package everything you do.
- A fixed-scope, fixed-price offer (audit, sprint, teardown) can act as a low-friction entry that feeds larger work and, eventually, a product.
- Concrete price anchors help: entry offers around 1,500 to 5,000 dollars, core offers 5,000 to 25,000, so you can size a first package deliberately.
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