What Is A Productized Service + Tips On How To Grow It

Do you need help delivering consistent client work when running an agency? Is every project you take on a brand-new endeavor? This can lead to efficient operations and happy clients. The good news is that there’s a better way. Productizing your services can streamline operations, structure your processes, and improve client satisfaction.

As you read this guide, we’ll explain what productized services are, how they can help your agency, and how to get started. This guide will also explore how the best agency management software can help you create and grow your productized services to achieve your business goals.

Orchestra’s solution, grow your productized service, can help you achieve your objectives, such as an all-in-one toolkit to grow productized services. With our solution, you can create a productized service, launch it, and sell it to clients quickly.

What Is A Productized Service

A productized service or 'productized offering' is a hybrid between a service and a product. More specifically, it’s a type of service packaged for sale like a product. There’s a clear scope of work, predefined deliverables, and predictable outcomes. The service is sold for a set price and has a standard delivery process.

From your customer’s perspective, a productized service offers a specialized “done for you” solution with a compelling value proposition at a set price and scope. From the founder’s perspective (that’s you), a productized service runs systematically and continues to produce and grow with or without your direct involvement.

When it comes to examples of productized services, there are plenty of variations on the business model to consider, and I cover those in-depth in a separate guide. For this guide, just keep in mind that a productized service is all about predictability: Selling to a typical customer, solving a common problem with a standard solution, packaged at an easy-to-buy / easy-to-sell price, without the usual song and dance of a custom proposal process.

The Key Differences Between Productized Services and Traditional Services

Productized services differ from freelancing and other services because when you develop your productization plan, you will target a specific type of client, and your service will solve a particular business need. Your clients have a business pain point that your productized service is designed to solve. You will use predictable, repeatable processes to deliver your service, making your clients’ experience smooth and enjoyable; your team will know what to expect every time.

Productized services also offer simple pricing options, presented as ready-made packages, so that means no more proposals for clients. Your client’s expectations are spelled out for them from the start. Productized services come in a few flavors regarding revenue models, from recurring subscriptions (or retainers) to one-time engagements. The difference is the price is often fixed, sometimes with a few packages to choose from, with a predictable, pre-packaged scope of work.

Benefits of Productized Services

1. Done for You

Software is “Do It Yourself,” which makes a piece of software nothing more than a tool that the customer can use to accomplish a task themselves. No matter how intuitive a software user interface is, it’s still only a tool that solves half the problem. The complete solution still requires the customer’s (or someone else’s) time to achieve the results that the product promises. This is where you can come in with “done for you.” you can provide a service that onboards the client with the software, manages the ongoing use, or perhaps oversees the whole process.

You’re now turning a tool into something functional and valuable while saving the client time. Because a productized service is “done for you,” it’s a faster and often more effective way to give the customer the desired result. Customers don’t need to invest their time or learn new skills, techniques, or software. This aspect alone adds significant value to the equation. Take my company, Audience Ops, as an example.

That’s a productized, done-for-you content marketing service. Rather than simply offering blogging software or document editing services, we offer a more complete package that solves the problem of running an influential blog for your business. Our standard packages include all the critical components of a well-run business blog: creating content ideas, writing, editing, publishing, and distribution, all delivered in an easy, predictable package.

2. Low Cancellations

One of the biggest challenges most Software as a Service (SaaS) companies face is a high cancellation rate, a.k.a. churn rate. The customer’s experience with a SaaS typically goes something like this: The software proves valuable for a short time, usually between 1-3 months. After that? The customer reaches a critical point where several things happen: They realize they’re not using the software as much as they thought they would when they signed up (perhaps due to lack of time), so they cancel. They come across a better solution (cheaper, more effective, or both), so they cancel and switch. Or (hopefully) they’ll become increasingly engaged in the software and remain subscribed for a long time.

It’s tough for most SaaS products to achieve that 3rd outcome most of the time. Solving the churn problem becomes their biggest hurdle. A productized service, on the other hand, has a much easier time combatting cancellations. Why? Because the most common reasons for cancellation are removed from the picture. Customers don’t have the time to do it themselves. A productized service does the work for them, saving them time. The results don’t live up to the promise. A productized service takes a hands-on approach, delivered by experts who ensure this doesn’t happen.

The UI or workflow needs to be more apparent. A productized service isn’t reliant on a UI to be effective. Before I sold and exited my first productized service business, Restaurant Engine, it had a near-zero cancellation rate. That’s mainly because we designed and set up every new customer’s website, ensuring it looked terrific and met every one of their needs perfectly. As a productized, streamlined service, we ran this process for multiple new customers every week.

3. Pre-Validated Idea

I don’t believe that the market for a product is genuinely “validated” until it has multiple paying customers. It’s a continuous evolution of meeting your market’s specific needs. Sure, during the planning stages of a new product launch, you can do some “soft validation” stuff like collecting emails on a landing page or pre-selling a product before it’s built, but even pre-selling can’t guarantee customers will realize the value over the long term (and not cancel down the road). A productized service is often created from a service you’ve delivered as a freelancer or at a previous job.

That means you’ve already seen firsthand that clients/companies have been willing to pay for such a solution. This gives you a strong sense of validation right from the start as you begin productizing that service. I call this a pre-validated idea, and it’s a great place to begin productizing your service. When I started Restaurant Engine, it wasn’t a question of whether or not restaurants needed website design and if they were willing to pay for it. I previously had a few restaurants as clients when I was a freelance web designer, so I knew this idea was pre-validated (and there are plenty of restaurant websites in the world, many of which badly need this type of service!).

But even if I hadn’t explicitly worked with this type of client, it’s safe to assume that small businesses like restaurants need a low-cost way to get a professionally designed website. Since I started with a pre-validated idea, I could move forward with figuring out how to streamline, sell, and scale up such a service. Remember, even if you haven’t offered a service before, if you've seen the need in companies you’ve worked for or experiences you’ve had, then you can proceed with a higher level of confidence that there is market demand for this.

4. Revenue Comes Easier and Faster

When you’re bootstrapping your transition out of client work or a nine-to-five, you’re perpetually racing against the clock. How long can you go until you run out of savings to pay my bills during my transition? This is a scary place to be—I know. A productized service helps you sustain your runway longer by getting your first customer revenue in the door faster and easier. You can charge a higher price as a value-added, “Done For You” service—often targeted at businesses.

You can require the first payment up-front rather than rely on free trials to convert leads to customers. You also don’t need thousands of customers for the business to be profitable. A typical productized service only requires a handful of paying customers on a monthly retainer to be sustainable. Compared to starting a software business or writing a book or digital course, all of which require many months to create and “ship,” a productized service can—quite literally—be launched to paying customers within a matter of days.

Then, it’s just a matter of iterating and improving as you go. Early revenue from those first paying customers extends your runway. Now, you can continue to push forward, scaling up your operation and increasing bandwidth. Compared to bootstrapping a software product on the side, which often requires some periods where you must pause to take a client project just to keep the lights on, a productized service feels like a no-brainer.

5. Most Entrepreneurs Are Overlooking Productized Services

Finally, here’s the reason why building a productized service is the perfect opportunity if you’re bootstrapping: Most others in your situation are overlooking it. While others are chasing after the shiny SaaS ideas, throwing iOS apps at the wall to see what sticks, or trying the long, slow path to building an audience and selling a course or a book, you can be signing up paying customers with nothing more than a landing page. While the rest avoid doing anything manually “because it doesn’t scale,” you can capitalize on that opportunity.

And that opportunity is in the systems. Most of your peers aren’t interested in systems, procedures, and streamlining operations. But to you, the productized service business owner, systems are the key. They will allow you to turn a manual, hands-on, value-added service into a product that can be run with or without you. That could mean streamlining specific procedures, hiring key team members, utilizing 3rd party tools, or eventually building out your software to make your process even faster.

Many other products exist to pursue. But they require a lot more time and funding. Building profitable, sustainable, productized services businesses has been the best way for me to self-fund my time to pursue other, slower-to-grow business ideas like software and training products.

6. The Best Way to Learn

And here’s a bonus reason why a productized service is a better opportunity than building software: It’s a fantastic way to learn. The founders that never stop learning are the ones who go the farthest. I’ve learned so much by creating and launching my productized services. On the product level, you have a more intimate relationship with every customer, so you’ll learn and refine your value proposition faster than you would with impersonal software.

And when your processes are delivered mainly manually, you learn where the friction points are, making it easier to streamline and automate. But at a high level, building a productized service is your opportunity to know what it means to go from freelancing to business owners. You’re learning to work on the business instead of in the industry. That means focusing on processes, building a team, and creating value.

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How To Productize A Service In 8 Simple Steps

1. Target a Specific Audience

Choosing a specific target audience helps your agency make the right decisions to reach potential customers. When you focus on a particular niche, you can develop your expertise and stand out as an authority, which helps attract buyers. For example, if you want to create a productized service for an SEO agency, you might hone in on local SEO for real estate businesses.

By targeting a specific audience like this, you can create a service that will help buyers in this niche, market it to them directly, and improve their SEO to attract the right clients.  Also, if you have experience in this area or have worked with real estate businesses, you can leverage this knowledge to improve your service and attract buyers.

2. Know Your Clients' Pain Points

Understanding your customers’ needs will help you provide real value. If you don’t know what your clients need, research is necessary to find out what they fear, what they want, and what could help make their businesses more competitive in their industries. With the data collected, you can create ideal customer profiles.

Then, review your past invoices, identify missed opportunities, and eliminate services nobody seems to be going crazy for. You can also use customer experience management software platforms, which offer great tools to connect with clients and better understand their needs. Your service offering should be a packaged solution to those needs.

3. Differentiate Your Services

When you decide to productize a service, you must understand that you’re not creating a bland, generic service. Instead, you’re developing a solution to a specific problem that a targeted group of customers has. To do this, you’ll need to differentiate your productized service to stand out from the competition. Earlier, I mentioned that you might have to do market research.

The pitfall many productized service providers fall into is this: they see a competing provider's excellent idea and copy it. Why would a potential client buy your service over the established one? Maybe you’re cheaper, but competing on price is a race to the bottom. Instead, set yourself apart with unique attributes. For instance, let’s say your service is to create insurance websites. While that is an exciting niche because you set yourself apart from regular designers, why should anyone hire you?

Leverage your client testimonials and data, and show prospects that your customers have increased conversion by XY%. Another example is someone selling services for book covers (design, typography, etc.). There are countless book cover experts, but only a few have worked with best-selling authors.

4. Analyze Your Performance Data

How long has each of your services been offered? How do your current services contribute to my success? Do any of my services need more sales? What makes these services different from my more successful services? Steps to productize a service: look at revenue by service sold. Building off these metrics will help you offer productized versions of already successful services.

Revise unsuccessful services to offer a productized version that solves a specific problem. It’s also essential to trim the excess services I’m offering. If a service isn’t in demand, there’s no point in distracting clients from the services they need.

5. Review Your Support History

Scan the inbox of your helpdesk software for reasons clients stopped using my services and any objections and problems they experienced. You may find shortcomings in your services or the way they’re delivered. For example, if you notice customers regularly asking for progress updates, consider implementing a self-service portal where they can see the status of their orders in real-time.

6. Get Feedback from Your Best Customers

Who are your favorite customers? The ones responsible for a good chunk of your revenue while requiring minimal hand-holding along the way—I’m sure you have a few clients like that. Reach out to these clients to find what attracted them to your agency first and gather insights into bringing in more people like them.

7. Network with Other Agencies 

Only some people in your space are in direct competition with you. You’ll learn a lot about business and your customers just from talking to other service providers they use. It could be through industry forums, Slack groups, or in-person events. By openly sharing ideas and helping others solve their problems, you’ll expose yourself to future opportunities, collaborations, and joint ventures.

8. Test Your Setup & Optimize Your Flow

Last but not least, when everything is set up, run tests—a lot of them. Invite a client into my portal and ask them to purchase services, go through the order process, and give you feedback. Don’t worry; we have a test mode, so payments aren’t live. With the input, go back to the drawing board until the entire flow is accessible for both existing clients and new prospects. Then, officially launch your productized service and promote it via content marketing, social media, and affiliates.

Try Orchestra for Free to Grow Your Productized Service Today

Orchestra's all-in-one growth toolkit makes it effortless to launch your productized service. Designed for creatives ready to scale, Orchestra provides a branded, white-labeled client portal, task management, and real-time analytics, with no coding needed—just your Stripe account.

Whether you’re a designer, developer, or copywriter, Orchestra streamlines your workflow. It lets you collaborate with clients seamlessly while maintaining a private workspace with your team. Add integrations like Slack and webhooks to customize your setup and deliver a branded experience. Enhance your service with a platform built to grow alongside you. Try Orchestra for free and develop your productized service today!

5 Tips On How To Grow Your Productized Service

1. Utilize Orchestra  to Scale Your Productized Service

Orchestra helps you launch your productized service with ease. This all-in-one growth toolkit is designed for creatives who are ready to scale. Orchestra features a branded, white-labeled client portal, task management, and real-time analytics, with no coding needed—just your Stripe account.

Orchestra streamlines your workflow, letting you collaborate with clients seamlessly while maintaining a private workspace with your team. Integrations like Slack and webhooks help you customize your setup and deliver a branded experience. Elevate your service with a platform built to grow alongside you, and try Orchestra for free to develop your productized service today.

2. Manually Solve the Problem First

Before successfully productizing a service, you must solve the problem consistently and repeatedly. Often, agencies think they need to productize to solve a lead problem when they have a capacity issue and wouldn’t be able to serve more clients if they had them. Learn how to solve a high-value problem consistently with good margins. Then, you can productize your service.

3. Get a Cheat Code for Both Sides of the Market

When I started independently, a coach told me: “Don’t start a business by yourself, and don’t start a two-sided business.” I, of course, being the stubborn person I am, did both. But I got lucky with Credo because I had a cheat code for both sides of the market. I had people coming to me wanting me to consult with them on SEO or digital marketing.

I could tell them I wasn’t taking on new clients but could refer them to someone who was a great fit. People were appreciative of this. As a former agency marketer who is friends with many agency owners, I could also quickly seed the network's supply side.

These cheat codes have come in handy throughout the business's lifespan, but I wish I had a stronger one for the first one. Demand is almost always the most challenging part of scaling in a productized service, so if I had to choose between having an unfair advantage on the demand or supply side, I’d pick the demand side any day.

4. Charge Reasonable Rates

When you’re ready to productize your service so that you can serve more clients, it’s tempting to charge less because “we’re working less.” I’m not going to give you a diatribe on pricing, but I will say that this is the wrong approach because you’re still in an hourly time-for-money mindset. The best-productized services charge for the value they bring by staying just “custom” enough to charge high rates while also leveraging the benefits of a system that has reliable outputs based on reliable inputs.

Charging like this will also let you run your business with a good profit margin, which, as we all know, is extremely important in lean times and will allow you to pay yourself well. Good margins let you hire good people, pay yourself well, and weather changes in the competitive landscape.

From my experience, a business's operating margins hierarchy goes like this: SaaS—80-90% margins. Productized service—30-70% margins (you want 50%+ minimum to be viable) Agency—10-40% margins. Like Nathan Barry’s Ladders of Wealth Creation, it’s often best to start at the bottom and work your way up. You can skip a rung if you want, but your life will most likely be unnecessarily more complicated than it would otherwise.

5. Build Technology to Facilitate Delivery

One of my key learnings in running Credo, which I am also applying to EditorNinja, is the importance of building technology to automate or at least systematize as many of your repeated processes as possible as soon as possible. When I started working on Credo, I ran it with a free CRM, a few spreadsheets, and my email inbox.

We still have a CRM, spreadsheets, and email inboxes. We also invested a lot of money in building our Platform to facilitate project creation, matching and introductions, and appointment scheduling. I know Design Pickle has built out their workflow management software called Jar (keeping with the pickle theme) to facilitate a similar workflow to what EditorNinja will become someday.

The sooner you can build technology that makes it easy to plug people into the processes to run them instead of doing them in many places, the sooner you’ll be able to scale. You don’t even have to build your technology. To run their business, many productized services use project management software like Asana or Basecamp, which has repeatable fields and process sheets. I don’t care which you choose. Just use technology to enable you to scale.

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7 Famous Examples of Productized Services

1. Design Pickle – Graphic Design as a Service

Design Pickle offers unlimited graphic design requests for a flat fee with a subscription-based model. It appeals to businesses that need regular design work without hiring in-house designers. Design Pickle assigns a dedicated designer for each client to simplify the workflow and implement a streamlined request process for fast turnarounds. Clear deliverables and expectations increase client satisfaction and retention.

2. Bench – Bookkeeping for Small Businesses

Bench productizes bookkeeping by using standardized processes and dedicated teams. Their subscription-based plans include monthly bookkeeping, financial reports, and tax filing services, all packaged in an easy-to-use interface. Bench focuses on client onboarding, dedicated bookkeepers, and AI-enhanced data processing to maintain high-quality, efficient service at scale.

3. WP Buffs – WordPress Maintenance Packages

WP Buffs provides standardized website maintenance services for WordPress users with fixed monthly plans based on support levels. Their approach outlines pricing tiers and uses automation tools for routine tasks like updates, security checks, and performance monitoring. This allows them to scale efficiently while maintaining quality.

4. Wavve – Social Media Audio-to-Video Conversion

Wavve offers set plans to transform audio content into engaging videos for social media targeted at podcasters and marketers. They simplify the process with a DIY interface, allowing users to convert audio into branded, visual content quickly. Pricing plans are based on video length and export options to maximize flexibility while remaining scalable.

5. DesignJoy – High-End Design Subscription

DesignJoy offers a “designer-on-demand” model where clients can access unlimited design requests for a monthly fee. This productized service targets businesses looking for consistent, quality design without hiring a full-time designer. DesignJoy delivers high value with a personalized designer experience, minimal queue times, and a focus on quality design. Their approach allows them to charge premium prices.

6. ManyPixels – On-Demand Graphic Design

ManyPixels provides unlimited graphic design services on a subscription basis, targeting agencies and businesses with frequent design needs. They automate project intake, use a dedicated team of designers, and provide a simple workflow to keep projects on track. Monthly plans help with consistent revenue and customer retention.

7. Video Husky – Video Editing Subscription Service 

Video Husky offers unlimited video editing with quick turnarounds for a flat monthly rate, which is ideal for content creators and agencies. They manage multiple client accounts with dedicated editors and a standardized revision process. Their structured workflow keeps edits fast and efficient, scaling with demand.

Try Orchestra for Free to Grow Your Productized Service Today

Orchestra’s growth toolkit helps you launch and scale productized services fast. The all-in-one software creates a branded client portal for your productized service. This means you can present your offer to clients and manage all the moving parts from one organized location that looks like it’s been custom-built for your business.

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