The Bright Side of Productized Services

A few weeks ago, I released this video about the dark side of productized services and how they are not the best model for freelancers — and it had a much better reaction than I thought it would.

People were generally on my side, with many viewers wanting to learn about the brighter side of productized services, where no one is blocked on Twitter, and we’re all making a solid income without losing our minds on custom proposals or sales calls.

My name is Sara, I am a SaaS expert and own the ops agency _systms?, where I help brands like yours untangle complexities and remove bottlenecks from their workflows.

Benefit 1: Pricing

Before we dive into the benefits of having a truly productized offer, I first want to discuss how to come up with your pricing. I know I’m pulling the cart in front of the horse, but that’s why you’re here, right, to talk money & numbers.

If you’ve heard me share my pricing strategy at all in the past six years, then you know I base everything on one simple formula;

Bills X Years of Experience

Yes, you read that correctly: my rent, car payment, and insurance… are the actual strategies behind my pricing.

I use them as “anchors,” and then I add $1000 for every year of experience.

When I first quit my job to freelance full-time, my bills didn’t stop. So if I had a client sign on, it would be cool. I can pay my car payment, or phew, I don’t have to worry about groceries.

And I have kept things that simple ever since.

So, if we swing back to having a Productized Service, that’s how I created my rates. I charge $5K for a general Notion build because my rent is $1K + I’ve been building for 4 years… hence $5K.

Of course, I have absolutely charged 10X that amount—and I’ve also charged less than that, which is why it’s an anchor—I can swing forward or back depending on the client and deliverables.

No Custom Proposals

The next nice piece about being “productized” is not having to “do” proposals. Parallel to this, choosing to share your rates publicly or not.

In any sales call, I keep my anchor price in mind, listen intently for the deliverables, and decide if my set rate is good enough or needs a swing. If it doesn’t, I have a saved Gmail template with the onboarding ready to go that I ship one hour after the call.

Now, I have and pretty much have always shared my rates on my website.

It makes things easier, in my opinion, for people out of budget not to book a call they can’t afford, but like we talked about in the Dark Side video, I no longer allow people to book a project without meeting me first.

Another bright side to be productized is not having to do hard math.

Listen, I failed algebra twice. I don’t have time to calculate how many projects it will take me to cruise every month.

Instead, I can easily look at the anchor vs. leads and know, OK I only need one project this month.

Project Deliverables

Let’s talk deliverables. I can do the majority of our projects in my sleep because they are the exact same 95% of the time.

Here’s a great example.

I recently worked with a photographer out of Detroit. We took her off Honeybook and built a new digital hub using Notion, Tally Forms, Wave Accounting and Cal.com.

Similarly, I worked with another solopreneur for whom we did the exact same project, except they stayed on QuickBooks, so most of the focus was on connecting the other tools with Zapier.

This is why productized offers are great because when you get the unicorn project, you not only have the mental bandwidth but the creative time & space to experiment, explore, and do badass work because the no-brainer projects don’t eat up a lot of time.

To that point, because a productized offer is more or less universal, you can nail down timeframes. 90% of our projects take 3 weeks or less now because we can go in and immediately knock it out.

The key here is using productized offers to be as efficient as possible so you can spend time doing other things like starting a newsletter or gardening or whatever makes your little heart happy.

Own Your Craft

The last thing I’ll add about the bright side of productized offers is that you can really begin to OWN and hone in on your craft. Looking back over the years, I can 1000% remember times when I didn’t feel in control of a project or that I wasn’t showing up my best because there were too many cooks in the kitchen.

Having a productized service removes that. It allows you to take control and show up exactly as you intend to without fear of creep.

To that point and circling back to anchored pricing, adding on the $1K per experience year also gives me a buffer should something else come up. I refuse to write nit-picky invoices or, worse, chase them. So this pricing gives me room to “add on” a deliverable, no questions asked.

To make a very long-winded argument short… When you remove the crazy hourly calculations, have confidence in the primary work you do, and allow yourself to focus more on the project — not how you get to it — a whole new world opens up. Promise.

???? Sara Loretta is an operations industry leader @ SYSTMS? and the 10th US Certified Notion Consultant. She’s on a mission to make business education accessible to all solopreneurs, startups, and agencies.

Find Sara on Twitter (X), YouTube or LinkedIn.

visit systms.club/resources to download.