Owning a business makes sense if you plan to work independently for a long time. A successful business needs revenue to exceed its expenses and follow a stable, coherent plan. If you want to really succeed at independent work, I think you should approach your practice from the mindset of a business owner—and instead of calling yourself a freelancer, pitch yourself as a consultant to others’ business problems, using your work as a valuable tool to accomplish whatever’s needed.
I’ve spent the past couple of years creating consulting offerings, packaging them up like products, and selling them to my audience. As a result, instead of stressing myself out chasing clients, I let clients come to me by applying for one of my offerings. Rather than deal with the feast-or-famine cash flow issues that I’d typically get with one-off projects, clients pay me on a consistent basis—which lets me sleep a lot better at night.
Of course, I’ve grown my business, and kept it as stable and durable as possible, by creating things people do want to buy. Draft Revise, a monthly A/B testing service that I launched on July 8th, 2013, has remained sold-out since, with over $250,000 in all-time revenue. Since I launched Draft Revise, Revise Express has made over $12,000 in lifetime revenue (with five of its customers becoming Draft Revise clients later), Draft Coaching has remained sold-out since its launch (with $29,500 in revenue since its launch), and Draft Foundation signed its first paying client at $30,000, only two weeks after its launch on July 6th of this year.
In the past, I tried a lot of different ways to create and launch new offerings. The ideas above made it, but Revise Express required six months of retooling, and I’ve floated other plans that died on the vine. Now, I’ve finally hit on a process that seems to work well. In what follows, I’m going to outline the launch process that worked for me, how to generalize the process to whatever you’re putting together, and how you can take action today.
Draft Revise: How I Developed the Offering
I put together Draft Revise during my first month-long intermission from client work. Essentially, you pay me a quarterly fee to run A/B tests for your website. I run up to three tests every month, handling everything from ideation to execution. Then, at the end of the month, I determine which tests succeeded, write up a report, implement everything on your production site, and repeat.
Draft Revise came as an answer to the question: How do I create a monthly retainer for UX-focused work that people will pay for? This led me to begin running A/B tests for people. Why?
- A/B testing solves an expensive problem for clients. People know they are missing huge opportunities with their marketing funnels.
- A/B testing is easy to understand. It was the hotness in mid-2013, and it’s still pretty in vogue today.
- A/B testing is continuous. You never stop improving your marketing site, and testing is a practice that clients integrate into their design process. But if they don’t know where to start, they need an expert to help.
Ten days after I launched Draft Revise, it sold out–and it’s remained that way since.
Draft Revise has created the bulk of my income since I launched it; I can rely on it for all of my annual expenses. It’s durable: if a client fires me, I can replace them quickly and not lose all of my revenue. It’s stable: over half of my clients stay on for at least six months.
A few months after I launched it, I started to explore the reasons why Draft Revise has fared so well. In subsequent offerings, I learned to focus on what problems the customer has, while attempting to project what my own workload would look like after I get new paying customers.
How to Apply Draft Revise’s Model to Tour Own Work
So, what does this look like for you? I’ve created a process that I follow when making anything new, and it follows four steps:
Step One: Explore Your Idea From Every Angle
I am constantly coming up with new ideas, and most of them are terrible. For example, I once had the idea to write up reports that talk designers (or their bosses or clients) back from enacting bad ideas. I threw it away for two reasons: one, I would constantly be subject to negativity in my work, which would be a bummer; and two, I probably couldn’t charge a fair enough rate to justify my time investment.
It’s important to keep sifting through to find the ideas that will work. I frequently talk with my colleagues and friends, and think of different things that may work well. Other people conduct research on Hacker News, or with their current freelance clients, to determine what pains their prospective customers might be feeling at any given point. All of these lessons and insights go into a notebook dedicated solely to business development.
Photo by Nick Disabato
If you’re serving businesses, successful offerings either increase their revenue or decrease their costs. Successful offerings also solve pains that already exist in the market, and are presently under-served. You need to constantly be analyzing what issues people are facing, so you can be the one to build something that clearly addresses them. (My friend Amy Hoy calls this process a “Sales Safari.”)
Take Baremetrics, for example. Stripe is a wildly successful credit card processor for developers. Baremetrics provides a bunch of useful analytics for your Stripe account. Nobody else was doing this very well when Baremetrics first launched, and a lot of businesses have a significant interest in knowing how their payments are doing. The result: over $34,000 in monthly recurring revenue in the past 18 months.
Baremetrics’s founder created the product after hearing others complain about how hard it was to make real analytics out of Stripe. He even saw a couple of people build solutions themselves on top of Stripe’s API. So he made the tool himself, charged businesses for it, and the rest is history.
With any new idea, ask yourself:
- Does this reduce expenses or increase revenue for my customers and clients?
- Have I heard others experiencing problems around this area? If not, how can I best explore this?
- Is the market already crowded for this sort of solution? If yes, what makes mine stand out? And is this enough for me to be heard?
- How does this fit with my existing business? How will people view me once it’s been launched? Does this compliment or conflict with my existing offerings?
- What ramification does this have for the rest of my business? If it blows up on day one, will I dial back something else I’m offering, or will I balance it with the rest of my work?
Hold off on ideas where the path is not clear. You can always work with them at some point in the future. Once you have an idea that seems promising, you can begin working on what shape the offering itself will take. For example, I had been mulling a monthly retainer for UX work for almost a year before Draft Revise came along. It took the growth of third-party A/B testing tools like Visual Website Optimizer for me to realize that something like Draft Revise would be feasible. In the meantime, I remained patient and kept exploring my options.
Step Two: Define the Scope & Price on Value
When I put together a new offering, I try to keep the scope as consistent and repeatable as possible– which allows me to do my work with fewer unknowns and less stress. For example, with Revise Express, I have a consistent process that I follow from beginning to end. You pay and fill out a form that explains your site and its goals, and then I print out screenshots of your site’s pages, mark them up, and write up my thoughts in a template I created. The process doesn’t materially change from client to client – which allows for fewer surprises on my end, while still solving numerous challenges for my clients.
Defining the scope allows you to establish a consensus with your clients ahead of time, while reducing the risk that you will burn out when you’re delivering the work. It also does not connect your work to time–it connects your work to its results.
While you might bill by time right now, clients don’t care how long it took you to do something. They care about the outcomes you create. It’s on you to estimate and price your work accordingly. So when I price a new offering, I don’t look at how long I typically spend on it. Instead, I focus on the results I deliver for clients, and price accordingly. I once created an A/B test that took 10 minutes to create and bumped my client’s revenue by 18 percent. Meanwhile, I’ve spent days laboring over tests that ended up failing. Should I have charged that client for the 10 minutes, or should I have charged them for the likely outcome?
Pricing on value changes everything. It’s very likely you can put together an offering that increases your projected “hourly rate,” given what you can safely charge for it. If the scope of the work is small compared to the value it’ll create, then the offering itself is likely to get you more money and be a better fit for whom you work with. And this sounds crazy, but every time I increase my rate, I end up attracting better clients with more interesting design problems.
By this point, you should have the following together:
- The problem you’re solving.
- The solution you have in mind.
- How long you expect it to typically take.
- How much value you expect it to create—and, as a result, something approaching a final price.
- The likely ramifications for your business.
Now it’s time for you to write something for your prospective customers.
Step Three: Write the Marketing Page
I take my marketing page very seriously, as it’s how I’m able to get people in the door. It also nails down the scope of what I’m doing as firmly as possible, while allowing me to figure out the best way to communicate the problem clearly.
A good marketing page should have a reader in mind and establish an immediate understanding with them. I tend to do this with a combination of storytelling and research. For example:
- Storytelling: Draft Foundation’s marketing page begins with a made-up anecdote of a notional customer signing up for a SaaS (software as a service: a way of delivering apps over the Internet) with a beautiful marketing funnel and a crummy application. This fake situation spoke to some real problems that most SaaS businesses face.
- Research: Draft Revise’s marketing page begins by citing a bunch of studies where small changes to the UX of an application yielded outsize results. I connected this back to the practice of A/B testing, in order to show that thoughtful, incremental improvements to your design can generate similar results for you.
For example, a former client, Freckle, also begins their marketing page by outlining the pains that a client feels—which allows them to immediately create a sense that they understand the prospective customer’s problems.
Once I’ve established a rapport with my reader, here’s the overall anatomy of a successful marketing page:
- Describe the overall pitch. As briefly as possible, what are you offering and what outcomes can you provide?
- Go into detail on the scope. If this is a big offering, I spend several paragraphs describing the timeline of the project. If this is smaller, I might outline it in a couple of sentences and link to an example.
- Address prospective objections. You should always be putting yourself in the customer’s shoes, thinking about any objections they may bring up over the course of the project. For example, Draft Foundation is a six-month engagement. That is very long for a lot of clients, so I wanted to ensure that I provided an explicit reason. More broadly, a client can always choose to do nothing, rather than take on work with you—so what’s the cost of doing nothing? Spell this out as clearly as possible. Do this with every objection you can think of.
- Close with pricing. There’s a reason so many influential advertisements close with the price: it’s because we want to spend as much time as possible pitching to them, so the price sounds like a no-brainer once it’s been disclosed. When I disclose the price, I always anchor it against an alternative. For example, Draft Foundation compares its $30,000 fee against the prospect of hiring a full-time senior UX designer for the same time period—if you can poach one.
- Provide a call to action. A good marketing page has one goal. For me, that’s usually to fill out an application so we can have a chat about whether this is a good fit. For many smaller product-based consulting services, though, you may want to simply have a “buy now.”
I rewrite my marketing page constantly before launch, slowly running it past friends, colleagues, and eventually my partner. Rewriting is very, very hard, and it often takes multiple dozens of drafts before I get it to the point where it’s perfect.
I write in plain text, in Markdown, so there’s no excess to distract me from the quality of my writing. But use whatever tools work for you.
Step Four: Refine the Details
As I rewrite my marketing page, I’m doing a bunch of other things, many of which help contribute to these rewrites:
- Find a guinea pig and test the offering. Roll out a limited-scope version for someone you know, either for free or heavily discounted, so that you can work out the kinks, solicit a testimonial, and get honest critique from them. Make it clear that they’re getting a one-time discount and what you expect from them to make the service better.
- Create a PDF welcome packet for new applicants, and email one to everyone who applies. In the welcome packet, you should go into further detail about the scope, how your working relationship will play out, and answer any questions that the client might have. (Here is Draft Revise’s welcome packet, for reference.)
- Build a terms & conditions page to legally protect yourself. You need contracts for all of the work you perform for clients, and these sorts of offerings are no exception. Here are Draft Revise’s as an example. Ask a lawyer to write yours.
Once you have your marketing page as good as you can possibly get it, and when you feel comfortable fulfilling the work you’ve promised to do, you should launch. Spread the word to your mailing list, any social media outlets, and direct emails to anybody who might be interested in your work. Before you launch, let a few colleagues know ahead of time, and encourage them to help promote your launch as well.
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This is not an easy process. You need to work hard to understand your customers’ true needs. You need to spend a lot of effort reflecting on how you can meet those needs. And then you need to execute on that solution as carefully and thoughtfully as possible.
But if you stack the bricks, day by day, you might find that you have eventually built a better business for yourself—one that you actually enjoy doing. The more you find yourself recognizing and empathizing with your prospective customers’ real needs, the more likely you are to have a stable, durable business.
The upside of this has been palpable for my business, allowing me to basically never have to write a one-off proposal again. All of the marketing pages I wrote? Those are my proposals now. And people come to my site, determine if they want to buy, and move on if they don’t.
So far, it’s worked out pretty well.
Additional resources:
More Resources
- Draft primarily serves businesses, but if you’re making stuff for consumers, you’ll want to read Kathy Sierra’s Badass: Making Users Awesome.
- A lot of people call this practice “productized consulting.” My colleague Brian Casel has a whole course on how to do this; I’m one of the case studies.
- And if you’re curious about more on value-based pricing, check out Value-Based Fees by corporate consultant Alan Weiss.
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