From laid off to creating my SaaS and generating $8K MRR with my productized
service
How it started
6 months ago, I was all in on the crypto wave, working hard and feeling like I was on the cutting edge.
Then the market crashed. A few months later, I was out of a job.
I felt it coming. With all the massive tech layoffs, I knew I needed to diversify my income. Which is when my flatmate told me about a guy running a design agency by himself who was doing crazy numbers.
Learning about productized services
I think we all know the story of Brett from designjoy.co and his productized service. Think of it like a (very expensive) gym membership, but for design. People sign up, pay monthly, and get a set amount of design work. It seemed so straightforward, and I thought, "Hey, I could do this with web development."
So I took Brett’s course and joined his community to learn how he was doing it and start my own venture with all the right cards in hand.
But getting started wasn't a walk in the park… As a software engineer, seeing that I'd need to connect a dozen different tools together to run my agency before finally offering a shared experience among my subscribers was unthinkable.
After talking with a lot of different people trying to start a productized service, I decided to work on making this process easier and accessible to all.
That's when I decided to build https://breeew.com. It's a simple platform, but I’m proud of it!
It helps you create and manage productized services. It essentially reproduces DesignJoy's workflow but from a single place, so you never need to do any manual actions. Instead everything is automatically managed for you. (I spent a lot of time trying to make the perfect UX.)
My productized service
Anyway, fast forward to today. I actually started by own productized service (liberto.dev) and now generate $8k in monthly recurring revenue.
What's great about this isn't just the money (though that's pretty sweet). It's the feeling of being my own boss that's truly priceless.
I know a lot of you out there are hustling hard, maybe feeling a bit stuck or looking for a side gig that could turn into something more. I'm telling you: if I can do it, so can you.
You've got the skills; you just need to put them out there in the right way.
If you're curious about how I made it work or just want to bounce around some ideas, I'm here for it. Let's help each other out.
And hey, if you want to see how https://breeew.com could work for you, go take a look. I built it to help people just like us get ahead.
Catch you later,
Anthony
P.S. Really, go check out https://breeew.com or hit me up. Let's make things happen.
Very motivational! I'm an FPGA developer for embedded hardware and also went through Brett's course. Curious to know how you have managed turnaround times for tasks and how you choose when/what to deliver for larger tasks.
Love your approach to this. I also have a development agency as a subscription. Curious to know how your price point is working for you and what prices you have tested.
Thanks!
Super cool for your dev agency, exciting times ahead! The only price I've tested so far is $7999/month for small projects, I wouldn't charge that for large projects that would take a lot of my time!
It all depends of your service and how much time you're ready to allocate to it :)
Also, if you're working with other developers, you might be able to charge a bit less and streamline the processes :)
How did you gain customers for liberto.dev?
First customer is someone I worked with and created his own company the other one was a lead coming from twitter!
This as well. Always found it hard knowing which people to reach out to and forming the messages needed to land a call/deal
Very inspirational Anthony, thanks for sharing! I'm also starting a productized service around my freelance app development work of the last few years along with a couple of colleagues. In this case we decided to build a custom yet simple web platform to optimize the product development process focused on fast and frequent iteration cycles.
Thanks Reynolds for your kind words! Super curious to see what you came up with as solution?
This is exactly for that I created Breeew to provide this type of platform to anyone, but clearly your coding skills were helpful :D
Great story! And LOVE these comments.
I'm working on a Productized Service directory, we have about 80+ so far. I'll throw a recommendation for your tool on the landing <3
I've been in the discord a while as well, seems like you're building something sustainable/long term, love it. Gumroad vibes!
Wow thank you so much for the nice words and your support it means a lot <3
Gumroad is a good inspiration for me, my goal is to make productized services as easy to create than selling a digital product with gumroad!
What is the link to your directory? :)
Sure! Here it is: https://productizedhq.com/
Still just starting, but seeing solid (imo) traffic + SEO results so far. Started a month or 2 ago.
Cool project mate, congrats! I've just submitted my mobile app development productized service to the directory. Hope you find it a good fit there :)
Super cool initiative well done! And thank you for mentioning breeew, this is so cool 😍
Very inspiring, just signed up for my unlimited design subscription - https://24seven.design/
Looking forward to using it.
Added you to a Productized Services directory I run! You should see the backlink show up in a few days. Really solid pricing table :)
Wow! Super grateful. Cheers Buddy!
Awesome to see that, let me know if you need any help 🙌🏻
Breeew looks great. I am trying to start my own productized service business. So might give your product a go. Would love to see a video of the client portal before I sign up.
Amazing to know, if you want you can try the client portal by yourself by subscribing to the free plan of my agency (no credit card needed)
https://liberto.dev
Super pumped to have you try this out!
Also, I'm building in public on twitter if you're interested :)
Thanks again 🙌🏻
great journey
Thank you 🙏🏻
Very interesting product. My question with pricing tho:
"Automatically billed at your first subscriber."
IMO the activation point of this product is AFTER the first subscriber, because you want to see how it actually runs in a real world scenario. So to me billed at my second subscriber would be a much stronger sell.
Hey there, thanks for your feedback!
Pricing is a very interesting topic, I'm trying to find the right balance between being accessible for all and starting generating incomes with Breeew!
With my test so far, most people won't have their first customers and having this first for free is enough to test as many ideas as you want for free and fast.
(Which wasn't possible without Breeew before, other services are really expensive)
There is some users already having 10 agencies in parallel and trying what works and I think it's already fair to wait for their first subscriber to charge them.
Waiting for two would mean I would virtually never generate money with this product.
But I'm thinking very soon of adding a more affordable price with limited options, making it even more accessible to all :)
For sure I agree you should pay yourself :)
Personally I have never considered productizing myself and your post inspired me to try that, but paying $49 a month after actually getting started with a real client is a huge turnoff for me, and it actually stops me from trying this myself. Because what do I do if I lose this client etc?
This is a relatively new market so I think you might benefit more from growing the pie by removing the barrier to entry for more people. Also if I'm not mistaken your marginal cost is almost 0 so it doesn't hurt to have more users.
Have you considered a revenue sharing model? You can take for example 2% (you can frame it as 5% including stripe fees), that'd align more with the value your services provide to your users.
Totally understand your point, this is quite a big entry price, but so far after my experiments I saw that people are really against paying fees.
I started with a cheaper plan and a transaction fee, but it was actually slowing Breeew's growth!
But I'm considering adding a cheaper plan with limited options :)
So far the new pricing is quite well welcomed, because not payment until your first subscriber is quitte attracting and fair (I think)
Something I can think about is stopping payments if your don't have any subscriber paying anymore, this would solve your worries isn't it?
"stopping payments if your don't have any subscriber" sounds great! I think I'm sold with that.
The meta point I'm making here is to make sure the customer finds success, which you obviously are doing already :)
Thanks for the productive discussion, gave me some fruits for thought for my own startup
Pricing is a ever evolving thing and I'm trying to find the right balance :)
I truly want something fair and accessible to everyone. I'm glad it help you somehow, super constructive chat indeed 🙌🏻
Congrats man! More to come!
Thank you so much for the support!
That's great man! Congrats! What tech stack did you use ?
Thank you so much!
I've used NextJS, TailwindCSS, ShadcnUI
For the DB I'm using prisma and mongodb serverless!
Saas is the way.
Agreed!
Came across Breeew recently outside of PH and though, wow, this guy is smart! Had I not already done everything manually for my own productized service I would have considered your platform. For folks who are less tech savvy, Breew could be a real game changer. Well done!
Thanks for this comment 🙌🏻
This is exactly why I started Breeew, because the setup for productized services is so complicated even for tech savy people
I would love to have you onboard one day, I will soon add ways to import an existing agency so it'll be almost an instant setup for you!
Dude this is crazy, I was messing around with building something super similar a few weeks ago... Productized services seem like a great prosumer audience to target these days with all the hype.
Great work, your product looks really nice!
"Selling shovels in a gold rush" type of idea right?
The hype is slowing down a bit the past months, but I feel like its coming back a little! :)
This really makes me want to buy the design joy course. Great work
Breeew is literally a product of that, gives you everything you need to get started!
The course was great, but in my opinion what DesignJoy represent is really hard to achieve without a big audience online
People trust him because he became famous in a way
As a developer, it's great to hear that this productized service is working for you. I'm really curious, did you see any challenges in adopting this subscription model for dev work? For example, is there a possibility that one subscriber gives you way too much work, and you're unable to do work for other subscribers?
There is a chance that some days are busier than others, but most of the time it's ok!
It all depends of who your subscribers are, I never overpromise anything, I never said I would be full time for them.
I've got things to do, as long as I can deliver they are happy :)
I had a followup here for both of you. How do you guys find clients as a developer and convince them to use a productized service billing model?
My experience is that many clients are set in pay per hour model. Do I just need to shop for different clients.
I've also been thinking about how to adopt this specifically for ML development
Sure, I think that it's all about how you're framing what you will do for them!
Charging by the hour a software engineer is IMO the worth possible way of charging because you never know exactly how long it will take to get something done.
You need to educate them on why this model allows to focus on a long term relationship and how easy and flexible for them it is.
For instance the "Pausing" feature is a huge seller because it gives a lot of control back to them.
Also it's simply easier, charging monthly is just more predictable and also would mean that potentially it would cost less to them (More hours worked by you, but not charged at the hour), always the same price :)
Ah good selling points. I'll try that with the next gig that comes up and if I get a bite, I'll give your platform a shot as well to go with it
Happy it helped ;)
Productizing productized services
love it :D
Productizeseption
That's great to hear and I started my own Productized service for QA last week and would like to know to your journey from 0 to $8k MRR. What strategies did you have to put together to get your first customer and I hope to get that point sooner.
Hey there, I think what worked the best for me was to build breeew.com in public, it helped to showcase my skills and added credibility to my name
So people are more willing to pay for them!
Nice
Thank you Hamid!
Congratulations
Whoa nice journey! How do you get your first 3 paid users?
Thanks!
On breeew.com it was via twitter mostly, building in public was definitely a great helper
That's a nice idea, congrats
Thanks ☺️
Nice one!
Thanks 🙏🏻
Interesting, where did you find your first group of customers?
I took Brett's course (the creator of design joy) and joined his discord community. On there, a lot of people are struggling with their setup so it was perfect for me.
Also, every time he was posted on twitter I was responding with a meaningful response plus I was trying to plug my idea somehow.
Some of his tweets generated 3000 unique viewers on my website juste because people were looking in the comments (Quite crazy)
Wow, 3K unique viewers on your website? That means the number of people looking into comments must be at least 10x
I will go try this too. Very interesting!
Yes, if you're one of the first comments, you get a tons of views from big accounts!
His tweets were generating 200-300k views, the comments were being seen a lot!
Hey @anthonyriera thats a cool idea! Thanks for sharing! 😁
I've thought about doing productized dev services before as well, but the scope of work seems much larger than design. How do you handle that?
Are tasks inside of existing codebases? Are you creating new codebases? Any requirements on tech?
How many customers are you serving currently? And how long has liberto been live?
The scope of work is definitely larger, this is why that you should first charge more and also carefully pick your clients.
For instance, I'm about to onboard a second client as I'm writing that and will stop there.
Both are clients with not "immediate / urgent" needs, meaning I can manage my time without time pressure making everything easier.
So I would avoid working with early stage startups with small fundings, they might be more demanding and "needy" than client with big budgets.
Also, pick projects that are easy to work on for you. If you're working on things that are easy for you, you will obviously work faster than a junior would ✌️
Hope it helps? :)
I'm curious how you plan on limiting the number of clients, would you just shut down your site or remove the "Subscribe" button, or would you be adding some sort of "notify me when available"?
I've thought about doing this productized service as a dev, but then ended up just doing standard consulting which I felt like suited my goal more which was to have a better work-life balance and still have time for my side projects.
This is a very good question!
I will soon add a limit, showing there is no spot left! If the demand arises I will start thinking of partner up with other devs and create a bigger agency :)
Productized services can also mean working as a team
How does the "productized" web development differ from just contracting/project work? Just getting payed monthly by the client?
For me it seems it's the same as just having a contract with X hours a month.
Especially when you only have 1 or 2 clients.
PS: Don't want to be negative or rude, just want to understand what's the difference.
This is a different form of contracting, but at the end of the day this is still coding for a client!
I'm just making sure to manage expectations with them and I carefully pick the one I want to work with :)