In this Trends.vc Report, we talk about how to get early clients, building in public, where to find qualified prospects and more.
Businesses need design, development and marketing work done.
Without a complex buying process.
Unlimited services let customers outsource tasks with a predictable price, scope and time frame.
Unlimited Services
- Nick is building Baked Design in public.
- Ch Daniel is building SaaSPad in public.
- Justin Watt is building Stakeholders in public.
- Brett Williams shares lessons learned while building Designjoy in public.
- Davor Egyed used warm outreach and grew Derokki to $7,800 MRR in 17 days.
- Luka Mlakar applied to companies on LinkedIn and job boards looking for services provided by Flowout.
- Cameron Baughn runs DesignFriend. He sends cold emails to recently funded startups and companies with open designer jobs.
- Storehelper lets you book a demo of their Shopify development services.
- Flow Sparrow offers a free call to share solutions to your website problems.
- GoDesignGo offers a discovery call to help you learn more about their services.
- Flowspark lets you sign up in 2 minutes.
- Product Alchemy lets you sign up in 1 click.
- Davor Egyed redesigned Derokki to offer fast sign-ups.
- Brett Williams says it's faster to sign up to Designjoy than to buy a t-shirt.
- Draftmade works with 5 companies each month.
- Imperius Films shares the number of spots left for new clients.
- Design Rack says they have limited availability and adds new clients to a waitlist.
- DotYeti offers a marketing report and 150+ illustrations.
- DarkRoast offers 100+ ideas for high-impact marketing projects.
- Design Pickle offers a guide on how unlimited graphic design works.
- Buildpath offers Shopify development for $4,995 and $7,995 per month.
- Black Mammoth offers web development services for $19,995-$31,995 per month.
- UnicornGO charges $399-$999 per month for unlimited design, content and video editing.
- AutoGrow offers a 7-day trial for $7.
- ViralVerse offers a 1-week trial for $77.
- Storehelper offers a 10-hour trial package for $890.
- Zensite offers a 7-day trial of their best plan for $999.
- Drip Fed Design lets you pay per month or quarter.
- Joyflo lets you save more by paying per month, quarter or year.
- Imaginary Space breaks down its flat fee per month, quarter or year.
- Hunter Hammonds grew his unlimited services to 7 figures.
- Johnathan Grzybowski and Khai Tran grew Penji to $350,000 MRR.
- Brett Williams grew Designjoy to ~$1,500,000 ARR and made $3,000,000 in total. He’s a million-dollar, one-person business.
- All Hands is a design studio. They launched Rhythm with unlimited design requests.
- HeyHiHello is a digital product and UX agency. They launched an unlimited design subscription for startups.
- Scandiweb is an eCommerce agency. Their design team launched green pixel with unlimited design services.
- Ebda is a full-service agency for Webflow design, development and marketing. They offer unlimited Webflow development.
- Breeew lets you manage tasks, chats and subscriptions.
- Zendo helps you sell productized, recurring and custom services.
- Queue lets you manage payments, feedback and clients in one platform.
- Service Provider Pro is a client portal for productized digital marketing, SEO and content agencies.
“Unlimited is misleading.”
The "one request at a time" rule prevents scope creep. This makes it impossible to abuse the system.
“How to deal with the most demanding clients when the cost of service outweighs revenue?”
It may be that your services are not a good fit for the most demanding clients. Those who need a full-time professional may not be your ideal customer. There are clients who have small, occasional needs for your service. This is your gold mine.
“Unlimited revisions lead to bad quality. Why bother if we can revise ‘one more time’?”
Poor execution will lead to churn and bad word of mouth. Unlimited requests and revisions are part of your value proposition. But the deciding factor is the quality of your services.
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Wow, this was a phenomanal write-up. (Love the Haters section lol.)
I'm working on https://ProductizedHQ.com/ in public to help with some of the questions people had around it, as well as be 'the' place online for people to shop for Productized Services.
I saw a lot of Design as a Service agencies going unnoticed when providing amazing services, at a lower price point, so it's sort of solving my own pain point.
Example/shoutout for another indiehacker:
Damien from https://diamondeyes.design/ is offering 30% off for the next few days, so like 3k/mo for someone with 14 years of exp. 🤯
But right now, no way to really see discounts like this, not to mention experience, and compare services. (Or see services to avoid.)
Still in early stages and SEO is just taking off, I will get all the ones you mentioned in this writeup added ASAP! 🚀
How exactly does this Unlimited thing work? I see that every such service says that one request at a time. But how do you judge/justify how much time this one request takes to complete?
Can someone give me an exact idea of how this is implemented? Because development projects need continuous communication with customers so that customer perceptive output is matched with actual output.
I don't understand how all these issues are being addressed is such services.
This is a good question, for dev for instance it would be taking an epic let's say "New comment feature" and split that in small chunks of work you can deliver in sequence.
This way the client gets a sense of progress and for you it helps to stay organised :)
This is also on task at a time, but at a more granular level.
Hope it helps, I will actually write a full article on that
For dev, splitting a feature into small chunks makes sense. Customers who are interested in being involved in the development process may be happy to see the progress happening...
But most customers want to understand how much they may spend to get a particular feature done.
When I think of this in-depth, this kind of model works only for maintenance projects/websites. Customer who isn't very tech-savvy sees the fee as a monthly expense and will be happy to keep paying for it as a way to get quick support or minor changes done.
I don't think this works for complex business application development. Please correct me if I am wrong.
The key is really to find a client that is willing to trust you 100% with what you do.
Also, it all comes down to the way you communicate with clients, if you are very vocal and make them understand what you're doing, they don't care at all, they would just trust you as the progress is visible.
Communication is a key factor. Also, most tech companies have their tech people in house, meaning that most of your clients won't be that familiar with what you do, so this is adding a layer of complexity: How to show your progress even if you progress isn't "visible"
Aka you refactored something... this is not easy, but it works, this was already true with more classic freelancing or the legacy agency model
To me, this is the beauty of monthly sub style (if you're a biz owner.)
You can have the same disagreement with a new hire, but then have to go thru a firing and HR thing. (Costs to source, onboarding time, having a HR department, and docs to fire depending on country.)
Or, I can just cancel my subscription if the agency doesn't see eye-to-eye on what a 'single request' is, and go with their competitor.
Thanks for mentioning us @dru_riley!
Thanks for this article, this is so well put and I totally agree on most of the point!
I really think many multimillions agencies will be created every year and also that productized services will be the new norm for freelancing!
This is exactly because I believe in that that I created https://breeew.com, to help anyone to get started easily with something that scales and that is easy to use!
Thanks again for your post and thanks for the shoot out! 😍
Are there any unlimited services specifically marked to restaurants?
What are you thinking of building?
most of the restaurant owners I am reaching out to have small budgets, but they need help with marketing. I was thinking of working with someone that can build a service i can market to them. Like referral marketing tracking coupons or system processes.
Amazing idea. I would love to support when you launch it.
I have also seen this struggle in US/West EU markets. Restaurant owners would def benefit from an all-in-one subscription to handle Google maps/referrals/Social media.
Rn, I have only collected Social Media as a Service for ProductizedHQ, so you'd be the first to target retail SMB's with a full service solution imho.
I'm going to look into some Keywords and see what the search volume looks like, would love to chat more :)
Ps. You could probably spin this up to test in like a hour using Breeew for free, I've seen @anthonyriera in some other comments here, but he made it super easy to setup SaaS style service biz.
Thanks for the shootout 🙌🏻 and yes it's completely free to test your ideas on breeew.com, this is exactly why I made it!
Cool idea. I have been working with restaurant owners for a while now. But expect really low budgets in general. I don't think you will sell them a $5,000/month subscription.
Do you guys now any solo devs doing this? It seems to me that productized development is a lot harder to execute than i.e. design, also it's much harder to judge how much time one request should take so it can generate a lot more disagreement between client and dev. All of productized development sites I see seems to be whole teams, just big software houses adopting to new meta.
Super Thanks for sharing this, big fan of your newsletter.
Even I am building an unlimited design subscription at https://24seven.design/
Hoping to scale it to a 7-figure year business in a couple of years.
I want to build a SaaS app for running a productized service - great UI, fast, task management (Kanban board), team management, client portal, handle client payments, eventually add team communication.
Existing solutions just feel so bloated / slow / poor UI / feature set I don't need.
I reckon there's a growing market for this - a lot of providers seem to be happy to use Trello + Slack but after a certain size I think it's hard to continue this way
Hey Tony, I created https://breeew.com that essentially exactly does what you just said :)
Totally agree with your points
Yep saw Breeew - has bags of potential, good luck Anthony!
Breeew (just saw Anthony already replied lol) seems like it's solid at this. I see a bunch of Productized Services using it ⚡️