The panelists discuss productized consulting with Kai Davis

 

You can’t speak for the others, but you will anyways.

Hey everybody, and welcome to episode 140 of the Freelancers’ Show. This week on our panel we have Eric Davis.

Hello.

Reuven Lerner.

Hi everyone!

I’m Charles Max Wood from DevChat.tv. Just a brief reminder to go check out JS Remote Conf at jsremoteconf.com if you’re into JavaScript. It’s just an online conference I’m putting on, so you should be able to attend. We also have a special guest this week, and that’s Kai Davis.

Hey there folks.

Do you want to introduce yourself really quickly?

Absolutely. So my name is Kai Davis. I’m an outreach consultant up in Portland, Oregon. So I work with brands and companies that sell products online, and help them sell more by identifying influencers and building relationships with them and finding opportunities to expose my clients’ products and best content to the influencer’s audience.

Awesome. We’ve talked to quite a few people about productized consulting and that’s kind of what we brought you on to talk about, too. Before the show we were talking. We decided we might want to do something a little bit different. It mainly stemmed from Reuven pointing out that he’d like to do something like this, but he doesn’t know quite what to do. So we thought that it might be interesting to, since you help people figure some of this stuff out, maybe help him or us—because I’m sure I have questions and Eric has questions as well – to identify what we can do as products, or consulting products, or services products, or whatever you want to call them.

Sounds fabulous. I think that’d be an excellent exercise for us all to go through.

What I’m hoping is that our listening audience can follow along at home if they’re interested in this and figure out maybe some of the things they can go for.

Definitely. Definitely.

So how would you go about figuring this out for Reuven, or for me, or for Eric?

What I’ve always found is it’s challenging to have the idea of what a productized consulting offering should be. Spring forward from the forehead from nothing. It’s hard to pull something out of the ether. The most valuable way to approach this is really by looking at the past projects that you’ve done before and finding those similarities—similarities either in audience, or in deliverable, or in scope – or surveying existing customers. We could start there if we want to pick on Reuven. Tell me a bit about what your practice is and what a difficult project looks like.

It’s interesting that you point to a difficult project. So I guess I currently divide my time in about three different ways. One third is doing software development on a project basis. Another third is doing consulting for companies whether it’s coming and checking their architecture, optimizing their databases, or even being sort of a part time CTO and leading their development. The third third, which is probably about half of my time now, maybe even a little more, is doing training—training typically in Python, Ruby, Postgres. So a hard project—I don’t know how many of those would be necessarily hard. Are you talking hard for me or extra value for the client that they would see—like that it would be hard for them to do without me?

You know I think actually that was a slip of my tongue. I meant to say like a typical project, not a difficult project. So like an average, how a majority of your projects look like—X, Y, Z.

The main development projects, I’d say, which are probably closer to sort of—I think what we’re talking about I imagine are—people come in with an idea and they want to develop it or maybe they have a little bit of code and they want to move it forward and develop it forward so that it meets some sort of business need. So whether they need to do an MVP or whether they need to get something ready for a launch or for an investment.

So Reuven. Real quick. Of the three thirds you talked about, which one would you rather do?

Which one do you see yourself doing for the next ten years or so and enjoying yourself.

So truth be told, it’s kind of a—I love doing the training stuff. I really do. My second favorite thing is actually being the CTO, consulting, sort of coming in and rescuing stuff. I still enjoy the development day to day but it doesn’t get my juices flowing as much as the others.

So the attack I usually take when I think about a productized consulting offering is—one of the major benefits to the consultant is it eliminates the need for proposals, and that’s what originally drew me to my own productized consulting offerings. I wanted to step away from investing five, ten, fifteen hours in writing a proposal; negotiating it, waiting with the client to get other proposals; and go through that whole roller coaster ride. So I just wanted to set something up with a sales page so the client could read through it and say, “Hey, this sounds like exactly what I want to do,” and there’s a ‘Buy’ button or an ‘Apply Here’ button. We’ll get started, and I was able to rescue that time from that proposal cycle. So that might be an interesting way to approach this, too—to see of the offerings you enjoy doing, which ones are pretty standard and which ones you have to go through for a procurement, to a proposal process with and would productized consulting help you eliminate that from your whole sales cycle.

Yeah. So like the development projects are always proposals, and it’s annoying and long and of course the percentage of them that I actually get—I don’t know. We’re probably getting twenty to forty percent of them. So it’s a lot of work for not necessarily a lot of payback. That’s on the development side.

I would say on the course side, on the training side, it’s quite the opposite where there’s almost no proposals involved typically because I’m going through another company although I’m on my way to changing that. But even when I do courses on my own basically people call me up. They say, “Hey can you do this course,” we find dates, we’re done. Sort of in the middle is CTO, consulting type thing where we have to figure out what is the scope and what are the goals but there’s not much of a proposal involved there. It’s usually just sort of writing out what we’ve discussed on the phone already or in person.

In that case, it sounds like the training is an area you really enjoy and that already seems pretty productized. I mean, are there pretty standard trainings or courses that you run through with clients, like you’re grabbing from a bag of two or three standard trainings?

Oh yeah. Like especially my Intro to Python course, I do the three or four day version of that all the time now. I would say I could do it in my sleep except there’s some times when I actually do. [Chuckling]

I want to ask a question that came to my mind, and that is more along the lines of the project. So somebody comes to you and says, “I need this project built. Blah, blah, blah.” In my case, I built probably a dozen social networks of different kinds for people, and some of them integrate with the more well-known ones like Facebook and Twitter, and some of them don’t. So generally I’ve just done hourly work on that, and to the honest—and you kind of pointed this out—I’m tired of chasing hours. So how do you productize something like that?

Where it’s a pretty standard deliverable or pretty standard abstract deliverable that you customize based on the clients’ needs?

Yeah.

How much variance is there from one project to another, either in terms of scope or in terms of hours? Is it like a factor of ten or a factor of two?

It depends a lot on how organized the client is, and so if they’re really well-organized I really know what they want then it can take anywhere from two to five times more time if they’re a lot less organized. I can compensate some from that, but not completely.

Mm-hm.

What first comes to my mind in terms of productizing that is it might be that there is a series of different products there that you sell. I know Brennan Dunn promotes road mapping sessions as a productized offering, taking the whole discovery process, assessing if the client has their stuff together and is ready to move forward, and just offering that as the first package in a series. From there you build trust and move on to the next scope. So there are two or three elements there. The first is just a client discovery road map session. It’s priced at a fraction of what the full project would be but it lets you asses, “Well, do they know what direction they want to head in and do they have this mapped out? Are they ready to move forward?” If they do, great. Now you’re able to say, “Let me customize the pricing for you. But here’s the standard deliverables.” If they don’t, then you’re able to offer a separate product to them that helps bridge that gap from discovery to implementation.

That’s a good point because there were four, maybe five client projects I’ve done in the past where they’re all actually different but looking back at them now they were all basically centered around building software for payments, gateways, integration, stuff like that; where I would actually build the library that people would call two-charged credit cards. So looking back, they were all pretty standard—like there’s a standard API. There are some differences between them all, but they’re all a self-contained deliverable.

Then these three other cases, I built just that for a client and handed it off. I didn’t actually go in their code, plug that library in, and it work. I just basically gave them the library and said, “Here you go.” Your development team can now take this and use it. So maybe there’s something like that for social networking. Maybe you have a service for integrating with Facebook with a Ruby app, or whatever, or integrating with Twitter with a Ruby app. You have these different offerings and someone can come to you and pay a set fee, get that set deliverable which could be off the shelf code plus some custom code, and they do the integration. Or maybe you do the integration, add an hourly thing on top of it or something.

Yeah. The major benefit there being it eliminates a lot of that need for a proposal or the need for hashing out exactly what that offering or that client need is. They’re able to come to a page and say, “Hey, I see this clicks with 95% of what I need. Let’s move forward with this and see what that next step is,” removing your need to go through that whole proposal roller coaster.

It’s too bad Curtis isn’t here because what Curtis is doing or has done a lot with WooCommerce – it’s like a framework plugin for WordPress to do ecommerce stuff. I’ve seen a lot of developers have payment gateways, or different ways to do a shopping cart, or this or that. You can sell them as individual, “Just drop this plugin in.” But you could also sell it as a service of you build this certain thing for WooCommerce and it’s a packaged service that has a set price. You pay X for this feature, Y for this feature, Z for this feature, and it’s not really a proposal. It’s like an off-the-shelf service you’re getting.

So it’s an a la carte solution, sort of.

Absolutely. I think that’s a really convenient way to view productized consulting as a whole. I still have custom, call it boutique, consulting offerings. I just don’t advertise them on my site. But a client is able to come to me and say, “I want to pick up Kai’s website x-ray or Kai’s traffic power up,” and just choose that and start moving forward. If we determine in the course of the execution of that consulting offering, “Hey, there’s a little more work that we need to do here,” or “There’s an opportunity to add value outside of these standard a la carte offerings,” then we can move forward into that discussion, a separate statement of work, or even a proposal. But with productized consulting it lets them come in and just pick up what they need right now, and then we can start that conversation later instead of having to recreate that proposal or recreate that really same project every single time.

So the savings is all around for everyone. From my perspective or from the consultant’s perspective, I guess your perspective so far, you basically then, when someone calls you they have already put themselves into one of your baskets or bins in terms of, “I’m interested in your traffic power up. I’m interested in your website x-ray. Let’s talk about how you can do that for me.” So they’ve already guessed that’s the scope. You’ve told them—I haven’t seen whether the pricing is on the site also. But basically everyone knows what they’re getting into.

how long are these things because my impression of productized consulting was that it was always going to be very small, like maybe a day worth of work and not a week or two weeks’ worth of work, and that it’s something that is highly repeatable and automatable. So I wonder how much development can be productized, how much training can be productized, because there’s a lot of hands-on, hard-thinking, custom work as opposed to something you can just churn out, almost like an assembly line day after day.

That’s feedback I have encountered in a number of places. My personal tack on productized consulting is there’s always a benefit if it can be automated or you can go from, “Hey this takes 10 hours,” to, “Hey this takes five hours to execute.” But it’s not as automated as a pure product itself. I

think that the major benefits are eliminating the proposals, getting the client on the same page from the start instead of creating the universe from the get-go, and letting that drive the engagement forward.

I know a couple consultants who have multi-week productized consulting offerings. So they come into the organization. They really work on the marketing side of things. It’s almost a chief marketing officer in a box. “Let’s define the strategy and get us going.” But the benefit is on their side, or in their marketing materials – they’ve defined what that is from the get go. It’s going to be a two-week engagement. It’s going to be X thousand dollars. At the end we will have established these benchmarks and given you these frameworks to move forward with.

So basically, if I were to take, let’s say the three courses that I teach most often—that also I think are in greatest demand—and not have them on a separate courses page on my web, so I’d put them on the front page and say, “This is what I want for you; these are my products,” plus maybe a description of CTO for a day or something like that; and then obviously go into greater depth. I see that on your site also. You do that. You have these headlines that people could go in and drill down to find out more and find out pricing and apply. Basically it’s much more a matter of marketing and branding and much less a matter of doing something new or different.

In terms of doing something new or different with the offering, or inside the offering, doing something new and different for the client?

Right, with each client, where every client calls and like, “Well, I have X,” and you say, “Well, I can do Y,” and you sort of negotiate it. Here it’s more like, I go to Amazon. I want this product. I pay for it. I’m done. Obviously this is a service business rather than a product business, so there is a

difference. But everyone sort of knows what they’re getting into and what the scope is, both in terms of price, in terms of time, and in terms of the Statement of Work more or less.

Bingo, and that’s that major benefit. I really started getting into productized consulting around just over a year ago. Before that, every single project I worked on was a little bit different. I do some email marketing for one client, social media for another, front end development for a third. At the end of the month it always felt like I was spinning my wheels. I had moved one inch in every direction but I wasn’t getting any sustained forward movement. When I switched to productized consulting it was that same standard scope of work for everyone, and picking on my product, the website x-ray, the first time I executed on it, it took me fifteen to twenty hours to generate. Now it takes me between six to eight hours and that quality has gone up. I’ve executed on that probably twenty to twenty five times for clients, and I’ve gotten much better at producing that output for them, both in terms of how long it takes and that end quality. So there’s a benefit for the consultant in that you can attain mastery in one or a small set of areas just by executing on that same scope of work multiple times, and the client’s able to come in and say, “Wow, he’s done this website x-ray twenty times. He probably knows what he’s doing by now. Let’s work together.”

If you’ve gone from twenty hours to do something to six hours to do something, you’ve basically tripled your billing rate, assuming you’ve kept the price the same. But of course, if it’s a product, then you can raise the price as demand grows.

Exactly, and the first time I sold the website x-ray I think I had priced it at $500 just because I wanted to try it out. I’ve now raised the price to $949, so there are benefits across the board for the consultant who issues this offering. As you get better at it, you’re able to say, “Well there’s a lot more value for the client here. I’m going to raise the price so it’s in line with that value.” At the same time, if it now takes you less time, you aren’t fighting against yourself, and that’s something I’ve always seen with hourly consulting or hourly billing. As you become more experienced as a consultant, it’s going to take you less time to fulfill the project. Well that means you’re going to be getting paid less for the work, even if it’s a higher quality of work, and it just never really made sense to me with productized consulting because you’re selling that standard outcome or standard deliverable. If it takes you one hour or a hundred hours, at the end of the day, you’re still just charging that flat rate for it. So it is similar to a flat rate or a flat fee project but just by wrapping it up in a bow and presenting it as a single product it’s easier for a client to come and say, “Oh hey. He offers these two services. I’ll pick one of them and we can start working together.”

I’m sorry.

I’m saying it’s a flat rate or a fixed bid project, but you have the scope constraint upfront vs. that’s always the problem when a client comes to you with a variable scope and you try to fix bid it. But for productized consulting, this is the package. This is the box you buy. Here’s the price for it, and the client either says yes or no.

Exactly, and even on top of that since switching to productized consulting, it has made it so much easier for me to say, “No.” I used to do a little more email marketing work, a little more paid advertising work, and I’d get plus one level here, plus one level there just barely learning as I move my way forward. Now when somebody comes to me and says, “Hey Kai, we want to work together. We really need somebody to manage our advertising campaign,” I could say, “That’s great. I don’t do that. This is what I offer. Let’s refer you to somebody else who does have those offerings.” So I’m able to concentrate my offerings in one area and get better as a consultant in those skill sets.

Have you found that as a result of the productizing you have more people coming to you than before? Has this really decreased the overhead you need in terms of marketing but increased the number of potential customers coming to you?

Drastically; night and day over the last year. When I think back to 2013 I had one client on retainer and every month I had one to two guest stars come into my universe and we’d work together on a project. Now I have six clients on retainer and two to three one-off projects every month by focusing my offerings just on a small set of products. It becomes so much easier to get referrals, to get known for something. If somebody says, “You know I really need somebody to do high quality outreach and link building for me.” Now people are able to say, “I know this consultant, Kai Davis. He has a traffic power up. He’ll be able to work perfectly for what you need.” It’s let me really establish a brand where before my brand was mushy and squishy and not well-defined.

Mm-hm.

So I’m still struggling a little bit with the area of, “Okay, so what do I focus on? What do I choose as my product?” I think in Reuven’s case, the training kind of lends itself. You pay X amount travel and I’ll show up and I’ll train your folks.” But I’m more focused on the programing end of things and I know he does that part of his business as well. How do you identify areas that you can choose for your product that people are going to want? Should I pick a product that’s ‘I’ll build you a social network’ or ‘I’ll build you a Facebook page’, or are those not good options for that?

Those are perfect options for it. What I found most valuable is just looking at the last year or the last six months of projects and seeing where there’s overlap. If you’ve built the same scope social network five or six times, then it’s easier to say, “Well this is something that people frequently come to me for or a scope of work we frequently agree on. Let me package that up and just say, when somebody comes to me I’ll just point you to this sales page, and if this looks like what you need – perfect.” Let’s start moving forward with that project just to, if not completely eliminate proposals, let them see the scope of work looks like from the start so they’re able to view it as a product. A little customization on the back end instead of, “Okay, we’re going to start from ground zero, go through discovery, go through a proposal, and build something brand new.” You’re at least able to give a sense of, “This is what a majority of my clients look for. Does this match what you need? ‘

So I could go in and I could say, “Here’s basically the standard set of features and the cost for a Twitter clone, and here’s the standard set of features and the cost for something that looks a bit more like Facebook, and here’s the cost and the standard set of features for something that looks like this other thing. Here are the timelines that we usually can commit to, and here’s the pricing for each one.”

Bingo. I think that would be a great way to approach it. What I’ve found with productized consulting is, at least in my business, is it’s been rare that cold traffic shows up and immediately makes a purchase. Usually it’s a referral or I go to a networking event or I’m on a show or a podcast, and somebody enters my universe, emails me. Then I send them to that page as almost a brochure that I hand them. In your case it might be the same. Nobody might show up and say, “Oh I’m going to purchase this sight on scene,” but as a lead contact you could just point them to the website and say, “Look at this, and then let’s have a fifteen minute Skype conversation to make sure it matches what you need built.”

So, how am I going to verify that people want or need that? I guess the fact that people paid me to build them in the past is some validation.

That’s the primary validation that I usually look for. Have people hired me for this before? Can I see where the similarities are and draw a line on the paper around it and say, “So this is the product, or at least the product I start with.”

The other primary sense of validation is, like Nick does, draft out that marketing copy. Put together a sales page. Send it to a couple colleagues, or even past clients, and say, “This is a new offering I’m putting together. I’d love your feedback on it. Let’s hop on Skype or I’ll take you out for coffee and we can chat about it.” Just to see, do your trusted in your sphere agree that this looks valuable, agree that it’s something they would purchase. From there, stick it up live and start sending traffic to it.

I’ve definitely launched a few productized consulting offerings where nobody really went for it or nobody bought it. In that case, I lost a couple hours of work, maybe a day’s worth of work over a month, putting together that sales page and drafting that copy. There wasn’t really anything I built for any huge loss there. I developed my skills as a copywriter putting it together, but at the end of the day if nobody bought it I’d say, “Hey, it was a good try but at least I didn’t invest tens of thousands of dollars into a product here.”

Yeah. That’s exactly what I’m doing is I’m going to—I’ve been reworking on some ideas I have and I’m going to talk to past clients, see it they’re interested. Like this looks valuable and then I’m going to give them like a freebee version of it. So they’re going to give me a bunch of feedback and then I’m going to work with them. In this case it’s for a month. Then after that, get their feedback, maybe even sell them on the paid one. But start with that, and I might even keep the page, like the sales page and all that stuff, hidden on my site, and send it directly to leads. So it’s all like warm traffic or people that I’ve already built a bit of trust with, or I’m in a sales conversation—send them there. Then those start converting. If people start showing interest there, then I’ve basically proved that ‘okay, there’s value here. People want this.” Then I can make it more public and do the marketing push around it.

I think that’s a genius way to approach it.

That’s because I’m a genius. [Chuckles]

Well the other thing is that if there is some base level of things, I’ve been tempted to get back into screencasting and basically putting videos up on YouTube. So I could actually demonstrate building out certain features of the product, and draw some traffic that way.

In your case, if say we’re doing the social network thing for you. I know there’s a few social network-y, either plugins or full on framework apps for Rails. You can do screen casts of what you use those to build that foundation or you can have your own custom stuff that you’re using, like a base you give to every client, and walk through how you add a certain feature on that. You take the same base, and how you build the Twitter version vs. building a Facebook version. You’re basically proving your expertise but you’re also showing the capabilities and showing that the client isn’t going to get like, “I’m starting from complete scratch with your project.” It’s, “I’m starting from this huge, prebuilt, pretested, already been used basis of code. So it’s a lot less work up front.” That might even put you a leg above. Say if I’m fighting against you as a competitor and I’m doing it completely custom, the client would have to pay me a couple thousand to get to the point where you are at day one.

Right.

Jumping onto that, the idea of content marketing or creating these screen casts, these tutorials around it. Once you have that productized consulting offering defined, I think it’s much more easy than it is otherwise to create contents, screen casts, tutorials, blogposts, whatever that address problems people run into while they operate in this problem space. Then you have your product there as that fix. So you could say, “Hey, if you’re trying to set up your own social network here, you’ve probably run into this problem. This is how I approach it. By the way, if you’re looking for an expert to tackle this problem for you, I have this product over here. Check out this sales page and apply at the bottom.” So you could create this huge library of content that demonstrates your expertise in this niche, in this focused area, and then have the ta-da presenting lead to the product you’ve defined, instead of leading to a vague consulting offering at an hourly or daily rate.

Right. So the other thing that I’m going to ask real quick on this is should I put together its own page? I mean, it should have its own landing page, I can see, but should it have its own website for that offering or am I okay just putting it on myname.com/yoursocialnetwork or something?

I think it could go either way. I don’t think there’s a right way or a wrong way there. It sort of comes down to what brand do you want that to be associated under. I made the choice a couple months ago to consolidate all of my consulting and productized offerings under my name, as that brand. I know that there are people out there who say, “Well, I really want this to be under my business’s brand or to be a productized consulting offering with its own brand.” There’s no wrong choice there. It just sets you up for what the future looks like. So I guess the question back to you is what brand do you want this consulting or these productized offerings to be recognized under?

Yeah, that makes sense. I think the answer for me is under my consulting business or under one brand because if I decide to do others that are related to it, then people can come and see oh he has this one and oh he’s got these other couple things going on.

Yeah. It makes it easy for a client to come in and see that ecosystem, see that universe of offerings. I always think about productized consulting as being rungs on a ladder. I have some base level, more affordable products and some higher priced, ongoing products. I want to make it easy for a client to come in and say, “Hey. I really want to read Kai’s free email newsletter or read this free article.”

From there move up to a smaller productized consulting engagement and then to a larger engagement by having it all under your consulting business’s brand and identity. It makes it easy for you to say, “My content is free. That’s rung number one on the ladder. Then maybe I’ll have a $200 prebuilt product or coaching call or what have you. That’s ladder rung number two. Then we’ll have the full productized offering as ladder rung number three.” Because they’re all under that same focus, it easy for a client or a customer to say, “It makes so much sense. I invested in this more affordable option. We built a trust. I loved working with him. I’ll move up to the next option here, and the next option from there.” One client becomes multiple engagements instead of a single engagement.

Is that a goal to some degree? Like I mean, is part of the goal of productized consulting not just make it easy for people to find you and defining things better, reducing the sales cycle, but also to ramp people up to do custom large consulting engagements?

I think being aware of how your productized offerings fit together should be a goal from the start. In my case, I’ve defined the top of my funnel as my ongoing monthly traffic power up outreach and link building service. So with every person that encounters me online, my goal is to build trust with them through a smaller productized offering and then move them up the ladder to that as the final destination. But just thinking about, ideally what project do I want to be working on with my clients that produces the most revenue or is the most exciting to work on, and what similar products can I offer that lead up to that and establish trust? Maybe it’s a roadmapping session where you come in through Skype or face to face and help them identify what the problems are and what they need to do to get past the problems. Maybe it’s a smaller productized offering or a report where you’re able to say, “Hey, here’s a strategy. Here’s a six month timeline of how you want to move forward.” In any case just thinking about how different offerings fit together and what that endpoint looks like, is a valuable thought exercise to go through.

Mm-hm.

Let’s say, going back to Reuven here, let’s say he does that virtual CTO or CTO on demand thing, and what it really boils down to is giving them some direction and some strategies to consider when building out their own software projects. So he’s not necessarily going to be the developer on the project but he’s going to be the guy that comes in and says, “Hey, you may want to consider these options in order to speed up your site or to make it more mobile friendly or things like that.” So how do you package that up and market it to folks?

The marketing is also a big question here because if you set up such a site and no one ever knows about it, well—oh well. [Chuckles]

But isn’t that a challenge with any type of consulting offering? You can hang your shingle out but if nobody walks by, they won’t really know you’re in business.

Yeah, but how do you package that up? Because they may need a two hour session or they may need a ten hour session. Do you just sell the two hour session and then give them the option to buy more?

I think that a good way to approach that is just by thinking about the problems. You could even interview the client to answer this question. Think about the problems that the clients have had that led them to choose either the two hour option or a ten hour option or a longer engagement, and see if you could create a productized fix or a productized solution for each one of those problems. Metaphorically you could think about this as, what is the question the client is asking that my productized consulting offering answers? So Reuven, when it comes to the type of projects you work on, do they fall into these general buckets: a two hour engagement, a ten hour engagement, and then something longer or does it look like something else?

I mean the training is a little different but they typically tend to be, let’s say two to eight hours, like two hours to a day at most or like three months.

I’ve seen some where it’s like they want you to come in every month for a big or planning what we’re going to do this month in development. I’ve seen others where they need like not so much a CTO but more of like a really high lead developer to run ideas by. Like say that the whole team’s junior. They don’t know what they’re doing. Then there are other ones that like every week they want you in during planning sessions. So there are different varieties there, and it could be that you pick the one you like the most or the one where you get the most—I mean your clients would need or they want the most—instead of doing them all at once, just pick one and start with that.

Absolutely. You don’t need to offer a solution for every problem that a client could come to you with. You could just say, “This is the one I enjoy doing the most. It’s what I’m going to hang that shingle out for and direct people to.” Maybe it is the smaller two to eight hour engagement in which case you could say, “Hey, you get the CTO for a day. I come in. We answer this list of questions, and at the end you get this list of outcomes or resources. Here’s the price.” When somebody approaches you, you could say, “This is what I’m offering right now or we could go through a custom project. I recommend we start with this.”

Just to get back to the marketing thing. So how did you let people know that you were doing these sorts of products, that they were now available? Did you take out ads? Did you just blog more?

Good question. There were really three strategies I use there. When I launched my first, and even now when I launch new productized consulting offerings, I email my past clients and say, “Hey, it was a pleasure working with you. I hope you’re doing well. I wanted to let you know I’ve got a new offering out there. I have a new product to announce. Here’s a link to the page. I’d love to hop on Skype or take you out for coffee and chat.” So as I work on more projects, I build up almost a congregation of people who have enjoyed working with me, and I could prototype or test my products with them. When I started, it was a much smaller group of past clients, but even then it was easy for one or two people to say, “Hey, this looks interesting. Let’s work on this project together.”

I’ve invested in white labeling my services with other agencies. So just, they might sell a product of, “We’ll build you a website for $5,000.” I could take one of my services and say, “Hey, this is how much I’m looking to get for this service. I’d love it if you advertise it to your clients. Charge whatever you want. You keep the difference.” So for doing the sales outreach to their existing portfolio of people, they can make money for free. Especially in the case of a recurring service, I’m saying, “Hey, you can make $500 a month for literally doing nothing, just by telling clients as they complete their website, hey if you need any SEO work done, we have a product we can offer on that front.”

The third strategy that has been valuable for me has been content marketing, and I lump podcasting, interviews, guest appearances, and blogging, and article creation all under content marketing. Just getting out there and saying, “These are the type of services I do. This is what I’m proficient in. This is what I’m developing my expertise in,” has been really effective at reaching audiences and saying, “I’d love to work with people. This is how I could help your business grow.”

Mm-hm. That’s a smart set of strategies.

I think that’s an age old question in consulting of any form, be it per hour, per day, or productized. I’ve got these skills. I’d love to work with people. How do I reach people and find my next client?

Yeah. That’s the kind of question that we all get from time to time just from doing the show and talking to people.

I’ve found that as I’ve gotten more invested in productized consulting and started defining my offering, at first it was, “Hey I can help you get more traffic for your website,” and now it’s more focused on, “If you run an ecommerce store and sell products, I can help you make more sales through outreach to influencers.” It’s been easier for me to market the services I’m providing and connect with the right people. I might be excluding more people from my marketing, but that just makes it easier for me to connect with the right folks. I have a really clear, or more clear, positioning statement than I did a year ago, and so people are able to say, “Hey that sounds like exactly what I need,” or, “That’s describing my business. I should have a more in depth conversation with this guy.”

What’s the downside of productized consulting, if there is one? Because really I just keep hearing about how it’s amazing and I keep saying, “Wow, I’ve got to try this,” and there’s got to be a tradeoff. No?

I think there absolutely is. The trade-off is if you launch a service too early without making sure it’s something you enjoy doing, you might find yourself with five or ten clients at hand who really want to buy something and you’re like, “Ah, damn it. I hate selling this thing. Why did I start selling it?” So you’re lashing yourself to a ship, so to speak. You’re saying, “This is what I’m going to do. This is the flag in the sand.” At the end of the day, if it turns out you don’t enjoy doing that you’re going to put yourself in an awkward position.

09].

There’s one more that I thought of.

Please.

For the most part, and this is both the stuff I’ve looked at and the people I’ve looked at who are doing this already, their custom services are we’ll just say $10,000 but their productized consulting are $1,000. So, in a way to keep their current level of income, they need to sell to a higher volume of clients because the dollar amounts are different. So if you’re someone who really enjoys getting really deep and getting really close to a client and maybe only working with one or two at a time, it’s a bit harder because you have to work at a higher volume if you’re basically going to replace the income you have already. It’s on that spectrum of custom service vs. you’re making widgets in a factory of volume levels. But that’s something to think about and that’s also something you’re going to have to have more systems or processes around support or how to handle a larger size of client base than you would if you were just doing custom stuff.

I think that’s absolutely right. You do need to sell at little more, more often if you’re going to price at a fraction of what a typical engagement looks like for you on the non-productized front. So you have to be aware, I guess, of even what the prices communicate to your audience. If a typical engagement for you is $10,000, but you’re selling a $500 productized consulting engagement, what justifies that $10,000 one? How do these prices all come together, and what does that look like for your positioning as a consultant?

Right. It kind of sounds like in your case that you manage to—I mean I don’t know what you were charging before for things—but it sounds like you’ve managed to get really efficient and good at doing these productized offerings. So you’re taking less time, you’re doing more quality, and you’re able to raise your rates. That’s like every consultant’s dream, and your clients are happier.

For me it definitely has been a victory on all fronts. Just like you’re saying, productized consulting has let me earn more money for my time and become more proficient in a set of areas. I feel like I’m a better consultant now than I was a year ago, and I’m able to charge a very significant multiple of what I was charging a year ago. So it’s been a win for me, but along the way I definitely—the first productized consulting offerings I launched with were very different than what they look like now. I’ve tweaked and tuned both the x-ray and the power up based on client feedback and what I enjoy doing, and at the start it was definitely a little rougher. I was figuring out some of these policies and procedures and what the final reports looked like as I moved forward. So for anybody who’s considering launching a productized consulting offering, it definitely grows over time just like launching a product. Version 1.0 is very different than version 3.0 or version 4.0. With a productized consulting offering, I think it does grow over time as you grow as a consultant and your clients provide feedback to you.

Mm-hm. How do you get that feedback? Do you just ask them?

I actively solicit it. At the end of a project I’ll ask the client like, “Hey, what do you think about this? I’m always trying to improve my practice and my business. I’d love to know how I could make this better. How could it have better met your needs?” Even at the start of an engagement I send every client a questionnaire, and one of the questions is, “Hey tell me, what could I do above and beyond what’s listed in the sales page or the scope of work to make this a home run for you?” So I’m able to understand the client expectations, what the client’s needs are, and constantly tune. If I see four clients come in that all have that same home run statement, I’m able to say, “Well that’s something I should either add to this offering or call out more, and make my offering more responsive to what the client’s needs are.”

Mm-hm.

So I want to step back just for a second. What are some of the must dos? So let’s say I’ve defined the product, I’ve defined the pricing and what people are going to get for their money, and it turns out to be a good deal, and I think people want it, what do I do next? What strategies are there for making it all work? Do you build systems? Is that the next step? Or do you get your landing page up? Is that your next step? Or build a mailing list? Or which one’s the most important? Which of those, and any I didn’t list, are the critical ones?

I think that once you—let’s say you’ve surveyed your last clients. You say, “Here’s an offering. This makes sense. Let’s move forward with it.” Step one is just—I use Google docs for this—just drafting out what that standard procedure looks like so if I was to fill this tomorrow I would do step one, step two, step three so I’m able to see what it looks like. From there I’m able to estimate how much time it will take, does the price I’m thinking of pricing this at make sense? Is it a decent hourly rate? Once I’ve defined that SOP and answered those questions, I’ll put together a draft of the sales page and send it to a few colleagues and associates in my network to say, “Hey, does this look like something that makes sense?” Then I’ll try selling it, or if not selling it, providing it for free to someone in exchange for feedback. So saying, “Hey I’ve got this new thing. I really want to have a case study to share with a future client. Let me do this for you. The only thing I’m going to ask is you give me as much honest feedback as you can.”

So at that point I’ve defined what the steps are, I’ve set up the sales page or at least drafted it, I’ve gone through fulfillment once so I learned what I know about this and what I don’t know, what questions I need to answer. Then at that point, then I think, “you as that productized consultant are able to make the page live or send it to past clients and start actively trying to sell it.” You’ve answered those unknown questions. Is this something I’d enjoy doing? What exactly are the steps of doing it? Can I do this well, or is there anything I don’t know that I need to know? You’re in a much better position to start selling it than if you had just sold it from the get go without validating it.

So the other thing I’m wondering then—because it sounds like you might be in a position where you don’t necessarily know everything that you should know in order to be able to deliver whatever.

So can you offer a productized consulting around something you don’t 100% understand?

I think it’s possible. I think that just like on any engagement—let’s contrast a productized consulting engagement with more of a free form proposal based engagement. There might be aspects of that free form engagement that you haven’t mastered yet. The client’s asking for a, b, and c. You’ve done a and b before. You’ve never done c before so part of that engagement is implementing something that’s an unknown to you. Similarly with a productized consulting engagement you might find yourself saying, “Well I’ve done 75% of this before. 25% is a little unknown.” Just by going through those steps of defining the operating procedure and fulfilling once for a friend or a colleague it lets you start identifying what exactly are the steps for this part I don’t understand yet.

I’d caution anyone listing against launching a productized consulting engagement they’ve never fulfilled before. It sets you up in an awkward position of your sales page is advertising this scope of work. You’ve never fulfilled this scope of work before. You’re going to run into a little more friction there than you would otherwise. So fulfill it once. Do a dry run of it. Make sure you understand the parts that you aren’t expert at yet so when it comes time to implement and go through, you’re able to say, “Well this has been hard before. Now I understand the specific areas I need to pay attention to or be cautious about.

Even if you just have to fulfill it once for a test client or a dummy client, portfolio type thing, you can do that. But yeah, running through the process at least once is really important. Who knows, if you run through an opinion on a deliverable like you have coming that you would give to the client that could be not necessarily a case study but an example or a sample you could give to leads who are coming to you.

Bingo, and having that sample is huge. One of the biggest flaws in my productized consulting offerings is that even now I don’t have those samples or case studies up on my site. So if somebody buys the website x-ray there’s not a sample up there that they could poke around in and say, “Oh yeah. This is what it will look like for me.” It’s something that I know I need to execute on. I just haven’t had a chance to put that together for a friend yet. But it’s on my list but having that sample, having that draft to share I think builds trust with the client and demonstrates your proficiency. They’re able to in a sense touch, and hold, and feel the product you’re selling and say, “This seems valuable. This seems like something I want to invest my money in.”

But for consultants I think the advantages of launching a productized consulting offering outweigh the potential costs. It really does let you focus in on one specific area of your business or one specific audience and offer something laser focused to those people. In terms of eliminating the proposals, I know that before I offered productized consulting it might take me ten hours to put together a proposal. I had something like a 25% success rate, so for every proposal that I closed I

was burning thirty hours of really unpaid time. Having productized consulting offerings available shrunk that gap dramatically. I definitely do spend some time with prospects who end up not purchasing. We’ll have a Skype call and email back and forth a couple of times, but it’s a fraction of the time I’d spend on qualifying or going through discovery with somebody who expected a full proposal.

Right. So I have to ask now, we did kind of deviate from the help Reuven find a product that he can productize. [Chuckles] Are there other questions? Do you have some ideas now, Reuven?

Yeah. No, I definitely do. First of all, and here it’s a little sticky in terms of the courses, tomorrow I could put on my website all kinds of courses as a productized offering. I would do it except for the politics involved of I really want to do it quite yet because I’ve still got the training company I’m working with. So I’ll put it on hold until I break the news to them that I’m leaving them. But in terms of the other things—I mean there’s a little more nebulous—but I do think that I can sit down and find some very clear benefits I can give people. I mean look. Here’s the thing. Some of the people bring me in to like optimize their Postgres databases. That’s the sort of thing I think would be hard to productize because it could be incredibly small or incredibly large. So I’m a little wary. That reminds me of doing a fixed price product that I’ve been gun shy from doing for many, many years. But maybe doing a one day analysis of where they stand and providing a report of here’s what I think you’ve got. Here’s what you need to think about. That’s the sort of thing I could definitely do in a day, that I could definitely price at a standard rate and I think people would be interested in.

Then you would sell them the custom service for however much they need. So if it’s a small optimization it’s a day. If it’s a big one, it’s a week. You’ll know going into it that this is going to take a bit of time. I need to price more. So in a way, your productized service is your proposal for the larger project, but you’re selling it.

Exactly. Exactly, and I can see doing that for a few of the technologies with which I have expertise basically saying, “Come in. Here’s what you pay X and you get my analysis. Then if you want to keep going with me, great. You don’t, at least you have an analysis that you could use with someone else.” I think that might provide some value to people without putting me in danger of doing a week long project for an hour worth of billing.

I think that would be an incredibly valuable way to approach it, and just like you’re saying, it reduces the risk on both sides. You’re able to come in, poke around, and say, “Oh gee. This is like a really hairy problem. Here’s how I recommend you approach it either through my services or another consultant’s services. If they decide not to work with you, they’re able to take that analysis to anyone else on the planet who’s qualified for this project and say, “This is what another consultant told us we needed to do. Review this and let us know your price for executing on it.”

Or they could say, “Hey, we really want to work with you. We built trust on this first project. It’s going to be a weak rate for the larger thing but we’ve sampled your goods. We understand how we work together. We have so much more trust in you, it’s a no brainer for us to work together.” I think that would be an incredibly great way to get started with it. It’s something it sounds like you’ve fulfilled a number of times, so you probably have a pretty in depth knowledge of the pains these types of clients are coming to you to solve or the language they use to describe their problems which makes it pretty easy to put together a sales page for this offering.

Right. Right. Very neat.

With services like that, even if you just metaphorically threw a dart at the board in terms of pricing, after a couple months of fulfilling that type of offering, as you get better at it, as you get those testimonials or validation, that’s something where you could definitely increase the price, and it’s the same output. It’s still a day’s worth of work. You’ve got this report but you have that validation of selling it as a product, say a dozen times. That, I think, lets you crank up that price a little more, raising your effective hourly rate, and still produce that same high quality report for a client.

I mean you’ve got to be careful. That’s why I’m starting with free. You could even start with—say you charge $100 for it and you find it takes you a week. Well getting $100 for that week is really, really low compared to your hourly rate but you’re learning. You’re basically bootstrapping this new startup, and so you can keep raising the price, or you could do it a couple times and figure out, “Okay out of these five on average it takes me this long’ and you now you know your cost of it—like what it’s going to cost you to provide it. So you could figure out what the price out based on the value, based on any profit you want to make, whatever. So taking a temporary, short term loss at things might actually be good for you in the long term.

Just to validate it, to get that sample, to get the testimonial for the product, there’s a number of different ways you could approach it to get started with it.

Yeah, very interesting. Yeah I actually have a good sense of how long it takes to do some of these things because I’ve gone in, I’ve looked at servers, I’ve poked around with the configurations, and I believe I know what sorts of things they want in a report. I can easily imagine defining such that it would be a day’s worth of work.

Even in terms of that report, even if it’s something like the website x-ray I offer for where it’s pretty standard, I found it valuable on the initial call to ask the client, “What questions are you looking to this report to answer?”, and making sure that I tune it a little bit to answer their specific questions. So in your case, 75-80% of the report might be standard from project to project, but just understanding the specific questions that they are using this to answer lets you tune it and make sure it’s a match, and evolve that report over time.

Right, and I imagine that’s part of what you do also. So that’s how you’ve managed to become more effective at say your x-ray service where probably a lot of the report is boiler plate. Then it’s sticking in the particular analysis that you’ve done that goes along with the description and the explanations.

Exactly, and I think of it as supporting material, so the website x-ray [crosstalk 50:20].

Pardon me for insulting your reports.

[Chuckles] No, and I think that’s a valuable insight that just because I’ve written an analysis once doesn’t mean that it doesn’t hold any value. My recommendations for how to build links to the site or tune on site optimization, it might already be something I’ve created for another client, but it’s still valuable for this client here. So the x-ray might end up being fifty pages. Thirty of that might be standard supplemental documents that help them execute outreach templates, link building templates, suggestions on how to tune their onsite optimization. It’s still valuable for the client and it lets me spend more time to focus on the analysis and the custom recommendations instead of saying, “Great. I have to rewrite this thing that I’ve already created once even if I created it six months ago.” It’s still valuable for the client, and because it gives them direction.

It’s just like with software. I’ve worked directly with clients where I’ve told them up front that I have the licensing to do it, but I would give them 50-80% of the code that I wrote for another client or in another project. Then the extra 20% is just the custom stuff they need, and they’re more than happy to pay for that because if they didn’t get that from me they would have to go to someone else and get all 100% of it custom. The fact you have a library, you have some collection of stuff you can draw from, it’s an asset. It’s not actually a problem or something that the client’s going to get mad about.

Exactly, and I tell you in my case I’ve definitely tuned those supplemental documents over time. Every time I put together the x-ray I look through it and say, “Oh, I could tune up this section or I’ve learned something new I could contribute here.” So as a knowledge base, it grows over time, and if you think of productized consulting as one step away from pure consulting, well the next step is a product be it an informational product or a course. The assets you build up, the supplemental documents that you start creating as part of your productized consulting offering, could down the line become an e-book or a course, or something you make available for free or for payment on your website. Maybe it’s, “Hey, these are the ten major issues I run into doing this optimization. I’ll sell this document to your CTO. It’s $100, but I’ve compiled this from 1,000 hours of research I’ve done on similar projects. I’m sure it’ll help give you direction,” and it just validates your value as a

consultant. They read through it and say, “This guy knows his stuff. Let’s hire him.”

It might even be your marketing, especially with supplemental stuff. I mean that’s the stuff you’re trying to teach your clients. You can teach them publicly and use it as leach in.

Mm-hm. Absolutely.

One other thing that occurs to me is that some of the reports that I’ve thought about building for people’s websites—mobile friendly, SEO, all that kind of stuff. A lot of that can be automated where you can either simulate a device or simply automate certain aspects of it so that it’s, “Okay. Here’s the report. It took this long to load,” just to tell people where their issues might be. ‘It took this long to load. It took this long for the JavaScript to run on your website. I couldn’t find a site map .xml. Whatever.” A lot of that you could write a program to do and so you might wind up going from productized consulting to a product there where all you’re really doing is a once over to make sure all the information is correct.

I think that raises an interesting question. With a productized consulting offering, is the client paying you for the time you spent in the chair doing this research or the value you provide to their organization? More, and more I think, especially in the example you just shared, it’s the value that you’re providing that they’re paying for. [Crosstalk 53:44] Oh sorry.

Well, I was going to say the value is that they can go back to whatever they’re doing, or hire you to go back to whatever they’re doing, and maybe that’s your productized consulting, where then they have a strategy to fix their problems. The value is in the solution. It’s not necessarily in the report.

Yup. Absolutely. It moves you further away from selling time for money. It might take you time to fulfill the offering but the client’s expectation isn’t, “Well I’m paying $1,000 for ten hours of him working on the keyboard.” It’s, “I’m paying $1,000 for a document or a report that answers my questions and helps my business grow.”

Right. On the subject of repetition, it always amazes me. I go into a client and they ask me what to me are very simple, straightforward questions about web architecture. I give them roughly the same explanation I give to all my clients. They say, “Wow. That is so incredibly useful and insightful.” So it’s new to them. It’s old hat to me because I’ve been doing this for a while, and I guess the same is true for the explanations and the supplemental text in these reports. Just because you’ve seen it 100 times, they’ve never seen it before, and for them it’s new and interesting and has so much value that they’re willing to pay a lot of money for it.

Yup. Absolutely. Yeah, I think it’s about improving the client condition at the end of the day, and it might be drawing from that library, drawing from that knowledge base of documents you’ve created over time, but it still improves their condition, it helps them know, “This is what I need to do or these are answers to the questions that you, just by virtue of working in this industry are easily able to answer but it might take them forty hours of research to really hone in on. I listened to a couple of previous episodes where you were chatting with different productized consultants, and it’s a minor reframing of the idea of consulting but just those minor tweaks in terms of how you position the offerings, how you have that standard scope for clients, can have drastic ramifications in how your business operates.

Just like we’re saying here, it’s really moving you away from an hourly consultant or a day rate consultant to an advisor who’s providing value. It might only take you an hour of work to provide insight on top of an automated report you generate, but it might be invaluable for the client just to have that insight. You’ve invested time building this tool and it answers their questions automatically.

Mm-hm. Well I don’t know if I have any other questions; how about you guys?

No. This was very insightful and helpful, and my only question is: oh my god. When do I have time to change things over because I really want to do this soon.

So Kai, I do want to ask another question. Are there any things we didn’t ask because we didn’t think of them?

You know, I think we really came through a lot of the questions that different consultants might ask as they get started with this. How do I choose what offering to provide? How do I validate it? How do I make sure that it’s something I want to do? My hope is at the end of this episode, people are able to say, “Oh gee, I really have a framework for getting started with productized consulting.”

Alright. Well, if there’s nothing else, let’s go ahead and get to the picks.

Awesome.

Eric, do you want to start us off with picks?

Sure. So a couple weeks ago I got a Pebble Watch, a smart watch. It’s been out for a while. I was kind of waiting for the Apple watch but I heard it’s going to be three hundred some odd dollars, and I started thinking, “Well if I’m wearing a $300 watch and I’m on a trail running and I fall and break it, that’s going to suck.” So I ended up getting a Pebble. I got the cheap one, just $100, to see if I’d even wear it, and I actually love it. Like, it’s not the greatest. It’s not the most fancy but when it’s paired up with my iPhone I can get notifications on it. Even if I’m in another room I can control music.

The big thing for me is, my running app that I use has an app for the watch so I can basically replace a GPS watch with it and my phone. Another great thing is it has like a thirty, forty battery hour life with all the Bluetooth and all that kind of stuff turned on, so I don’t have to worry about charging it every day. So, like I said, I’ve been using it for two or three weeks now and I absolutely love it, especially if you want to see if you would even wear a smart watch. It’s a nice low cost step instead of getting an Apple watch or the higher end ones that are coming out now.

Awesome. Reuven, what are your picks?

So I have two picks this week. Number one is I’ve been running this email list for my community, for my city, for I guess over fifteen years now, and I finally decided that the time had come to just stop.

Well it used to take basically zero time to run my mail server and mailing list, and in the last number of months as the number of anti-spam controls you need to deal with has gone up, it’s just become not worth it. So my first pick is Google Groups. It’s not perfect. It’s not amazing. There are a lot of problems moving people into it as I’ve discovered. Yes, moving a 3,000 person email list into Google Groups is fraught with difficulty including the, shall we say, low technological competency of many of those 3,000 people. When you tell them to sign up for a new email list, they just don’t know what you’re talking about. But regardless, I have to say it seemed like the best of a few different options. The controls are pretty nice, and it works stably, and I’m finally able to get out of the dealing with spammers and email servers business. So that’s pick number one.

I discovered a show that many other people have known for a while. Arrow. It’s on Netflix, and wow, what a fun show. So I never would have imagined that I would enjoy a show about the Green Arrow, but I was like a super hero I never thought much about. But the show is done very nicely. It’s a lot of fun, and it’s burning up way too much of my time watching Netflix lately. So if you have lots of time to burn because you’re doing productized consulting and you are now just sitting around on your piles of cash, Arrow is a good show to watch. Anyway, those are my picks for this week.

Very nice. I’ve got a couple of picks. The first one is, since this is the first week in December, this comes out on the second week in December, but we are recording on the first week in December. It’s December 2nd today. I’ve been working on my goals for next year, and I just want to encourage everybody to go and figure out what you want to accomplish next year. If productized consulting is part of that, then go ahead and do it. If it’s not, then figure out what you want to accomplish. Figure out where you want to be. I started doing that. I wound up doing it for the rest of this year at the beginning of last month. Now I’m working on the goals for next year. I was talking to the guys on the Entreprogrammers Podcast, which is basically a Mastermind group with John Sonmez, Josh Earl, Derrick Bailey, and myself and we just talk about business stuff and programming stuff but mostly business stuff. Anyway, and I showed them my goals and I got a whole bunch of great feedback from those guys, and one of the things that I got from them was a video that John did on YouTube and it’s How I Plan My Week, and it’s terrific.

So if you go watch it, he uses KanBan Flow, which is the other pick that I have, to manage his week and just stick things in there that he can then work through. The thing I really like about KanBan Flow is that you can also track Pomodoros on there. The issue that I’ve always had with the Pomodoro technique was that I’d have my to do list and then I would have to remember to go from my do list to my Pomodoro app or timer on my desk or notebook or whatever and start keeping track. So this is really nice in the sense that it’s all built in so all I have to do is say, “I’m working on this task. Here’s my Pomodoro,” and off I go. So anyway, those are my picks. Kai, what are your picks?

I’ve got three I want to share. They’re apps that I’ve started using and playing around with and just absolutely love. This first is Keith Perhac’s app, Summit Evergreen. It’s a Software as a Service that lets you create high quality online courses. So as you move through productized consulting or as you as you start putting together a collection of blog posts or articles on a topic, Summit Evergreen just lets you drop your content in, drop videos and drip out the content to subscribers for your course. It’s a really great workflow to use it, and it’s a really effective way to take content or knowledge you’ve put together as part of productized consulting offerings or trainings and have people easily sign up and start moving through those trainings. So that’s my first pick.

My second is Nathan Powell’s Nusii, nusii.com. It lets you create beautiful proposals for your business. I’ve played around with it, and even though I’m not writing a lot of proposals these days, I love the design of it. It’s a really simple application to use and it makes it easy to create high quality proposals and send to your clients. So if you care about the branding or the look of the proposals you send out, I think it’s worth taking a look at.

The third one that I use every single day is Remarq by Jeremy Green at remarq.io. It lets you create beautiful, stunningly formatted documents from a Markdown text file. So I live in markdown. Everything I write just lives in Markdown and Ulysses, and Remarq lets you take that content, drop it in, choose from some pretty pre-created templates, and it spits out a high quality, stunningly formatted document. I tell you, it’s been amazing just to draft up a couple pages of content for a client, drop into Remarq, and send them what looks like a professionally designed report. The feedback from clients that I’ve used these reports with has been stellar. ‘How do you create these things?” They don’t know that it’s just it’s just a Markdown document and a SaaS app. So that one is something I use every single day, and absolutely love.

So with Remarq can you drop images into it as well?

You could add the images like you do in a Markdown document, so using the Markdown syntax, and it puts them into the output. So it is possible, easily possible, to add images to the report it generates, but you aren’t able to generate a pdf and drop it in, and have it do the Remarq magic on that .pdf. Am I explaining that well?

Yes.

You basically link to the image, but you link where it pulls the image in rather than being a hyperlink.

Yup. Exactly. So you could stick the images into Dropbox or in an AWS and have it add those images to your final markdown document.

Very nice. Well thanks for coming, Kai. If people want to check out your offerings or get a hold of you and ask questions what are the best ways to do that?

The best way is to visit my website, kaidavis.com, and I’m on a Twitter sabbatical right now but if they want to get my weekly writing, I have a newsletter I send out every Sunday, a letter from me to you. I write about marketing and business and consulting and a whole range of things. They can sign up for that at kaidavis.com/newsletter.

Awesome. Well, thanks for coming. We’ll catch everyone next week.