So this week I got a contract to consult a company on analytics, data and BI practices. It’s monthly recurring revenue and work and it’s great.
Now as I go through this I am trying to understand a bit better how to “productize” certain aspects of this (google “tropicalmba productized services” for an intro on this concept).
I have got some clarity around my initial stages of the sales funnel, basically:
- Get a lead, mostly relying on word of mouth and content marketing right now
- Do a 2 days assessment of their current state and challenges for $2k
- Offer consulting/mentoring/couching services to achieve the targets we set on .2 for a monthly price
I am, however, somewhat confused on step 3. I say I am confused because I would like to avoid for this to become me selling my time. I am OK with consulting if I can hire a team to do it for me (I have experience hiring and managing teams).
So here are few things I have been considering to build a product around point 3 above.
- Build a standard cloud analytics architecture, process and people model for BI and data science (sort of what AWS does, build a process, make it boring, sell it)
- Create an open source Python orchestration library to glue together the whole analytics end to end since now it’s completely disconnected
- Specialize on 1 or max 2 cloud vendors (AWS and Azure for instance)
- Build some specialized open source docker containers to sell support on
I have to be honest, the main reason I am being hired as a consultant is not technical per se, it’s more about my experience in the field in all the end to end including soft stuff like managing stakeholders. But the tech is the easy thing to put a “product” price on, the soft stuff tends to end in me selling my time.
So finally here is the question. Any of you has had any luck in building a productized service? How does it look like? Any books on this topic I should read?