Add a stream of income

A lovely guy in the Work on Climate Slack community reached out asking how a fixed price service would work in his world (he’s a product designer working on contract).

Thought I’d just paste my reply here (edited out the bookends) in case it’s relevant to the folks on contracts or otherwise employed, who are wanting to build a product on the side.

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Let’s assume your contract has been running for a couple of years, and essentially looks and feels like a “job”.

To add an extra stream of income, you might decide to create a productised service based on your day-to-day experience.

I don’t mean just offering “everything you do” as an product, that’d likely be too open ended and have you working nights and weekends to keep up.

But perhaps something like a discovery consult, or a small component of your role that could be sold as a one-off.

Real world example: A photographer who works in corporate, fashion, etc, who built a fixed-price “Headshot in a day” service, but they box it up like a product.

What that looks like is stripping out quite a lot of steps, and paring the service down to it’s essentials, to the point where you literally exclude things to ensure the expectation is correct. You create a fixed price, build an SOP so you can deliver it the same way every time, and just continue polishing the process so it becomes easier to deliver and more profitable the more you do it.

For the photographer, people buy directly on the website, book their session time, get all the details they need for the shoot including what’s not included (like outfit changes), so all the photographer has to do is welcome them on the day and follow their SOP.

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Hope that helps ✌️