How (and Why) I Turned My Freelance Business into a Productized Service with Webflow

Turning my Freelance Business into a Productized Service with Webflow

If you’re reading this, you’ve stumbled across the first step in, what I imagine will be, the challenging and unpredictable journey of setting up my first “official” business. 

My name is Robert and I’ve been a freelancer for the last two years. One of my longest jobs has been content writing here at Memberstack – and one of the biggest learnings I've had is how many tools have been designed to help no-code developers start businesses as quickly and as painlessly as possible. 

After writing about this space for so long, I recently decided to take the leap myself. The job market is tough right now and AI is changing the face of freelancing. If there was ever a time to make the transition into something new, now feels like the right time.

My work with Memberstack exposed me to one of their resources – the “Productized Service Template”. While they are paying me to write what you are reading, this series was entirely my idea. The template was exceptionally well-suited for what I wanted my business to be. It handles all of the tedious parts (web dev, payments, user accounts, automations), allowing me to focus on the real hard work: finding clients who want to pay me.  

If you’re interested in making this transition yourself, keep reading! 

Introduction to Productized Services 

Here’s something I’ve learned about being a freelancer: my end goal is not to remain a freelancer forever. Particularly in my world of content writing, the one-to-one relationship between the writer (me) and the client can be unpredictable. I too often find myself living project to project, applying to a never-ending stream of jobs, hoping I’ll be paid at the end of the day.

To avoid these conditions, freelancers like myself will often try to pivot to another kind of business – depending on the kind of work they do. These alternative models can provide opportunities for more stable income and stronger client relationships. The most common is the freelancer agency (like We Are The Allies or Atfluence). In this setup, the agency owner defines a specific service (typically within their existing niche), finds clients looking for that kind of work, and then hires other, usually entry-level, freelancers to carry out those tasks. 

Another popular option is the SaaS model (you can see hundreds of examples on sites like ProductHunt). In this scenario, the services offered are built directly into some software application. These applications can be built with code or with no-code solutions (connected to some kind of front-end). This is especially popular among freelance developers – although the introduction of programmable generative AI tools has opened the door for this kind of work to creatives as well. 

In my specific case, however, neither of these fit exactly what I was looking for. I’ve worked for many clients over the last two years, but my exact job descriptions have changed frequently or haven’t lasted long enough for me to become an “expert” in a specific area. What I was looking for was some kind of business in which I could cast a wide net and, over time, carve out specific niches that I hadn’t worked in before. 

Enter: the Productized Service. 

What is a Productized Service? 

Productized services are best imagined as frameworks for specific freelance services that can be purchased by clients at a fixed price or as a subscription. Put more simply, it is a freelance service that is packaged and sold like a product. Instead of using an hourly or per-project rate for each client project, a client purchases flat-rate access to an existing service (or bundle of services) which is then custom-fit to their specific needs. 

These are the core traits of a productized service: 

1. Fixed pricing: the client purchases the service (or bundle of services) for a flat-rate one-time or subscription price displayed on the website. 
2. Reusable parts: each service utilizes existing infrastructure which can be customized to the needs of the customer. 
3. Finite scope: the service(s) have a clearly defined scope and service offering. 

This model has been especially popular among web/graphic designers (see: Designjoy, Design Pickle) – although there is a huge opportunity for it to be applied in other freelance industries.   

My Plan…

I think the productized service model is ideal for me because it allows me to offer a unique and varied set of products without having to constantly redefine my services for each new client. The type of work I’ve enjoyed the most over the last few years has been building weird systems or performing unusual services for clients – things like creating automated content systems, traditional writing series, or AI personas. 

My goal is to create a company where I can do these “special projects” – particularly projects that they would prefer not to do in-house –  at scale and for a variety of clients. 

Execution Plan:

1. Design and publish my productized service agency website;
2. Pre-validate some ideas based on what people are asking for on freelance discussion boards (mostly Reddit) or on job boards (Upwork, Remotive, X (Twitter), etc.); 
3. Pitch the service product to as many clients as I can; 
4. Refine and center the products that garner the best response. 

With this model, I am allowing myself to carve out my optimal niche while avoiding the “generalist” trap I’ve been in over the last few years. Products are also easier to market, and so, should be somewhat easier to scale.  

How To Identify “Productize-able” Services

Now that my high-level plan is clear (I hope), I’m faced with the first question: what am I going to productize? There are an infinite number of services that clients might find useful. My job at this stage is to figure out who these potential clients are, to understand their needs, and to start to build the outline for a productized service they’d want to use.   

I’ve designed a three-step plan to tackle this: 

Step 1: Picking Niches

For this project, I plan to use the term “niche” a bit differently than it is used elsewhere. Instead of referring to the services that I’ll be offering, I want to refer to possible profiles of customers who, as a group, might have needs that are unique to their industry.

The niches I plan to tackle first are going to involve the kind of work that I’ve done in the past. I think I’ll try to focus on things like content writing, project management, translation, and AI tooling. The great thing about this model is that I’ll be able to refine it as I begin building it. 

Step 2: Concept Pre-Validation

This is maybe the most important part of the entire process. For this “pre-validation” stage, I have been using a semi-automated system. Many job boards or forums (like Reddit) have RSS feeds which provide a way to turn text into data. I built a system in Make.com that sends info from these RSS feeds into an LLM (via the OpenAI API). This then categorizes and summarizes the text data and adds it into an Airtable base – which I can use to group ideas into potential services.

The goal here is to see the kinds of things that companies are asking for and get ahead of them by offering to do those things for them (packaged in a compelling way) as productized services. 

For a more detailed explanation of how this works, check out this breakdown. 

Step 3: Defining Products 

I plan to use this pre-validation research to define a group of 10-15 initial “special project” productized services. These services will exist on individual CMS template pages on my Webflow site, which I will use as launch pads for client outreach and other sales/marketing activities. The goal for these initial services is to create a narrow enough scope for each project that a wide variety of clients will be able to identify the specific value added from each product.

Once I’ve completed these steps, the next steps would be to create MVP (minimum viable product) versions of these service offerings and to add them to the website I’m planning to build and document in the coming blogs. Then I’ll be able to focus on the most important part of this project: actually validating my service concepts. 

Creating a Minimum Viable Business Plan (MVBP) 

Given the possible scale and scope of a project like this, I have created what I call a “Minimum Viable Business Plan”. The goal of this document is to outline everything that I will need to do prior to beginning the sales/marketing process. 

The Minimum Viable aspect of this means that I tried only to focus on finding the shortest possible path I could take to getting paying clients for this project. The reason I was attracted to the Productized Service Template from Memberstack is because it handles most of the complicated front-end and back-end development that this would require. 

Some of the things included with the template are: 

• Client and admin dashboards
• Ability to add, update, and filter projects
• Real-time commenting on projects
• Pricing frameworks
• User accounts + social auth
• CMS project management
• Multi-step forms
• Automations
• Payments (via Stripe) 

I have no idea if I’ll use every feature (at least at first) – but you can imagine how helpful it will be to have them available if and when they are needed.  

If you want to check out the minimum viable business plan, click here. 

Conclusie 

Creating a new business is hard. Creating a business where the exact product you plan to sell is not entirely known is a different process entirely. The goal for this piece has hopefully been to show you a powerful business model and one possible system for pre-validating business ideas easily and at scale.  

I hope you’ll follow along for the upcoming blogs! In this series, I’ll share not only my process of setting this business up, but also how I decide on branding and pricing, how I approach sales and marketing, how I analyze my successes/failures, and any other insights I find along the way. As with any business, it’s impossible to tell how exactly this will go – but I hope to make mistakes that you won’t need to make in the future.