038: How to Generate Recurring Revenue by Productizing Your Service Based Business (w/ Brian Casel)
Summary: Brian Casel is an entrepreneur focused on bootstrapping online businesses that combine software with productized services. Since starting his self-employed career as a professional freelance web designer back in 2008, he has built and later sold web design/SaaS business in 2015. He now runs Audience Ops, a content marketing service focused on helping B2B software companies grow their audience and customer-base. <br> <br> He writes and teaches about entrepreneurship and freelancing through his blog and newsletter at casjam.com. He also creates and sells courses and ebooks there, most notably his course, Productize, which teaches consultants how to build, launch, and grow a productized service business. <br> <br> His work and articles have been featured or published in Mashable, Smashing Magazine, Mixergy, Entrepreneur Magazine, and others. He has spoken at industry conferences such as MicroConf and Double Your Freelancing Conf. He also co-hosts the Bootstrapped Web podcast with Jordan Gal, where they talk behind-the-scenes of bootstrapping their online businesses. <br> <br> Being in full-time business <br> <br> Brian left his last full-time job at a wed design agency in January 2008 which translates to about 9 years in business. He started doing freelance web design while also working on different product ideas that didn’t take off. Started RestaurantEngine in 2011 while still doing other freelance work. Launched RestaurantEngine in 2012 and in 2013 starting working on it full-time till 2015 when he sold it. <br> <br> First product <br> <br> The first product business that Brian worked on was creating Wordpress themes that he would sell as digital downloads. This made him some income every month but he sold the business to someone else in 2015. <br> <br> Inspiration behind leaving formal employment to freelancing then to business <br> <br> While still working at the web design agency, Brian noticed that the company used to hire freelancers occasionally. He realised that the freelancers were making a living from that, which prompted him to learn freelancing through free online resources. In 2008, he decided to start doing freelance work which actually helped him through the economic downturn and gradually led him towards starting his own business. <br> <br> RestaurantEngine idea <br> <br> While building websites for different clients in diverse industries, he realised how difficult it was for small business owners to build and set up their websites even on platforms like Wordpress. That inspired him to create a hosted platform built on top of Wordpress in order to make it easier for business owners to build websites for their businesses. While in the planning process he realised that he could not standardize the platform for all types of businesses so he had to specialize it to one business sector and he settled for the restaurant sector because restaurants always require the same content on their websites like menus, etc. Focusing on one industry/niche made it easier for him to market the product. <br> <br> Going full-time into RestaurantEngine <br> <br> Brian was balancing his freelance work with working on RestaurantEngine for 2 years before he could go full-time into it. He had three people working for him in customer support, one in sales and one in content marketing. He built the site himself and had one developer on-call to support when needed. <br> <br> Determining the viability of the RestaurantEngine idea <br> <br> Brian didn’t know whether the idea would work but it worked out eventually. He had to invest a lot in terms of time, hard work and personal finances in order to build the platform before it even launched and started generating revenue. <br> <br> Tip: Validating a new product idea or business idea before going into it is very important <br> <br> Transition from RestaurantEngine to Audience Ops <br>
