Productize the Service or You Just Built an Agency

The Framework

There's a version of "adding services" that saves your business and a version that quietly destroys it. The difference is whether the service is productized.

A custom service means calls, proposals, and a different scope for every client. It doesn't scale, and the margins erode as you hire more people to manage the mess. A productized service means the customer picks from a menu, pays a set price, and the work moves down an assembly line. Same delivery, every time.

Farzad Rashidi was careful about this from the start, because his co-founder had run a custom web development agency and knew the trap: "you need to have customer calls and sit down and figure out what style do you like." Respona built the service so it could be automated later, not so it would need humans forever.

The Steps

1. Price per outcome, in fixed tiers. Respona offers five tiers with no negotiation and no ad hoc discounts. Volume discounts are set percentages. The customer selects and nobody haggles. This alone kills most of the agency drift.
2. Turn every custom request into an add on. Want to customize the content? That's an add on. Want to approve domains before they go live? Add on. "We productize the whole thing," Farzad says, so custom looking orders still run on the assembly line.
3. Build a client portal so orders self serve. Respona replaced spreadsheets and wire transfers with a portal where customers place orders as they go, with no limit on order size. That removed the account manager overhead that made small deals unprofitable.
4. Put software between the customer and the work. A client portal on one side, a publisher network portal on the other, and "a brain on the back end that connects the two" that the team sits on top of. The humans stay. The software carries the load.

Real Numbers

The productized model let Respona operate at a volume no custom shop could touch. Last month they built 2,500 brand mentions, about 100 a day. That scale changed their negotiating power with publishers, which they pass back to clients as lower prices.

The core result: 4x revenue in twelve months after a six year plateau. Their publisher relationships went from a dozen to tens of thousands, which is the real moat, not the software itself.

When It Fails

This breaks the moment you say yes to a request you can't systematize. One truly custom engagement, one "let's hop on a call to scope it," and you're back in the agency world with calls and proposals. If a request can't become a tier or an add on, it doesn't belong in the product.

Your First Move

List every custom thing you currently do for clients. This week, sort each into one of two buckets: a fixed tier, or a priced add on. Anything that fits neither is a warning sign that you're building an agency, not a product.