Your path to product: how to build a sustainable business by productizing what you know by @matteoc

Your Path to Product
How to build a sustainable business
by productizing what you know
@matteoc www.lafabbricadellarealta.com

This is me.
I don’t have
a boss
anymore.
I’m a
consultant.

Products have eluded me for a long time.
I get startups. I get entrepreneurship.
But products?

So I started a journey to explore how
products are born, where they come from,
how I can learn to develop my own.
You’re invited!
Share on Twitter!
Follow me on a journey to
understand how products are born
and how to develop your own
http://fbbr.co/prd via @matteoc

As a consultant I wonder:
what is the best way to extract value from
my time, how should I transform my ideas
and skills into work?

Is it by selling the highest amount of billable hours
and ﬁlling my agenda with clients
?@matteoc www.lafabbricadellarealta.com

With every client you begin
a unique adventure.
And usually it's lots of fun!
But not all adventures have a
happy end.

So you're back to writing proposals.
You work on many proposals before
getting approved.
And aer you have done your job,
you're not needed anymore.

There must
be a better
WAY@matteoc www.lafabbricadellarealta.com

A super smart
CEO like Mike
McDerment of
Freshbooks
would
suggest to
stop selling
time.

How?
By evaluating how much
value your work is
generating in the clients
business over - let's say -
one year and pricing
your service at - maybe -
10% of that li.

This is excellent advice.
But doesn't solve the core
problem: you still need more
clients, more proposals and so on.

A super smart
CEO like Mike
McDermen of
Freshbooks
would suggest
to stop selling
time.
Let's head to San
Francisco to meet
Tim Ferriss.
When it comes to
product he's the
man. He's the one
that is suggesting
since many years to
build a product
startup and live oﬀ of
that.

Tim’s Product
= Tim’s Ideas
And the best way to share ideas
in the internet era is still...
to write a book.

The
4-hour
SERIES
In return for sharing his
ideas, his books have put
him in an ideal position:
he invests in startups and
advises them at the same
time, maximising his
chances of returns.

How does sharing your ideas in books generate
business?
Let’s see an example from a few years back.
In his case writing a book makes sense.

David Allen is the
best selling author of
Getting Things Done.
Instead of keeping his
productivity workshop
secret, he decided to
give it to the world in
the form of a book.

In this way he has
grown his consulting
business incredibly. So
he teaches us that, as
a consultant, if you
share your techniques
you get a lot in return.

But this is not the only way.

Alex Osterwalder is
also a consultant,
he also shared his
most important
insight in a book.

In the meantime The Internet happened.
Same as David Allen. But with one big diﬀerence:

Not only does he
share his “Business
Model Canvas” in a
book.
He’s also developing websites, apps,
soware services that go together with
his methods.

Like a subscription soware-as-a-service
platform centered around the business model
canvas.
www.lafabbricadellarealta.com@matteoc

Why?
Because it's more
sustainable to sell
cheaply priced soware
solutions to many than
to consult at stellar
rates for few
customers.

So should we all get into soware then
?@matteoc www.lafabbricadellarealta.com

Let's go to Berlin
and meet André
Pankratz.
He’s a soware
developer &
entrepreneur.

In a few years and a few clients later
Vidibus - a soware as a service hosted
video platform - was born.
Aer years of selling one oﬀs he has
started to design an open source
solution tailored to his clients.

What happens when you sell great soware?
Well. You need to consult your clients in
order to help them make the most of it.

Soware is a great way to make your ideas
available.
But sometimes not even that is enough.

Let's go to Chicago
to meet Jason Fried,
co-founder of
37signals, the
successful soware
ﬁrm responsible,
among many other
things, for open
sourcing Ruby on
Rails.

37signals relies on the revenue
stream of hosted, subscription based
soware-as-a-service products like
Basecamp and Campﬁre.

But that was not
enough, there is so
much culture inside the
company that it had to
ﬁnd a way out not only
in the form of products,
but also as a New York
Times bestseller.

Important connections emerge.

Share on Twitter!
Ideas, books, software and
consulting are all connected on the
path to product http://fbbr.co/prd
via @matteoc

A pattern emerges.
Three key values contribute to productization.

ServiceOpenness Design
Share on Twitter!
Openness & Design are key to
value generation, Service is a driver
to sustainability http://fbbr.co/prd
via @matteoc

Openness
Openness is a key to
value generation:
by being open,
accessible, by sharing
your ideas you can
increase the value of
what you do. To multiply
your value you can
choose the way of books,
free seminars and talks or
open source soware.

Service
Service is a driver to
sustainability:
begin of service, being
more useful today than
yesterday, generating
your value month by
month, increasing your
value as your soware
and your ideas are
being shared more.

Design
Design is a key to
product:
Design is about making
something complex
easier to grasp. Being
a designer is a way of
thinking about the
world without taking
anything for granted
and is a key to value
creation.

This is just a small part of the discourse...

Click here to ﬁnd more examples, more
testimonials and to read the full story of
my personal path to product.
Click here to get in touch and share your
own path to product.
Share this presentation
with a tweet.
Share on Twitter!
Your path to product: how to build
a sustainable business by
productizing what you know http://
fbbr.co/prd via @matteoc

Go to my blog
to read the full
POST!@matteoc www.lafabbricadellarealta.com

Matteo Cassese
La Fabbrica della Realtà
matteoc@matteoc.com
on twitter: @matteoc
lafabbricadellarealta.com
Presentation credits:
David Allen photo by Robert Scoble - Source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:David_Allen.jpg
Jason Fried photo by Randy Stewart - Source: http://
blog.stewtopia.com
Alex Osterwalder photo by Heisenberg Media - Source: http://
www.ﬂickr.com/photos/heisenbergmedia/8190821158
Icons from The Noun Project.
Berlin, September 2013
Share on Twitter!
Your path to product: how to build
a sustainable business by
productizing what you know http://
fbbr.co/prd via @matteoc

Your path to product: how to build a sustainable business by productizing what you know by @matteoc

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