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Hey byrneseyeview - it's funny you mention this, because we found that the "branding" of SEOmoz as a consulting business from 2003-2006 really hurts us in the p
by randfish 17y ago
Hey byrneseyeview - it's funny you mention this, because we found that the "branding" of SEOmoz as a consulting business from 2003-2006 really hurts us in the product/software marketplace. We transitioned revenue streams in 2007, and had more than 50% of $ that year from product - those numbers have gone upwards of 80% in 2009. Yet, we still fight against the stereotyping that we're a consulting company.
We're making some moves (and changes to our site) that should help with that in the next few weeks, but it's interesting to see that even after reading the post (where I explained the above in-depth and showed a chart with product vs. consulting revenue), the "branding" is still so strong.
- byrneseyeview 17y agoThat's surprising! Do you think it was the "Consulting" versus, e.g. "Design and Development"? I wonder if 37signals had this issue, too--the impression I get is that they were kind of dragged away from being a service company, because their product got so popular. You might have that branding because people are more willing to admit that they hired you as a consultant ("We needed SEO for our site,") than that they bought software ("We needed SEO help to... do SEO.") And your biggest customers are presumably on the consulting side. I can't imagine a single organization spending $10K on SEOMoz products, but I read somewhere that that's your minimum for consulting. Anyway, it's definitely interesting to see how other SEO companies evolve.
- randfish 17y agoWell - we certainly have many times more Fortune 500s who are subscribers to the software than we ever served with consulting. And I'd say that getting testimonials and word-of-mouth comes much more with software users than consulting clients (who often like to keep things very quiet).