It took a while for the post to get there, but the point is incredibly spot on. Building out a product is hard and getting to big money is hard, but people and

It took a while for the post to get there, but the point is incredibly spot on. Building out a product is hard and getting to big money is hard, but people and companies pay for service all the time. Turning a service into a product is something I've been thinking a lot about lately and there seems to be an interesting spot forming between consulting and products. The most interesting thing to me is the potential revenue difference between just a product and just a service. For example, take something like Shopify. They are purely a product, they charge $79 and it's totally hands off. If you were doing a custom shopping cart or whatever, you might charge $5,000 or something to build/cusotomize a solution. There is very likely a place where you could run someone's store for them for like $500-1,000 a month without them having to touch anything. You could hire and train someone to run these stores and each person could run say 100 stores. That is 50-100k per month per person running those stores. It would not be super difficult to find that many customers and be able to pay people to service those customers well. The outcome for said customers would likely be better than if they had to manage it themselves, but it would be a lot better than what most build and move on type consultant type arrangements would provide. The same idea applies to a lot of niches, not just e-commerce. I suspect there will be a lot of offerings that pop up in the next few years that do exactly this.