How I Transitioned From Service Provider to Course & Digital Product Creator
“Scaling” to 6-figures and beyond, growing a team or even getting “booked out” were never my goals with this business. Rather, I started and continue to run this business to support my family, help people and fulfill my creative passions in the most sustainable and flexible way possible.
You may have heard me talk about how I run a Life-First Business where my life and all it’s messy circumstances take the front seat in any decisions I make about my business. And it’s that mission that lead me to transition from offering done-for-you services to selling 1:many offers like online courses and digital products.
In this blog post, I’m sharing the real behind the scenes of why, when and how I transitioned from service provider to digital product creator as well as some lessons learned in the process to help you if you aspire to do the same.
Starting a service provider business
Let’s start at the very beginning (🎶 it’s a very good place to start).
I opened my business in 2019 with a very young, high-needs baby in arms and a loving husband working away from home for months at a time after being downsized out of my job whilst on maternity leave. Previously, I’d already left behind my film career and dipped a toe or two into the digital marketing space as a freelancer helping local photographers and apartment rental agencies with their websites & graphic design needs. So it seemed fairly natural to start my business offering web design services.
With very little time on my hands, I knew I needed some training in how exactly to set up my business, how to structure my offers and, importantly, how to start getting clients. I enrolled in Paige Brunton’s Square Secrets, Ran Segal’s Flux Academy and in Danbee Shin’s Fast Track which helped enormously to speed up the start of my web designer business and set me up with both technical web design skills and broader marketing, sales, and business skills that I carry with me today.
My service packages were robust to start with and took anywhere from 6-8 weeks to complete. I was able to book a few clients within the first months of starting my business and worked on refining my design and delivery processes pretty much right away.
Streamling my services
With a few clients under my belt, I quickly realized that I couldn’t maintain that level of work and those sorts of long, drawn-out projects with the lifestyle I had at the time with a young baby struggling to sleep and no childcare.
So my fairly urgent priority then became streamlining my systems and processes to free up some of my time, speed up my delivery and allow me to book more clients without adding to my workload. At this stage, I tested out VIP Days which I modeled after Sarah Masci’s wonderful process that really helped implement this strategy quickly.
While I quite liked the flexibility of the VIP Day model, I still found it tricky to have so much wiggle room with deliverables and setting client expectations, which lead me to learn about and then implement productized services in the form of website audits and then template customizations once I launched my first Squarespace template.
Launching my first digital product
Loving how hands off my website audit was, I started thinking a lot about how to further streamline my business by packaging up my web design knowledge, and thus the idea to create and sell my first digital product was born.
I launched my first Squarespace template, which at the time was a kit with all sorts of other templates to help with your website launch in December 2020. Considering my audience at the time was under 500 people in total across my email list and social media, I’m pretty impressed with how well this launch went. I had 6 people pre-order the template which was enough to motivate me to sit down and create it!
Once it was complete and my beta purchasers had given me their stamp of approval, I set about launching it again at its full price. I also started to think seriously about how I could offer a done-for-you service using these resources I’d just created…
Which lead to me launching my One Week Website service, a highly productized service that lent on the Squarespace template I’d created but included done-for-you design customization, tech set-up, and post-launch support. This was a very popular offer and quickly was booked up within the first few months.
Recovering from burnout
While my One Week Website service and my Squarespace template were selling well, behind the scenes I was running on fumes… Which eventually lead to hitting a pretty horrible burnout that forced me to stop the service side of my business rather abruptly.
Thankfully, my templates were still chugging along and selling nicely on their own. So slowly, as I recovered from my burnout, I decided to move away from offering services entirely and pour my available time and energy into creating & selling digital products.
Growing my digital product business
The next few years were a sharp learning curve as I truly started to wrap my head around how to run a solely digital product based business. From creating products people actually wanted to buy, pricing them correctly, learning how to market & sell them, and all the rest that comes with this specific business model.
In 3 years I created & launched over 40+ digital products including design templates, copy templates, worksheets, spreadsheets, PDFs, Notion dashboards, workshops, courses, group programs, and even a membership that I ran with my biz bestie.
I learned which products worked best for my audience, which I enjoyed creating and selling most, how I like to sell, how to grow an engaged audience, how to create content to nurture people to buy and so much more.
I also discovered a whole lot of pitfalls and traps we can get ourselves into as digital product creators…
👉 For the first time ever I’m ready to turn around and teach you how to grow your own digital product business without all the trail and error that going it alone takes. So tune in to this free private podcast series to get started with your own digital product business today!
