How to pivot from a service business to digital products

One of the questions that I get asked quite a lot is “how do I pivot my business from selling services to selling digital products?” This is something that I did personally in my own business. I used to run a service-based business doing social media marketing, content, strategy, done-for-you Facebook ads management, all of the marketing things. I had the intention of growing it into an agency, but I realized that I didn't actually enjoy managing people. So that was the end of the agency goal.

 

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Pivoting from a service-based business to digital products

This is something that I did personally in my own business. I used to run a service-based business doing social media marketing, content, strategy, done-for-you Facebook ads management, all of the marketing things. I had the intention of growing it into an agency, but I realized that I didn't actually enjoy managing people. So that was the end of the agency goal.

This business, I ran it back in 2017 through to about early 2019. I had a small team, but I realized that I either would have to scale by hiring more people and removing myself from actually doing the work, which was what I enjoy doing. I enjoy doing the marketing. I didn't enjoy managing people. So when I realized that, I knew that I had to change something and I understood that there's only really so many ways that you can scale. So, for me, it would be having to pivot away from selling services. It meant that I needed to move towards building a digital product business.

Let me put it this way. There are only a few ways you can scale your business. You can work more hours, you can hire people, you can put your prices up, or you can scale with digital products. I chose to go down the digital product path. These days, most of my income comes from digital products. I have some affiliate income and a really tiny bit of client income for the limited number of one-on-one consults that I do, which these days is not a whole lot.

So this is how I pivoted, step-by-step. I'm going to go through it in chronological order.

1. I noticed a gap in the market

When I was doing the done-for-you marketing as part of my marketing service-based business, I started to notice that there were a lot of people wanting to work with me because they wanted me to run their Facebook ads for them, but they had a really tiny budget.

This is where I thought, okay, this would be a cool idea to start a course teaching people who have a limited budget how to run their own Facebook ads. So I created it. I launched it twice. Neither of the two launches was huge. I think the first one came in at just over $10,000, and the second one was maybe 5,000 or 6,000. Not a massive launch, but it was enough for me to think that maybe there was something in this whole digital product idea, this digital product thing.

I started creating and launching a couple of other digital products. I had a Canva template, I had an Instagram course, I had an email marketing course. But I never really doubled down on any of the particular products, and I ended up with this random assortment of products that didn't really make any sense. They were just there. It was like a library, but there was no logical flow through my products.

2. I launched more digital products

I did then what any normal entrepreneur would do. Instead of refining my products, I went and launched another one. I launched a membership. It was good, the content was really good and I had members. But I really struggled to grow it because, looking back now, I made a lot of mistakes. Because looking back two years, I can see crystal clear exactly which mistakes I made, but at the time, I could not figure out why it wasn't growing.

Once I launched that membership, that brought in a little bit of recurring income. It was maybe $3,000 or $4,000 a month of recurring income. So I started to slowly fire my clients, as I started to bring in more sales and more membership members.

3. I retired my other products and doubled down on one particular digital product

I eventually shut down my membership. I realized it was becoming way too much work for the return that I was getting and I just wasn't loving it, so I shut it down. I retired a bunch of my digital products and I pivoted into launching.

So guess what? I did not have a lot of money coming in at that point, and I actually started working with clients again. But I started working with them on one-off launch strategies, which I really did enjoy doing.

Then I launched the A-Z Podcast Launch Plan (my online course teaching podcast launch strategy). Once that took off, that was when my business kind of went crazy. I started to bring in a lot of consistent income, but it also meant that I had to start to think about how I was scaling my business. I had to delegate customer support, I had to start growing my team.

4. I stopped taking clients again

I started slowly easing back on launch strategy clients until I launched Launch Magic in 2020, which kind of replaced the whole done-for-you launch strategy with a done-with-you method. So in Launch Magic, I teach my clients how to do their own launch strategy and, in some ways, I actually think this is beneficial because my clients have a better understanding of their audience, of their customers than I do. I can come at it with the lens of the launching expert, but I can't come at it with the lens of the topic expert or the ideal customer expert.

Now I don't do any client projects at all. It's been gradual. It wasn't this one line in the sand where suddenly I was like, “No, I don't work with clients anymore.” It's been slowly, as I started to replace my client income, I started to let more clients go.

How to transition away from client work

Now, if you're thinking about transitioning away from client work, I would recommend doing it slowly like I did, and keeping in mind that you can always go back to doing client work again. It doesn't have to be permanent. You can get rid of your clients, you can fire them all if you don't like them. Then if you realize like, “Oh, crap, I actually need money again,” you can take on clients, you can run one-off projects. There are ways to bring in cash if you need to.

I found that I was the most resourceful and most productive in the times when I had hardly any income coming in. I found that it really kicked my butt into gear, and that was when I started to come up with really creative ideas for how to bring in cash quickly. So if that is what you're worried about, that is totally normal, firstly, to be worried about it, but also back yourself. Understand that you will be able to be resourceful, and you will find ways around it when you need to.

So I hope you found this useful if you're thinking of transitioning away from client income and towards digital product income. It's so worth it for the freedom and the time and the flexibility and the ability to push you into random ideas and projects because that is what really, really lights me up. For you, it might just be spending more time with your family or pursuing hobbies or whatever it is that makes you happy.

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