[_d8fd]

tl;dr -- offer customers something they can't buy at a price their willing to pay.

My personal, non-software example was to identify an untapped opportunity in my field, technical recruiting. My clients had 20 to 100 employees, no internal technical recruiter, had already recruited their core team, has run out of organically generated people to interview, and had raised a Series B or later in funding. In 2010, the only options available to them were contingency recruiters, contract recruiters who wanted 6 to 12 month full time contracts, and inexperienced admin staff (aka not experienced technical recruiters).

After learning that it super competitive to sell traditional recruiting services to my clients, I decided to develop a workflow that allowed me to offer them part-time hourly recruiting with no long term commitment. Typically this started off as 10 to 30 hours a week with no commitment (aka fire me at any time). This model worked great, and in 2 years I scaled from just me billing 30 hours per week with one client to 15 people (part time & full time) billing several hundred hours per week.

Service business are not software businesses, but they do share at least one thing in common; selling a product or service customers need & can't buy in an industry you understand is a heck of a lot easier than trying to make something up from scratch.

Good luck!

</rant>

[cylinder]

Wow that is really interesting, how did you manage to sell them a paid (hourly) service when as you said they had firms knocking down their door doing it on contingency?

[amorphid]

I managed to develop a pipeline of mostly referral business. When people come to you, it's a different kind of sale.

[smaddox]

Not the OP, but commission-based recruiting seems to incentivise the wrong kind of recruiting, i.e. "find someone we can shove down their throat". I would personally rather pay an experienced recruiter by the hour, even if it meant fewer (hopefully higher quality) leads.

[cylinder]

I agree, but the incentive for hourly is to wait as long as possible to introduce the candidate, right?

[amackera]

I think the idea behind hourly is to provide the best "bang for their buck". If your clients feel cheated, they will fire you.

Evidently OP did a good job, and made them feel like they were getting high value.

[amorphid]

And that was basically the pitch... "We aren't magic, we just do what you would do. If you have the tim to recruit yourself, do it. If not, give us a try, and if it's not working, fire us."