[Sytten]

Product and service businesses are very very very different things. Service you get immediate cashflow but the thing doesn't scale past the humans. Software scales infinitely in theory, but it takes a lot of time to build before you even get 1$ out of it.

[notforviewingit]

You can hire people into consultancy business and grow it like any other business. Sure it won't become the next magnificent seven, but you can grow it enough that you can make a lot of money.

For example, there exist plenty of consultancy companies that have 10million revenue. That would be 20x growth for us. In practice that would mean 500k - 1m yearly income for founders in our case. On top of that the company probably could be sold for 30m - 100m.

With typical vc dilution founders need to grow a very successful product company to earn similar amounts of money. There are plenty of examples of unicorn exits where the founder team has made less.

[tonyedgecombe]

I've know quite a few businesses that started with services then transitioned into product. Once you have enough domain knowledge it is the obvious next step.