[akassover]

There's another type of hybridized consultancy/product business to consider: have a product and provide value-added consulting around the product. This tends to work best with B2B products that require implementation legwork, customization, or just general thought on the customer side to get maximum value.

For example, at Guidearama.com, our platform lets businesses turn marketing assets (videos, white papers, case studies, etc.) into a resource center on their website with lead generating landing pages. We've often ended up managing the entire program our clients are implementing around our platform. This can be packaged at a fixed cost and is much easier to price based on value than normal time & materials work. To our clients, we look like heroes because we can produce results very quickly using guidearama.com that in their minds should take 10x longer to complete.

There are a few benefits to this hybrid approach:

* The consulting work becomes decommoditized. You gain an unfair advantage because you developed the product the client is interfacing with.

* Your product builds your pipeline for you so you spend less time on sales and marketing.

* Your consulting work becomes more efficient because you can automate many tasks in your product that would otherwise take time if you were doing straight consulting work

In patio11's case, I don't think there wasn't an opportunity to do this because his consulting work and Bingo Card Creator didn't overlap - the case might be different with Appointment Reminder.