Productized Services Are Back

Read by Bernhard Hauser (not AI)

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Do you remember when everyone online was talking about productized services?

Just two years ago, productized services were everywhere. Many founders I knew who were doing consulting work on the side were packaging up their work into fixed-scope offers.

When I started Waterglass, I didn't have portfolio revenue yet. I needed cashflow before I could focus on acquisitions. So I did what worked at the time - I started consulting work and productized my services from day 1.

Since then, a lot has changed and it's becoming increasingly clear that we are headed toward an agentic future. And most people assumed productized services would shrink, but the opposite is true.

Sell a service that scales

My first productized service at the time was helping businesses implement AI chat assistants, since most of them had no exposure to them before.

I packaged the work into two offers:

• Package 1 was an implementation with a fixed scope, fixed price and a small variable range for the complexity of the integration.
• Package 2 was a retainer for ongoing improvements after the assistant was live.

It worked pretty well, not because the service was sophisticated, but because the value proposition was clear. Clients knew what they were buying and I knew what I was selling.

That service work gave me room to focus on our acquisitions Pxl and later Notehouse without financial pressure. I've moved past it now, but it was the bridge that got me started.

The next wave of productized services will be agentic

Most businesses still don't know how to effectively integrate AI into their workflows. We see it inside our own portfolio. Both Pxl and Notehouse have customer requests that an agent could handle, but actually building it and keeping it reliable is hard work.

That is the new gap and it's wider than the chat assistant gap was two years ago.

Agentic work is a strange hybrid: it's part SaaS, because you are reusing the same underlying tooling across clients, and it's part custom work, because every business has its own data, its own quirks, its own definition of what "done" looks like. That hybrid is exactly what productized services were designed for.

The difference now is that the execution layer is increasingly automated. You don't need to write every integration by hand. You don't need to draft every email response.

The founder's job shifts to the parts that don't automate well, figuring out what the client actually needs, framing the offer and staying close to the customer.

How to get started offering productized services

If you are starting out today and looking for a way to generate cashflow that funds the real thing you want to build, this is a good moment to look at productized agentic services.

A few things I would do if I were starting again:

1. Find the gap, not the trend. Look for operators in industries you understand who want agents, but don't know where to begin. Listen for the workflows they describe with frustration. That is your offer.
2. Standardize before you scale. Pick one offer, one outcome, one delivery process. Resist the urge to customize for every client until you have run the same package at least 5 times.
3. Use agents for execution, not for thinking. The repetitive parts of delivery (research, drafting, integration setup, follow-ups) are where agents create real leverage. Keep yourself in the creative and client-facing work.

The old playbook still works: Standardize the offer, charge a fixed price - and repeat. Agents just change who or what does the work.

If you are thinking about starting something while building toward a bigger goal, productized services are still a great answer. I would argue a better one than two years ago.

What is the productized service you would start today?