I had a bit of an epiphany today that most of the recurring profit (and probably profit of any kind) generated by my company comes from the management of relatively inexpensive services.
So in our case, that’s mostly website hosting but also applies to things like ongoing services for WordPress and even domain name registration.
I just re-read one of my old blog posts and I mentioned how, when presented with the option for even faster hosting, virtually all of my clients have declined. And I found that fascinating.
Over time, I’ve realized that the technical specs of my hosting don’t matter a whole lot to any of my clients.
What they value is that I’m managing everything. They know I’m handling it all, configuring it will, and they inherently trust that what I’m offering is high-quality. Beyond that, they don’t understand and don’t care to understand how it works.
And that’s all great, and something I have already written about.
But today I thought… What other services fit a similar description? I think anything that meets the following criteria would fit the bill for a great opportunity:
- More or less a commodity service but with premium options available
- Relatively complex behind the scenes and poorly-understood by most
- Recurring service with minimal maintenance required once set up properly
- Tech or software related and possible to perform entirely online
- Ideally a service used by businesses and not just by consumers
Anything that meets all four of these criteria could potentially be a great opportunity for me. In addition to the website hosting and domain name registrations we’re already providing, here are some that I can think of now:
- Cloud-based email hosting – particularly services that will not be interacting with third-party clients, such as Google Workspace
- Cloudflare services / DNS hosting
- Zapier Integrations
- Managed Google Analytics and similar tools
- Merchant services accounts/integrations, like with Authorize.net
Of these, the last one interests me the most. I could basically just resell Authorize.net services and get it set up and maintain it, and people would love it because I would handle everything for them. I could just have a form that people sign up on that gets all of the information needed to get set up and do it all for them.
I’m sure there are lots of others, but these were just the ones I thought of now.
I just definitely keep thinking about this and try to find more examples.
A possible 6th category may very well be: “is able to be managed entirely by me without the need for a client account”.
That would be a major drawback of the merchant services stuff, because they wouldn’t see the need for me if they had their own account that would keep working without me. Ideally it would all be behind the scenes.
The value is there regardless, it’s just that if they have their own account, they would be inclined to question the value without understanding the full picture.