His Little Productized Service Earned $11K in 12 Months

Bas van StraatenWebflow Developer $19,000+ revenue Published March 5, 2024 by Fardeen KhanReviewed and edited by Niall Doherty

Bas van Straaten is a Webflow developer and founder of Webflow Cookies, where he provides a simple productised service to build cookie banners on Webflow sites.

The selling point…

Unlike other solutions, we will match the look-and-feel of the cookie consent banners with the rest of your website.

This sells for €72.95 ($78.95) per site.

They’ve apparently had 250+ customers, which works out to $19,000+ in revenue

Bas says in a recent interview…

The service I created was never meant to make any money. When the GDPR rules were announced in Europe, I increasingly received the request to make my clients’ websites GDPR compliant and set up a cookie banner.

There were many services out there to help, but most of them were either expensive or lacked styling control. Short story: it was always a hassle at the end of the project.

So

To help the community, I decided to design my own cookie banner and offer it as a free resource to the community.

People started to use it and this is how the story of what is now known as Webflow Cookies was born.

After launching the free resource…

People started to ask me for help with the setup. I installed the cookie banner, set up their Google Tag Manager and sent an invoice for the hours worked.

Only after the 20th order I realized this could be a great little productized service.

A few weeks later, and I built a website, wrote out all SOPs and trained a VA to handle the implementation.

His “little productized service” has done well…

In the last 12 months [it has] made just under $11,000 – with a 90% profit margin. While it only contributes <5% to my annual revenue of all income stream together (freelance work + 2 other small services), it counts as some good pocket money given that it’s fully outsourced.

I reckon Bas’ approach could be replicated in many areas.

You’d basically create a free resource for a popular product (eg. Webflow, Airtable, etc.), then offer a paid product or service that complements the freebie.

Another example of this in action: Zite Design Carrd Tutorial

That’s a tutorial showing you how to build landing pages for Carrd. You can watch the videos for free, and then Zite Design itself is a template marketplace.

So if you get fed up learning how to build templates yourself, you can head over to Zite Design and buy a pre-built template.

Lastly, I love Bas’ advice for aspiring entrepreneurs…

If you’re just starting out, and don’t have a clear idea yet for a service/product – consider going the freelance route first:

– You get to learn new skills, people and software while getting paid for it.

– In the short term – selling your time to clients gets you much more cash much faster than trying to build a product (in my experience).

– As you spend time becoming an expert in a certain niche, you start to uncover problems and new opportunities – which you then can turn into products or services.

Bas said $11K is <5% of his annual revenue.

So he’s earning about $220,000 per year overall.

And it sounds like most of that comes from freelancing

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