When I talk to founders who’ve attempted this shift, three big things are almost always holding back a successful transition. Comfort with the existing model, and the reliance on services income to survive. The undistracted time needed to build a great product. The difficulty of finding enough of the right customers for that product. It’s rare that your services clients are the perfect match for your product (because fundamentally, they need services, not a product; that’s why they’re your customers!). This is why you can’t simply transition services clients to product customers, despite the
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