Productize Your Job and Quit

You’re a white collar professional with over a decade of experience. You’ve found some major inefficiencies in your work, and repetitious tasks that you have to do, and not only you, but everyone in your role at other companies. If you’re driven, creative and have an insight that’s repeatable, you can leverage and sell it with software. This lets you stop trading time for money, and gives greater opportunity for growth. Hard work, no doubt, but worth a risk to escape the 9-5.

Why

Human labor is getting automated away; we see this everywhere we look, but the smart people know it’s not just fast food kiosks, it is white collar labor, and it’s here today. Why not jump on this trend and make some money at it. It is the ultimate “start with yourself as the user”, but you are a highly competent practitioner of a deep work skill. This makes your insight significantly more valuable than automating social media clicks or similar. Think about all the highly paid professionals in your position that can reduce their workload and increase their billing rate by your software.

Success Stories

I’ve seen this in the wild many times. It’s the best type of MVP, and an easy sell to business owners looking to grow their customer base and reduce employee cost. One past client of mine was a pathologist and MD (examines tissues and scans for disease), that found the repetitive notetaking for common ailments frustrating. We worked together to design a web interface that embedded all of his expertise into note taking for pathologists across hospitals and other practices, along with being able to collectively add new pre-populated content into the app. It used voice activation, so task switching from microscope to keyboard was minimized. He’s currently in sales mode, already selling to a few hospitals and creating a lifestyle business. Transition from MD to true entrepreneur with the right software partner.

Another success story came from a financial advisor client who wanted to improve his sales process. Giving detailed and personalized breakdowns of current investment strategies compared to a strategy driven by the advisor became easy to visualize and present with the right software. Ingesting the Robinhood, Coinbase, and Mint data into a javascript graphing library that compared risk and returns to various strategies offered by the advisor improved my client’s sales success rate from 15% to 40%. A big win that has enabled him to serve higher end clients himself and increase his income.

How

This type of MVP takes a special type of technical partner. The partner has to be well versed in already, or adept at picking up industry nuance and build it into the product. Anticipating how tasks are carried out and building in a straight line instead of a winding road is key. Prioritization and understanding is important here. By hiring a dev shop, the expert spends too much time in product discussions and isn’t heard. A junior dev contractor won’t build with the correct architecture for scale, or understand the specifics of the industry.

Financial freedom is a major goal for all professionals. You’ve likely built up enough nest egg to take some risks and secure a future more stable and economy-resilient than you thought possible. If you’re considering, let’s chat — reach out here.

Original article posted at https://mvpengineer.com/productize-your-job-and-quit/