In this solo podcast episode, Ian Peterman, CEO of Peterman Design Firm, outlines a five‑step framework for service‑based businesses to develop and launch their own products without abandoning their service model. He emphasizes leveraging the existing customer base as a source of insight and early adopters. The steps are: (1) Survey current customers to uncover unmet needs and product ideas; (2) Synthesize survey data into a clear product definition, feature set, pricing, and brand positioning; (3) Craft a marketing strategy that initially targets those existing clients, using their trust to generate early sales and validation; (4) Collect honest product feedback from the same customers to iterate and improve the offering; and (5) Blend the new product with the core service to create a synergistic, cross‑selling ecosystem that amplifies value for both the business and its clients. Throughout, Peterman stresses practical tactics—questionnaires, newsletters, design‑team collaboration, and brand‑architecture decisions—while maintaining an enthusiastic, instructional tone aimed at helping service firms avoid starting from scratch and instead capitalize on their established relationships.
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Hello, my name is Ian Peterman. I'm CEO and founder of Peterman Design Firm, and on today's episode on launching a new product, I want to talk about 5 steps for creating a product as a service company. And I talked about this a little bit in its It's just something that's come up quite a bit in my work. I help service companies become their own product companies, launch their own products, and I just want to talk about 5 steps that can be taken in order to not actually transition into only a product company, but to create a product for a service company. So we'll talk about surveying current customers, Determining your product and features, creating a marketing strategy, getting product feedback, and then blending your services and products together and how to have some ideas on how to do that. So first, let's talk about, you know, the first step here that I would guide a service company through in order to launch a new product, and that is survey your current customers. So Unlike a product company that's starting purely from scratch, that doesn't have a customer base, it is their first product. If you're a service-based company, you have a service as a product, then you have an existing group of customers. So take advantage of that and talk to them. Put out surveys, send a newsletter with questions on it, do whatever you can in order to get information from your current customers as to what products they would enjoy. What are they looking for? Are there any products that they wish existed? Do they have any specific needs, you know, that are related to your services and what you're helping them with already, or things that maybe they have nothing to do with what your service is but is still a strong need? And you may find that there are products out there that they they really wish existed or would buy if it had certain features or if it came from you, even if it's not necessarily directly related in an apparent way to your service. But, you know, maybe you work within generally one industry and they have a different need that you might be able to fill with a product. So talk to them, get that information, start the dialogue, surveys, questionnaires, things like that. Start getting that information so you can start You can get a good idea of what are the products out there that your existing customer base would be interested in from you. The second thing that I want to talk about is determining your product and features. So you take all that information and you need to put it together, figure out what kind of product it is, what are the features of it, what does it need to look like? And depending on your survey, maybe if you ask pricing questions, you'll have an idea of prices, pricing, features, and any other details about the product that would be good to put in a scope. And so putting it all together will create this product feature and scope, and that is something that you can either with your own internal design team or a design firm, whoever is working with you in designing it, That will give your roadmap for how to develop and what does that product need to look like. And that process is typically pretty straightforward, but sometimes it can benefit from some additional market research or talking with a design team or design person who has experience in that product field in order to give some guidance of, okay, well, this is great. And when customers say they want X, we find that they actually really mean Y, just most people don't— aren't able to articulate that. And so there's, there's some professional-level help that can help interpret some of those survey answers depending on what it is and actually give a little bit more guidance and help make sure that your product features are really well-defined and really truly match your customers, and you also need to be thinking about your brand. Are you launching it as your own brand? Are you launching it as a sub-brand? And so it can be a little bit different, maybe a little bit disassociated from the services. So determining all that is going to be really important. Next, number 3, we're going to— is create a market strategy based on your current customers. So Don't necessarily think about how broad your product could be, right? I mean, you could be developing a product that could be used by many people outside of whoever your core customers are, your existing customers, but you really want to focus on a marketing strategy that really goes to them because it's far easier to sell a product to someone who already knows, likes, and trusts you. than it is to establish a new relationship with a new customer who does not know anything about you. And so make sure that you, at the very least, do a marketing strategy based on your current customers. And then you can always look at, well, how do I expand? How do I market this product to people outside of my current customers? And even if you have a small customer base, maybe you have 100 or 1,000, you know, you're not talking about tens of thousands of people, market to them first because it'll allow you to get product feedback. It'll allow you to test the product. It'll allow you to kind of do a bit of a dry run, even if you have a really small group. So definitely do that first and figure out how you're going to market that product to your customers. Fourth, get product feedback from existing customers. So As I mentioned, one of the, one of the reasons you do marketing for current customers is you're really going to want to get product feedback. And with customers you already have, you already have a certain level of rapport. They know you a bit better. So you're going to get, hopefully— and this is, this is always the goal with this— a little more honest feedback of, oh, we love your services, but your product has this issue. Right, so you already have that rapport where they're not going to feel like they're harming you if they give you bad feedback, which can be an issue when getting feedback from people that don't know you. People will want to be nice and say, oh well, your product is fine, and not really give you the feedback, whereas your current existing customers, especially if you go to the ones that are really happy with you or have really strong relationships with whoever their point of contact is at your company, then you can get a lot more honest and more, more interactive feedback easily because you might be able to, you know, have them give feedback when you're talking about a service. You can also loop into that conversation, hey, we know you got this product, you're a valued customer, we've been working with you for a while, and we really value your honest opinion. Tell us what you think about our product. Like, is it good? Is it bad? What could we do better? And so get that product feedback from your existing customers, and that will allow you to make adjustments, make revisions, change things, tweak things, whatever needs to happen in order to make sure that you have an even better product. And that will make it so that when you do go to market to people outside of your current customer base, people that don't know you, you're gonna have a better product that works better, solves more people's problems, does, you know, it's just gonna be a better experience. Maybe the customer experience, the user interface, things like that are gonna be improved, and you'll be able to have more people that are going to champion your product. Because if your existing customers are really happy with it, then you also are gonna be getting great reviews, and they're going to tell people about it. And so you're going to be able to really capitalize on building this solid relationship on top of an already solid relationship with your customers about your products. 5th thing I want to talk about is blending your services and products together. So one of the smart things to do is when you launch a physical product or digital, but you launch a product paralleled with a service, is, you know, sometimes it's, it's really nice to have products that go with it. So when you blend, blend your products and services together, that means, well, we have this service and you need a product in order to, to make the most of that service. And maybe they were purchasing that product before, or maybe it didn't exist But people wish it did. And so when you do that, when you create that product, you should be connecting your services and your products together as much as you can because it's cross-selling. It's going to— especially if you make a product that makes your service better and vice versa, then you're going— you're adding even more benefit. You're going, okay, well, yeah, our service is great, you can do that, and if you pair with this product It's even better, and it isn't just a one plus one is two. It can be a lot more than that. It can it can be a multiplication factor of you know we're taking this and we're putting this, and it's actually greater than the sum. So you want to be aware of what are your services, what are your products, and how they mesh together. And part of your whole serving customers. Back in, back at the beginning of this video I talked about, is figuring out how a product could make your service better. And that could open doors, because if you make your services better, you're going to sell more services, you're going to help more people, and you're going to be able to have this product that's also, you know, improving your revenue. And if it makes people's lives better, it makes them even more successful with your service, then That's just going to elevate the experience that people have with your service and your company, and they're going to tell more people about how great you are and how successful they are with whatever you're offering. And so there's not really a losing, it's really a win-win for you and your customers, and pairing those together to create a better experience and Just facilitating that will, will make people like you more, will improve your brand, and of course product line will be successful as well if it's tied to a service and they help each other be more successful. So this is just a quick overview of, you know, the 5 steps to creating a product as a service company and some ways in order to do that to maximize Your existing customer base, what you've already built, because you definitely want to be— you don't want to be starting from scratch. If you already have customers, if you already have company, you shouldn't start from ground zero when you're launching a product. So hopefully this helps you take advantage of what resources you have and produce a better product to better serve your customers. Hey, thanks for watching. We really appreciate our viewers, and if you haven't subscribed yet, please do subscribe to our channel so you can get more great videos like this in your feed. And like the video. If you want to learn more about the Peterman Design Firm, please check us out on our website, petermanfirm.com. You'll find link and information in the description, and of course we're on all social media as well, so check us out there. All right, thank you.
