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Building Products in the Agency World: Strategies and Insights

September 19, 2024 12:50 PM

Power Talk

🇬🇧 English

Bratysława 1

About

We believe agencies should explore building products alongside agency work. Being an agency gives us a unique advantage where we see the solutions clients and developers/designers are looking for and have the ability to build them. We've found it to be a fantastic way to diversify our revenue stream and build original IP, which helps during acquisition. In this talk, I want to show the pros and cons of building products, how to get product ideas, how to validate them, and 5 tips and tricks to help agencies start building useful products.

Talk by

Photo of Vimalan Vijayasekaran, Founder at ViDesigns | Webflow Enterprise Agency

Vimalan Vijayasekaran

Founder at ViDesigns | Webflow Enterprise Agency

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From the recording

Talk in brief

In this WaysConf 2024 talk, Vimalan Vijayasekaran, founder of Webflow enterprise agency ViDesigns, shares strategies for agencies to transition into product development. Drawing from his agency's experience launching five successful Webflow products—including Formly and Flow Play—Vijayasekaran explains how building niche, attribute-based tools can help agencies diversify their income, establish industry authority, and build valuable intellectual property. He outlines a practical path from creating free clonables to launching paid products, emphasizing the importance of solving internal agency pain points, designing for a developer-centric audience, and choosing the right pricing models. Vijayasekaran also highlights how productizing services can generate a steady stream of recurring revenue, smoothing out the traditional feast or famine agency cycle.

Key takeaways

01
Smooth the Feast or Famine Cycle
Agencies can stabilize their cash flow by building products that generate recurring revenue, which currently accounts for 40% of ViDesigns' total income.
Watch from 8:13
02
Productize Internal Agency Pain Points
The best product ideas come from solving repetitive problems your agency or clients face, such as building complex multi-step forms or custom video players.
Watch from 5:07
03
Leverage Lifetime Pricing Models
For products without high ongoing hosting costs, offering a high-value, one-time lifetime payment can convert more customers than a cheap monthly subscription.
Watch from 12:39
04
Build Authority to Attract Agency Clients
Creating successful tools for a platform like Webflow establishes your agency as an expert, prompting large clients to hire you for custom implementation and redesigns.
Watch from 10:02
05
Start with Simple Clonables
Instead of launching a massive, complex platform immediately, agencies should start by releasing free, simple reusable components to validate demand and build an audience.
Watch from 3:51

Video chapters

0:03Introduction to ViDesigns and Formly
Vimalan Vijayasekaran introduces himself, his Webflow agency ViDesigns, and their first major product, a multi-step form library called Formly.
2:28Solving Webflow Design Limits with Flow Play
Vijayasekaran explains how they developed Flow Play to give designers visual, code-free control over embedded video players.
3:20The Evolution from Clonables to Products
The speaker details his journey from creating free Webflow clonables to developing complex proto-products and eventually fully supported paid tools.
4:59Validating Ideas by Solving Real Problems
Learn how agencies can identify and validate product ideas by addressing their own repetitive needs or specific client requests.
7:43Why Agencies Should Build Products
Vijayasekaran discusses the financial and strategic benefits of product development, including recurring revenue, community building, and IP valuation.
11:57Six Lessons Learned in Product Development
The speaker shares crucial lessons on designing for your audience, pricing strategies, documentation, and the importance of marketing.
15:59Audience Q&A: Technical Implementation and Chrome Extensions
Vijayasekaran answers audience questions about the ViDesigns Chrome extension and the technical coding skills required to build attribute-based products.

Read edited transcript highlights

These concise notes were edited from automatic captions and checked against the talk structure. They are not a verbatim transcript.

The Genesis of Formly

ViDesigns launched Formly to address a major pain point in the Webflow ecosystem: the lack of design control over multi-step forms. Existing third-party solutions were either prohibitively expensive or visually inconsistent with high-end custom websites. By building an attribute-based library, ViDesigns allowed designers to maintain 100% control over their form layouts directly inside Webflow without writing custom code. Today, the product serves over 30,000 monthly users and processes millions of script loads.

Watch from 1:18

Transitioning from Freelancer to Product Creator

Vimalan Vijayasekaran's entry into product development was accidental. As a freelancer looking to stand out in a crowded market, he began sharing free, reusable Webflow components called clonables. Over time, these simple assets evolved into proto-products that required basic documentation and custom attributes. Eventually, this organic audience growth paved the way for launching fully supported, paid products backed by dedicated customer service and active user communities.

Watch from 3:20

Productizing Client Requests

Agencies can discover highly viable product ideas by paying attention to bespoke client requests. For example, a client wanted a way to store custom Webflow components in a sidebar to easily build landing pages. ViDesigns built a dedicated Chrome extension to solve this specific problem. Realizing other clients and developers faced the same challenge, they released it publicly. The extension now serves a thousand monthly users as a free utility.

Watch from 6:52

The Strategic Value of Intellectual Property

Beyond generating recurring revenue, building software products creates valuable intellectual property for an agency. Vijayasekaran notes that having proprietary tools significantly boosts an agency's valuation during acquisition talks. ViDesigns recently received an acquisition offer for a portion of their product portfolio, demonstrating how product development provides agencies with highly liquid exit opportunities that traditional service-based businesses lack.

Watch from 11:26

The Power of Lifetime Pricing

When structuring product pricing, agencies should consider offering a high-tier lifetime payment option. Vijayasekaran discovered that ViDesigns sold significantly more lifetime licenses than cheap monthly subscriptions. If a product does not incur high ongoing operational or hosting costs, a one-time fee removes the friction of recurring billing for users while providing the agency with immediate, upfront capital to reinvest.

Watch from 12:39

Building No-Code Products with Code

While the end-users of ViDesigns' products do not need any coding knowledge to implement them, building the tools themselves requires robust programming. Vijayasekaran explains that his agency collaborates with technical developers who write the underlying JavaScript. The agency's role is to bridge the gap by translating Webflow's structure to the developers, ensuring the final product remains simple and entirely attribute-based for the end designer.

Watch from 18:02

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