Eric Davis' book on long term contracts, recommends making long term contracts the top tier of your services pyramid. "What's a service pyramid?", I hear you say. Well, basically your pyramid comprises of three tiers of products and services. Your affordable products and services for the masses are on the bottom tier, products and services for specific markets go in the middle tier with your premium service at the top tier. It got me thinking about the tiers in my pyramid of services and products. Do I have services and products in each one?

The Top Tier

Currently the only premium service I offer in the top tier is myself as a Ruby on Rails developer. This fits in with Eric's idea that only your long term contracts should reside in here and that's currently what I have in the top tier. I have a couple of long term contracts for providing myself as a development resource to teams using Ruby on Rails.

The Middle Tier

There's nothing in my middle tier, but that's okay. My top tier provides me with nearly all of my income at the moment, but I shouldn't leave this tier empty for too long. As a freelancer I can't be dependent on any one stream of income. Each product or service should be generating some income for me, but at least for the moment I have a good premium service that I can depend on until I get other products and services in place.

The Bottom Tier

At the moment, the only product or service that I have in my bottom tier is Journalong, my free journaling service for Dropbox. I don't have any other products or services here. There's definitely room for another product in here. Something simple and easy to manage. As for services I'm not too sure. I don't currently provide any short term affordable services that others would want. Well at least I haven't been asked.

There's definitely room here for more products and services.

What Next?

What I have taken away from this exercise is that I need to start thinking about other products and services in the middle and bottom tiers of my pyramid. The gaping hole in the middle of my pyramid requires a product or service or even both. It shouldn't cost more than any micro products and services in the bottom tier but should still be cheaper than my rate as a freelance developer.

As for the bottom tier, I am putting more time into Journalong with the goal of turning it around into a profitable micro-product. I've got a few ideas for other products and services in this bottom tier, but I need to be selective about those. There's only room for so much that I can do, and cramming too much into the bottom tier can take my focus away from the middle and top tiers. I will need to keep prioritising things over the next few months if I'm to have something in each tier of my pyramid.