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Positioning

What changes when you own the IP

Recording with Vivek Shah of Capermint Technologies about game development surfaced a question every Indian services firm eventually faces: keep selling hours, or build something you own?

Written after

Episode 09 — Vivek Shah, Capermint Technologies

This article is my own analysis of the subject, not a transcript.Listen to the conversation →

In this article
  1. Hours are a safe, capped business
  2. Product is a different sport
  3. The half-way position most firms end up in
  4. What it changes about positioning

Hours are a safe, capped business

Selling development hours is predictable, cash-generative, and permanently capped. Revenue is a function of headcount, margins compress as competitors appear, and the day you stop selling is the day revenue stops.

A services firm sells time. A product firm sells the same thing twice.

Product is a different sport

It is not a services business with a product bolted on. The cash-flow shape inverts — you spend for a long time before anyone pays — and the marketing job changes completely, from winning a client to finding a market.

The half-way position most firms end up in

Building a product with the services team, in the gaps between client work. It almost never ships, because client work always wins the argument for attention, and the product is the thing with no deadline.

If you are going to do it, ring-fence the people and accept the services revenue you lose. The firms I have watched succeed at this treated it as a separate business from day one.

What it changes about positioning

Owning IP gives you something to be known for that is not a technology list. That is worth more than the product revenue in the early years, because it is the first genuinely defensible thing most services firms have ever had to say.

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Hear it from someone who lived it

Vivek Shah of Capermint Technologies on episode 09.Listen →

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