How to Productize Your Agency's Most Repeated Work Into Templates and Guides That Sell

The most common thing I hear from agency owners who want to build product revenue is some version of "I don't know what to make." They think they need a big idea — a course, a methodology, a brand-new framework. Something ambitious and fully formed before they start.

That's not how any of the best-selling products I've seen get built. The best ones come from a mundane audit of work that's already been done.

Here's the method I use. It's not elegant. It works.

Step One: The Repeated Work Catalog

Block two hours and open up your project management tool, your email drafts, your client folders — wherever your deliverables live. You're going to build a list.

Go through the last 12 months of client work and flag every deliverable that meets this test: "I have done a version of this for more than one client."

Don't filter by quality or ambition. Just flag everything. Onboarding questionnaires. Reporting templates. Proposal decks. Scope-of-work documents. Audit frameworks. Strategic briefs. Content calendars. Brand voice guides. The checklist you send clients before a website launch. The email you write explaining how to read analytics.

Everything. Write it down.

When I did this for the first time, I cataloged 34 items. Thirty-four distinct things I had produced, more or less from scratch, for multiple different clients. Each one represented hours of work I had done more than once.

That list is your raw product inventory.

Step Two: The Non-Expert Filter

Now apply the filter that actually determines sellability.

For each item on your list, ask one question: "Could a non-client — someone who bought this as a standalone product — use this to accomplish the same goal, without me in the room?"

Some things fail this test immediately. A custom analytics report tied to one client's data can't be used by a stranger. A competitive audit for a specific niche is too narrow to generalize. Cross those off.

But you'll be surprised how many things pass. The structure of that analytics report — the questions it asks, the metrics it surfaces, the decisions it informs — that's generalizable. The framework of the competitive audit — the categories to evaluate, the scoring methodology, the output format — that's teachable.

Work through the list honestly. For each item that passes the filter, note who the buyer would be. In most cases it's one of three people:

1. A business owner who wants to do what you do themselves
2. A freelancer or junior person who wants to do it for their clients
3. An in-house team that needs the same output but doesn't have the expertise to build the system from scratch

Knowing who the buyer is shapes how you build the product. The same underlying framework might be packaged as a "DIY guide for founders" or a "professional toolkit for consultants" depending on which buyer you're targeting.

Step Three: Score for Effort vs. Return

You now have a filtered list of potential products with identified buyers. Not all of them are worth building first.

Score each item on two dimensions:

Buyer urgency: How often does someone need this? A proposal template for agency owners is needed constantly — agencies write proposals every week. A product launch strategy framework is needed a few times a year. Higher frequency generally means higher sales velocity.

Build effort: How long would it take to create a polished, standalone version of this? Something you've already built in template form might take four hours to productize. A complex framework that lives in your head might take 20 hours to document and design.

Build your first products from the high-urgency, low-effort quadrant. These are the items where you have the most to show for the least investment — and they give you early sales data before you commit time to bigger builds.

Step Four: The Translation Step

This is where most agency owners stumble. They take their internal SOP and paste it into a product document without doing the translation work, and the result is something that makes sense only to someone already inside their business.

The translation is about swapping internal variables for reader-facing instructions.

Your internal SOP says: "Pull the KPIs from the client master sheet tab labeled 'Monthly Targets.'"

Your product version says: "List your three primary business KPIs here — the numbers that, if they move, the whole strategy shifts. If you're not sure which three to choose, we cover that in Section 2."

Same instruction. One assumes context the reader doesn't have. One brings them with you.

Go through every step of whatever you're productizing and ask: "What does the reader need to know before they can act on this?" If the answer is anything you haven't already told them, add it.

This also means the right format isn't always a template. Sometimes the best product is a guide. Sometimes it's a template plus a guide. Sometimes it's a short video walkthrough alongside a template. The format should be whatever makes it easiest for someone unfamiliar with your process to get to the outcome.

A practical example: I had an SEO content brief template I'd used with 20+ clients. The template itself was a Google Doc with 12 fields. Without context, it was confusing. I added a six-page companion guide explaining what each field was for, what "good" looked like for each one, and how the brief connected to the production process downstream. That bundle sold 400+ copies. The template alone would have gotten returns and complaints.

For more on finding what to build and structuring your first products, the post on how agency owners build $10K/month in product revenue covers the mental model and time structure in more detail.

Step Five: Price Based on Outcome, Not Effort

Agency owners systematically underprice their products. I did it too.

The reason is that we're used to thinking about our own time. "This template took me four hours to build, so I should charge..." No. The buyer doesn't care how long it took you to build. They care what it's worth to them.

A proposal template that helps an agency owner win one more project per month is worth hundreds of dollars per month to them. Pricing it at $29 because "it's just a template" is leaving significant money on the table.

Price based on the outcome the product enables. Ask: what does the buyer get if this works? What's that worth to them? Then price somewhere in the range of 5–20% of that value.

For professional tools sold to agencies and freelancers, $49–$149 is often the right range. For DIY tools sold to business owners, $29–$79. For comprehensive systems or bundles, $99–$299.

Test higher than you're comfortable with. You can always come down. You almost never need to.

Where to Put It All

Once you've built the product, you need somewhere to sell it. I use MadeThis for my entire product catalog. Upload the file, write the product description, set the price, get a link. The simplicity matters when you're coming out of an agency where your tech stack is already overloaded.

If you want to understand how it compares to other options before deciding, the MadeThis vs. Gumroad comparison is a good starting point — both are popular for templates and guides, and there are real differences worth knowing about.

The Real Unlock

Here's what changes when you complete this process: you stop seeing client work as the only form your expertise can take.

Every engagement becomes a research opportunity. Every deliverable is a prototype. Every SOP you write is a product waiting to be translated. That shift in perspective doesn't slow down your agency work — it enriches it. You start building things more intentionally because you know they'll have a second life.

The audit I described takes about two hours the first time. Do it quarterly and you'll never run out of product ideas. More importantly, you'll be building from work you've already done, tested, and proven — which means your products come with something most creators never have on day one: real-world validation.

If you're ready to take one item from your catalog and get it live, MadeThis is where I'd start. You can have your first product for sale in an afternoon — and that first sale changes how you see everything.