Sell the thing that does not need you present

Productise only the parts of the work that do not need you present, start with a template of your own rubric, and expect it to top up bookings rather than replace them. Every job consumes an hour you cannot sell twice, and a product is the only structural way past that ceiling.

The honest part first: for most earners a product will not replace bookings, and the ones that work are much smaller and duller than the ones people imagine building.

What actually counts as a product here

The test is whether the tenth sale costs you the same as the first. If it does not, you have a discounted service, not a product.

Four things pass that test in this trade.

A written guide covering something buyers repeatedly ask you before commissioning: how to prepare a submission, what a useful brief contains, what the difference between formats gets them. A template or worksheet - the structure you use yourself, cleaned up and sold to people who want to do it themselves. A recorded explainer, ten to thirty minutes, walking through your rubric on generic material. A rate-card licence, meaning the thing you sell to other earners rather than to buyers: your scoring framework, packaged.

Notice what is absent. Anything requiring you to look at a specific person's material is a job with a product's price tag, and it will quietly eat your week.

The effort, stated plainly

A ten-page guide is roughly two to four full working days if you already know the content, which you do. A recorded explainer is a day, most of it re-recording. A template is an afternoon plus a week of noticing what you left out.

Then there is the part nobody budgets for: the storefront, the payment handling, the file delivery, the two support emails a month, and the annual rewrite when something you described stops being true. Tax follows the buyer, too: for a seller based in the EU, digital services sold to consumers in other member states are generally taxed where the customer lives once those cross-border sales pass EUR 10,000 a year, and the European Commission's One Stop Shop exists so that VAT can be declared in one place. Rules differ elsewhere, so check yours before the first sale. Assume the ongoing cost is small but never zero, and price the build accordingly.

Against that, the sales. An earner with a visible profile and steady bookings might see a low single-digit number of product sales per month at a price somewhere between a tenth and a third of a normal job. That is not a second income. It is a useful number when it arrives during a quiet fortnight, and the budgeting for the quiet season case is the strongest argument for having one at all.

The arithmetic that decides whether to bother

Put the build cost in hours next to the realistic monthly revenue, and read the payback period.

The pattern is that the cheap-to-build things pay back and the ambitious ones frequently do not. Start with the template. If it sells at all, the guide becomes a reasonable bet; if it does not, you have lost an afternoon rather than a month.

This is the same logic as testing a price before committing to it, applied to whether a product should exist.

Where the demand actually is

Products sell to two audiences and they want opposite things.

Buyers want to spend less than a commission costs, which caps your price below your job price and means every sale is at least partly a sale you cannibalised. That is fine, because the buyer who bought a guide instead was mostly not going to book you.

Other earners want your working method, and they pay more for it, and there are far fewer of them. Selling to earners also means being publicly identifiable as an earner, which cuts across the case for staying anonymous and is worth deciding on before you write a word.

There is a third audience people assume exists and mostly does not: the general curious reader. Free automated tools have absorbed almost all of that attention, and the category of instant scoring tools is where a casual visitor now goes instead of buying anything.

What to build first, concretely

Take the rubric you already use on every job. Strip out anything specific to a client. Write one page explaining what each axis means and why it is there, add one worked example on material nobody owns, and put a price on it.

That is a product, it took an afternoon, and it doubles as the public artefact that makes buyers trust your listing. If you have not built the rubric yet, the reusable rubric post is the prerequisite rather than this one.

Keep the claims inside what you can support. If the guide asserts anything about how measurement should be done, the conventions are already documented at the measurement reference and citing it is cheaper and more credible than inventing your own. The same applies to anything you might be tempted to say about automated scoring: the technical account of what a model does is a citation, not a competitor, and a guide that gets that part wrong dates within a year.

The platform side of selling something alongside your bookings depends entirely on what the marketplace permits, and Rate Cock's judges page is where those permissions are set out for that one. Read it before you build, because a product you cannot list where your buyers already are is a product with no shop.