Hi There. My name is Ali and I write about the art of building digital products, transforming your business with AI, and outsourced IT services. Subscribe if this interest you. And if you run a B2B business, join my community.
Modern business advice gives you frameworks to help you reinvent your business. Unfortunately, these didn't work for me, and I don't think they work for Indian IT service providers. How do I know? I’ve read everything under the sun, implemented these frameworks, and had no results.
To be clear, I’ve spent a large part of my life in India providing IT services, but my guess is this holds for any geography and any line of business that has vintage and competition. Take the Indian IT services industry. It is nearly six decades old (TCS was founded in 1968), it is a $283 billion industry with over 3,200 member companies in Nasscom alone, and most of its founders are technical people who specialise in the supply side of the business. They don’t know how to generate demand, and they never had to.
Note: Read this piece if you haven’t. It explains how IT services companies can grow at VC speed.
Why now?
I don't want to state the obvious so let me try and answer this in another way. You’ll feel the need to reinvent right now if:
Revenue is shrinking. Gross revenue is going down.
Demand you don’t control has stopped arriving. Referrals have dried up and inbound has slowed.
Clients no longer think they’re buying craft. They still need you, just a different version of you. They know you’re using AI, so what they’re paying for is the output or the outcome, not the hours or the skill behind it.
You have nothing to sell twice. Everything so far has been bespoke, and you can’t see what to build next without starting from zero.
You want more. You have an insane drive and dream of exponential growth.
If you haven't guessed, the turning point is AI, in both directions. It removed the scaling limits services firms had, and it gave buyers more choice than they've ever had.
Reinvent. But how?
If you’re like me, you’ve approached this methodically. Founders of IT services companies are a hardworking bunch. They’ve bootstrapped, most have no debt on their books, and they’re profitable. Rare traits these days.
So you read books. You join business consortiums. You seek out mentors, ask founders who are a few steps ahead, and more often than not, hire a consultant. I’ve done all of it. The results were zero. Not “slow to show.” Zero. I have a shelf of books, a folder of decks, and the same business I started with.
I’ll go one step further. I’ve tried every framework you’ll find in the literature. A few, for your amusement:
Business Model Canvas. Nine boxes. Under “customer segments” I wrote “anyone who calls.”
Blue Ocean Strategy. Found an uncontested market. Nobody in it had a budget.
Three Horizons. Horizon 1 paid salaries. Horizon 2 was a deck. Horizon 3 was a feeling.
Jobs To Be Done. I know the job. I still can’t get the interview.
Several others with equally confident names.
You get the drift.
Why don’t they work?
They do. They just don’t work for the founder I’m describing. Most frameworks assume the different parts of the business already exist. They’re built for a company that can generate demand, can fulfil it, and simply needs to point that engine in a new direction.
Most bespoke IT services firms don’t have those parts. They have little to no demand generation muscle. (If demand and supply are fuzzy terms for you, read my previous article here.) If you don’t know how to sell, there’s no point spending time figuring out what to sell. You only find out whether something works by trying to sell it. If it doesn’t sell, you pivot and try something else.
For this founder, reinvention doesn't start with a new offering. It starts with demand.
Sell? But what, and how?
Ask any founder who has made it big in this industry and you’ll get the same advice. Go where the buyer is. Most often that means the United States of America or some other part of the developed world. Meet the buyer, show them your portfolio, and sell.
This advice made sense when the industry wasn’t crowded. Vendors were scarce, and a buyer would take an in-person meeting on the strength of a well-written cold email and a decent website.
That world is gone. Going to the market where your buyer is still makes sense. Going without a strategy doesn’t.
So if the buyer isn’t going to meet you, you need a sales strategy where they come to you. There is exactly one method that does this today, and that is CONTENT.
I’m not going to cover what content to create. That’s an article of its own. What I will say is this: people in their twenties, selling something as commoditised as LinkedIn posts, are running seven-figure agencies off nothing but their own content. Tommy Clark started posting as a college student in 2018 and now runs an agency doing over a million a year. Nicolas Cole built a ghostwriting shop with 80 clients on the books and several million in annual revenue, all under other people’s names. The list goes on.
Every Indian IT services founder I know solves problems far more complex than that. They just can’t generate demand for it. Here’s how you fix that.
The playbook
Go broad on content, narrow on the offer. Build a social media strategy around your expertise, but let it touch a wide spectrum of subjects. If you provide app development, you could post the same message on repeat (”if you have an app team, I can cut your cost by X”), or you could talk about hiring, product decisions, AI tooling, shipping speed, all of it tracing back to app development. Do the second.
Entertain and go viral. Fuck the cringe. People are on social media for themselves, not for you. Learn to be entertaining and learn the mechanics of going viral. Both are skills.
Qualify through the CTA. Broad content brings everyone in. The CTA sorts them. It is the most powerful qualification tool you will come across, so write it to attract exactly the person suited to your offer. If you sell engineering, the CTA is “Cut your engineering spend by 40% in 90 days,” followed by a form that asks for current team size and monthly spend.
Experiment with the CTA. If you offer a bouquet of services and don’t know what to sell, keep changing the CTA. An AI readiness audit. A legacy code review. A fixed-price MVP in six weeks. Whatever. You can only sell to people once they show interest, and the CTA is where interest shows.
Reverse engineer a productised service. Once a CTA converts, build the delivery mechanish behind it. A productised service is one where the process that produces the output matters more than the person running it. The audit follows the same checklist for every client. The MVP uses the same stack and the same six-week plan. Same input, same output, every time, whether it’s one-off, monthly, or a retainer.
Scale. A team of 30 can now serve 300 to 400 customers. Fixed price, fixed output, and no single client large enough to hurt you if they leave. Your rate per customer will be lower than what you charge for bespoke work today. Your revenue won’t be.
Where this leaves you
There’s a line I heard from a YouTuber that I keep coming back to: “Learn new skills and make more money.”
I wrote this piece because I think the Indian services entrepreneur is one of the hardest working people in business. They compete for talent with venture-funded companies, put their own sweat and blood into the work, and care deeply about their clients. So deeply that I’ve seen services firms retain the same client for years. That kind of retention is unheard of.
If only they learned how to sell in today’s age. That one skill takes the business to a different scale.
So it’s time. Time to learn new skills and stop hiding behind “client work is keeping me busy.” Stop pouring everything into the supply side of the equation.
Remember the parts of the business you avoid are the hardest ones, and they’re the ones that pay off when you do them well.
It's time... So crush it.