4 Types of Small Internet Businesses

Welcome to The Workflow!

Welcome back to another edition of The Workflow, where we explore the latest in the world of indie work and technology. In today’s edition, we’re examining four types of small Internet businesses you can create; the pros, cons, and leverage that come with each model; and examples of entrepreneurs and businesses from each category. We’ll also explore one of my new favorite workflows—turning voice notes into structured content. Let’s dive in!

Today’s Topics

• 4 types of small Internet businesses

• Turn voice notes into structured content

• Helpful workflow tools

• Workflow automation news

• Workflow Tweet of the week

Read time: 8 minutes

4 types of small Internet businesses

Are you interested in starting an Internet business, but not excited about taking on venture capital, scaling to the moon, or creating shareholder value at all costs? If so, these four types of small Internet businesses might be interesting models for you to explore.

Indie Consulting

Indie consulting takes the classic management consulting model and niches it down into a specialized knowledge area or process deployed by a single consultant or small team. This model is characterized by a high degree of autonomy, allowing you to pick and choose projects based on personal interest, often prioritizing flexibility and creative freedom over scaling or building large teams. Indie consultants tend to focus on niche expertise or specialized knowledge, delivering insights without the overhead and bureaucracy of larger organizations.

✅ Pros: Intellectually stimulating; flexibility; freedom

❌ Cons: Unpredictable revenue; scaling challenges

Leverage: Specialized knowledge; high hourly and/or project rate

Examples: Venkatesh Rao, Jason Liu

Productized Services

Productized services are typically contractor services (design, copywriting, SEO, etc.) that are packaged into predefined offerings and typically monetized via a monthly retainer. This model eliminates the complexities of traditional freelancing/agency engagements, such as negotiating prices and project scopes individually. This model enables faster turnaround times and consistent quality, making it easier for businesses to outsource tasks. Clients benefit from transparent pricing and clear deliverables, while service providers can optimize their workflows and focus on delivering value with limited overhead.

✅ Pros: Predictable recurring revenue; high demand for services

❌ Cons: Constant fulfillment requirements; monotonous work; scaling challenges

Leverage: Hard skills; delivery speed arbitrage; systems and processes

Examples: Design Joy, Baked Design, Story Arb

Info Products

Info product providers specialize in creating and selling digital educational content—such as online courses, e-books, and guides—that share their expertise with a broad audience. By packaging insights into scalable digital products, these businesses can reach a wide audience without the limitations of one-on-one consulting or coaching. This model enables relative passive income generation for the creator while providing affordable, high-quality knowledge to consumers looking to learn and grow in specific areas.

✅ Pros: Relatively passive revenue; asynchronous work; highly scalable

❌ Cons: Requires audience or marketing; upfront investment with unpredictable payoff

Leverage: Audience

Examples: Justin Welsh, Ben’s Bites

Indie SaaS

Indie SaaS is independently created software products typically built by solo entrepreneurs or small teams. These developers focus on launching scalable, web-based solutions that cater to specific niches or address particular problems without relying on external funding. Utilizing lean startup principles, these folks rapidly develop minimum viable products (MVPs), release them to the market, and iteratively improve based on user feedback.

✅ Pros: Recurring revenue; huge leverage; highly scalable

❌ Cons: Customer support; technical overhead; requires audience or marketing

Leverage: Code

Examples: levelsio, Marc Louvion, John Rush

By no means is this an exhaustive list of all the types of small Internet businesses. If you think I missed one, respond to this email or fill out one of our surveys below and let me know! I’d love to cover it in a future edition.

Turn voice notes into structured content

This week’s workflow recipe is one I’ve been using quite a bit for creating content. I write tutorials for Ben’s Bites, and to speed up my tutorial writing process, I’ve been using a three-step process with ChatGPT and Claude to go from a voice note to a written tutorial.

Steps to follow:

• Dictate content to ChatGPT: Using the ChatGPT app on my phone, I’ll click the voice-to-text button and start with the phrase: “Turn this text into a transcript with timestamps.” I’ll then proceed to talk out the content I want to eventually write into a structured post.

• Copy ChatGPT transcript into Claude: ChatGPT will output a perfect transcript; however, it’s not as great of a writer as Claude. So I’ll take the transcript and drop it into a custom Claude Project I’ve trained on my previous tutorials and ask it to write a tutorial based on the transcript.
  

• Edit the tutorial content manually: No offense to Claude, but even with providing many examples of my past writing, it still doesn’t nail my voice, tone, structure, and style. So I’ll always finish the process by manually editing and improving the writing.

This voice-first writing process with AI tools is a new workflow paradigm for me, and I plan to keep expanding my use cases for it across many different tasks. It’s a big reason why I see AI as a viable on-ramp for AR-enabled work, as I’ve written previously. I’m curious if any of you are using voice-first workflows for your tasks — if you are, reply to this email and let me know!

Helpful workflow tools

Frase - Empowers content creators to go from keyword to well-researched, SEO-optimized articles faster and better.

Commenter AI - Your AI-powered LinkedIn commenting adviser. Save hours every week and draft your comments with a click.

v0 by Vercel - Generate UI, ask questions, debug, execute code, and much more with natural language prompts.

Workflow automation news

Learning to Reason with LLMs With the launch of its newest o1 models, OpenAI is enhancing the reasoning abilities of its LLMs by training them on diverse tasks and using techniques like chain-of-thought prompting to have it “think” before it answers. Early results show its improving effectiveness in complex problem-solving and decision-making.

Klarna is replacing SaaS with AI The fintech firm Klarna is severing its relationships with two of the biggest enterprise software providers—Salesforce and Workday—in favor of automating its services with AI. And the company says it could potentially eliminate more.

Rebuild Clay in Zapier Sales outreach just got easier (and more affordable). Learn how to rebuild Clay in Zapier to generate lead lists from LinkedIn, automate email finding and verification, enrich leads, draft AI emails, get recent news, and more.

Tweet of the week

Ways To Connect

1. Ask a Workflow Question: Submit a workflow question, and I’ll answer it in a future edition or respond to you directly.

2. Get Featured: Are you automating personal or business workflows? If so, I’d love to feature you in The Workflow! Reach out with your workflow, automation tip, or related content.

3. Book a 1:1 Call: Grab time with me to discuss all things automation, whether specific automations for your business, AI and no-code tool recommendations, or whatever you’re looking for help with.

4. Work With My Agency: Do you work at an AI, no-code, or SaaS startup? Are you looking to better educate your users? Find out how Onboard can help put your user education on auto-pilot.

Thanks for reading!

Garrett from The Workflow

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