Jason Fried on "Making Money off your By-Products" from Carsonified on Vimeo.

From the world of webdesign and web applications comes an excellent reminder to any business.  When you create the product that your business is known for, you are typically creating waste, or a by-product that is usually undervalued.  37 Signals' CEO Jason Fried notes the following examples:

• The lumber industry used to consider sawdust and wood chips a simple waste product of milling lumber, but these products have been streamlined into other products:  landscaping mulch, fiberboard (MDF), Oriented Strand board (OSB), many other products.
• The oil industry originally drilled for crude to supply motor fuel and oils, but the number of consumer goods that contain petroleum byproducts now staggers the mind, from plastics to synthetic fibers and even food grade waxes like paraffin.

Fried discusses several examples of the products his company has created as by-products of their design work:

• Blogging about the process of building a company led to the writing of their first self-published book, Getting Real, and the running of several web-design conferences, that Fried notes has generated over $1,000,000 in revenue for the firm.  (Read the book free here.)
• Creating Basecamp, an internal project management system for the firm's web design work led to the realization that the system might be of value to other web designers, or other small businesses.
• The codebase that ran Basecamp was cleaned up and extended to become a more general web application framework, Ruby on Rails, a system released as an open source product that has generated extensive publicity and good will in the webdesign community.

If nothing else, your work process creates experience, and hopefully expertise, which if documented appropriately, can be sold for its value.  Write a book, but do so incrementally as your process develops.  Capture that experience as it happens and funnel it into a saleable product.

• In the process of designing homes for clients, Susan Susanka developed a set of theories and practices that she has spawned into a series of successful books:  The Not So Big House.
• Because We Can creates custom furnishings and interior pieces using Revit and a low-cost CNC robot they have named Frank.  They sell their by-products, the small scale mockups they create while prototyping their commissions:  Prototype Sale.
• At my current firm, I have created several code compliance spreadsheets for use within the company.  Why not make these available to clients, even other architects? Your firm' s CAD standards, software guides, quality control checklists, reference material, screencasts, any of these might find a valuable buyer.

What is your company's by-product?

How soon can you identify it, determine its value to the market and make it available?

More at carsonified.com Original Blog post at 37signals.com