If you'd like to learn how to productize your digital marketing services (or any other digital services), I recently wrote a free book: http://www.productizebook.co -- Launching a course soon as well :)
1 - I am testing candidates. Giving them two paid tasks.
2 - I found time tracking tools to be inhumane, especially for creative work (like designers), but I do understand it can be useful for other job positions.
3 - We have 35+ staff, so while we don't have the most optimized productivity data, we have a good "benchmark" as we can compare employee performance.
4 - We give 2 warnings, with comments and opportunities to grow, then we terminate the employee. So far it hasn't happened yet.
Totally! Building a community has helped me to know what customers wanted.
How I did it:
- Started a small Facebook group, added friends
- Started connecting on FB with productized service entrepreneurs, added them to the group
- Mentioned the group in various places (Twitter/Indie Hackers/...)
Thank you for mentioning the ManyPixels gallery! We set it up as we wanted to provide different style of illustrations. It is also a great marketing tool for our main business.
I reached out individually to every single productized service entrepreneur featured in those interviews and made sure they go in-depth with their answers. Not sure how that qualifies as webspam?