Competitive usability evaluations: What if I've already done the work?

Question

As a freelance UX designer/consultant with a particular primary industry, I'm thinking of offering a service for usability evaluations of a prospect's site and their competitor's site. Has anyone here offered that service - currently or in the past? How do you handle this?

Since I'm targeting just one industry, I expect that after I offer this service a few times, multiple customers may ask me for usability evaluations of the same competitor. Have you encountered this situation before? Is it better to build up a library of competitive usability evaluation results and sell them as products to clients (possibly at a lower price than it took to originally do the work) or to do the work fresh every time? Or is there a different strategy that usability consultants use in doing this?

Answer 1

You can't sell to B what A paid for

If you work as a freelance under a contract, the contract would normally spell that the rights on any work you do, or any intellectual property you create will be assigned to your client (making your client the owner of the work). Even if there isn't a contract, by the virtue of commission your client will have legal grounds to claim the usability report as theirs. Thus, you could get yourself into troubles if your plan is to do paid work for one client and then sell it to another.

You can sell to A and B what neither has paid for

What you can do, as you suggested, is undertake the evaluation work on a non-commissioned basis (not working for a client), and then sell the reports, just like with market research papers.