$20K/Month From a Subscription-Based Design Service

Amin Memon is the founder of Draftss, a productised design and development service.

Per a recent interview, they’re apparently earning $20K/month in revenue 🤑

Amin says…

I had been running my own design agency for some time, but I felt that the traditional model was outdated and there was an opportunity to innovate.

🧠 His thinking behind doing subscription-based design service…

The average cost to hire a designer in the US is around $60,000 a year. That’s when I decided to create Draftss and revolutionize the agency model. 

We developed a subscription-based model that allowed customers to request unlimited graphic design tasks [one-task at a time] and get top-quality designs from our highly rated-team.

Looks like they launched around April 2018, see the first version of their website here 👈

To get traction…

Our strategy for achieving our first 50 customers was to leverage the power of community marketing. We connected with niche communities such as Indie Hackers, Facebook Groups, and Reddit, and used our side projects to launch product launches.

And…

Within the first week of our launch we had crossed $3.2k MRR. Since then there is no looking back as we are increasing the number of customers over time.

🔑 They key to Amin’s success…

For building a great start-up, you must focus on the end result of the product which solves the customers problem and provide immense value…

For example there are tons of other companies that try to copy our model & build their own design subscription model as a service. But they eventually failed because they weren’t able to obtain great designs & provide them at a fraction of the cost, with a fast turnaround time.

Sounds to me like Amin’s great at finding, hiring and managing talent.

And that talent provides excellent service for customers 😍

If you’ve got a similar skillset to Amin, or you’d like to develop those skills, then an agency business could be a good fit for you.

Just note that the margins on such a business aren’t usually very high. Amin doesn’t mention how much of their $20k monthly revenue is profit, but I suspect it’s likely less than 30% 😕

Hiring talent ain’t cheap.