$12k/month part-time design agency

Carsten Pleiser is the founder of Design Buffs, “a productized service to hire pre-vetted designers.”

Clients pay Carsten $849 to $1499 per month for 2-4 hours per day of design services. The work is handled by Carsten’s dedicated team of creatives 👩‍🎨

So it’s basically an agency setup – though Carsten prefers not to call it that – which is a Level 3 online business according to my framework.

A few notes from Carsten’s recent interview on Indie Hackers…

• Started the business just over 2 years ago
• Solo founder working on it part-time
• Landed first clients “through cold emailing and pitching on LinkedIn”
• This SEO-optimized article brings them “loads of new leads each month”
• Started out charging $350/month and gradually raised prices

Regarding that last point, Carsten writes…

The more we niched down, the more successful and focused we became. The more focused we became, the more we could charge.