Background

2 years ago I graduated from university. 

Back then I used to run an online letting agency for international students in between my lectures.

My first stint at entrepreneurship. The business was simple: Cold calls landlords, take photos of their properties, put them on a Wordpress website, advertise the properties to the students and hand over the keys  when they arrived in town.

After not being able to grow the business and with revenues declining, I decided to exit the business and took a year off to travel and explore Africa. I did an internship there and travelled a bit around nearby countries and eventually flew to Asia.

Not having a job at that time I decided to launch a small productized service offering unlimited design work for a fixed fee per month

I bootstrapped it to $40,000 in MRR and decided to write to write a long post to explain how everything came along so sit back, relax and take a ☕ of coffee, this is big brain dump of everything that happened from the start until today!

Step 1) Finding your value proposition 

The top priority of a founder of any business is to create value. 

Entrepreneurship is really just about that: Understanding market inefficiencies and correcting them. You get paid to make markets more efficient.

Being a Indie Hacker / Solo founder is great because markets change all the time, and one industry can have many new problems. Incumbents are usually too slow at realising that and that's where you have an advantage at being small and fast.

Finding the right problem to work on > Having the perfect solution 

Back when I was running my real estate company I would often hire design services.

I would look online for designers, gave them 50% in advance, and would struggle to write what I needed to get done. A bad experience both for the designer and I.

I usually fix problems that really bother me and that I would be passionate to work on. It makes me motivated to work and I can see the value in fixing them.

That's one of the key things I learned when I was in law school: 

Finding the right problem to work on is more important than finding the solution. Once you get to know the core pain points, you'll understand how you can add value to fix these and find a solution for that.

Here was my problem-solving framework for setting up my project:

Lack of trust: Put a lot of testimonials on the website and a 10 days, 100% money back guarantee.

Poor communication: Empower clients and designers to communicate better via standardised offers and standardised briefs.

Expensive: Source designers in Asia to offer more affordable prices.

After laying out the key problems finding a solution was rather simple: 

Let's just create an unlimited design service, with a 100% money back guarantee, and a platform where it is a great experience to submit a brief.

Getting the supply

After having my rough value proposition done, I needed to find designers, not being one myself.

I contacted two designers I had on my Skype list for a while and asked them the following:

Can I put your portfolio items on my website? In exchange I will find clients for you and pay you a fixed fee per month. You will have to work on at least 5-6 requests per week.

They accepted and we started working.

I also did a napkin calculation of the business model which was like this:

Step 2) Validating the demand 

The problem when starting a business is that you can have many biases. Use mental models and recognises which biases you may have as as entrepreneur so you do not fall into mental traps...

... But at the same time, it is great to keep a little bit of hope as it helps you pushes forward. The realist person is the room though, is the market. So you have to put your product in front of that person.

A. Starting a MVP

I purchased a $10 CSS/HTML template and launched a quick MVP which basically comprised the following items:

The portfolio pieces of designers.

The price and a payment button 

A FAQ page

A chat.

B. Putting that MVP in front of potential customers

Once the site was up I naturally tried to get people to visit it.

My thought process was the following:  "Who would be the most likely to be interested by those services?" ... "And how do I advertise it without spamming?"

I remembered I was a member of various entrepreneur groups on Facebook and decided that it would not hurt to ask for feedback. Here is what I posted:

It worked.

A few people purchased and I repeated it on about 10 other groups. That's how we got our first customers.

Being hunted on ProductHunt

Then things got a little bit more ugly. 

We got hunted on PH.

At that time our MRR was only a few thousand dollars per month and I was managing the projects all by myself, working remotely with the designers.

That's what happened after:

 In total we got 10,000 euros in sales that week, and way too many customers we could handle.

But... We slowly recovered. 

We tried new project management solutions, we set up a better system for email requests and learned from our mistakes.

Step 3) Attracting customers and growing revenues 

After the initial surge of customers that ProductHunt gave us the next question was:

 How do we keep on acquiring customers to grow our business?" and a second question was : Who are the right customers for us?

A) Understanding our target market

A lot of our initial customers were solo founders or entrepreneurs, which is great as we help them as we are relatively low priced but they churn after they get their initial design work done. Selling to established businesses on the other hand require more time but is more valuable over the long term.

Sometimes the customers who are the easiest to sell to are not your best customers. 

B) Using different tactics 

When launching a tactic I usually analyse what is high impact and low effort.

I agree, this is not a perfect science but over time once you get more and more customers and segment them, you can plan better strategies.  

But at the beginning: Just throw spaghettis at the wall and hustle your way in.


Here are a few tactics we used to find customers:

1. Creating valuable and entertaining content

Pro: Helps with SEO and to connect with your audience

Con: Takes a long time

What we did: We crafted behind the scenes blog posts that entrepreneurs loved. They used our learnings for their business and some purchased our services after.

2. Launch offers

Pro: Relatively easy to set up 

Con: Short lived

What we did: Every time we would launch a new subscription (or limited subscription) we would discount it and add a quantity and time limit on it. It created a fear of missing out! You can also use this strategy to kickstart your startup or even pre-sell your products / services.

Here is an example:

Advertising a new offer 

3. Warning people we would raise prices for new customers

Pro: Helps you test your pricing

Con: None?

What we did: One day going to bed I told my co-founder: "We need to raise our prices". 

He told me: 

Yes, but let's not raise immediately. Let's tell everyone we'll raise them next week and see if more people buy at the current price points.

5 hours after the announcement we had made 1000 euros in sales!

We ended the day with close to 10000 dollars in sales. One of our best day since we launched.

4. Build an email list 

Pro: Very effective if people see value in your emails

Con: Takes time to build and you have to maintain the quality

What we did: Having an email list is the real estate of the Internet. It is like having your own mini monopoly. It is something you can own and that can be extremely valuable. We use our email list to communicate with our customers (and future customers) about updates, behind the scenes, etc.

We are quite simple in our communication. We provide real value. That's all.

An example of email we send to our mailing list. We use Mailshake to send our emails.

Step 4) Building a team, opening an office 

During the first month I worked solely remotely with the whole team via Skype. After one month I booked a one way flight to Indonesia.

My goal of going to Indonesia was mostly to understand the motivation of our designers better: They found the idea of having recurring income great and they also loved the fact that they were being paid twice a week (some of them had to chase their clients for their payment). 

Understanding motivations is key in setting up a team, because if the right incentives are in place, you can go much faster.

1) Opening an office.

Then we decided to open an office.

The problem with working remotely with designers is that it was incredibly hard to set up new processes or control quality so we decided to centralise everything to train people faster and to share our vision more efficiently.

Our current team: Most of our team worked previously at large startups: Uber, Go-Jek, Grab, Line, Lazada.  

And we grew from there. Adding one designer per one designer.

After two months we hired 3 project managers to help deal with clients. We grew steadily the number of staff, making sure we had enough money in the bank and enough subscription revenue to pay them in the future.

I understand, this is against startup mantra of growing fast but in the case of service growing fast can absolutely kill you: 

You need to have clearly defined service offerings and clear blueprints before being able to scale. Hiring immediately a huge team creates organisational challenges where your focus should be on talking to customers and creating very good SOPs. 

2) Training the team, building standard operating procedures (SOPs), and empowering them

One of the first hires I made was a local production manager to help me understand the culture better. She told me once:

Robin, you are like an Englishman in Paris.

She was right, I could not lead effectively in Asia because I could not connect (I did not understand the culture yet). I learned a little bit of the local language and focused more on leading than directly managing projects on a day to day basis.

I solved this issue mostly by being as transparent as I could and becoming friends with everyone in the office. Once my employees knew my personality, it became easier for them to work with me as they understood me and my reasoning. 

One of the way we connect: Each morning, our manager gathers everyone and asks a question unrelated to work. Last time she asked everyone "What is your biggest fear?" a great way to connect the team and foster team work!

Now that we had a good team, knowing each other and working well together the next challenge was the following : Set up standard operating procedures, or build the machine.

I remember a book I read my Michael E. Gerber (that I used to start my first business): 

Work on the business and not in the business

The principle is simple: You have to start building a machine so that the business can operate without you. We are at this stage for Manypixels and we're building a ton of standard operating procedures so that we can deliver very efficiently. We document everything on Google Suite and have folders for each team. I will write more on this later!

Each team has its own folder on the drive

Step 5) The future: Becoming more like a "Shop" for services

The future for us will be focused on productizing more our services. We want to make ordering design services as easy as it is to order a product on Amazon.

We also want to continue training  designers and offering them higher economic opportunities (we pay them more than twice the average local graphic designer salary). We are also planning to open a Pixel Campus where we're going to train designers and offer free UI/UX workshops and business English courses.


Conclusion

1. Providing value is the foundation of business.

2. Finding a good problem to work on is more important than finding a solution.

3. As a service business we focused a lot on empowering our team (via connecting them) and then only setting up SOPs.