When I landed in Asia to start my digital nomad journey I had truly no idea what I wanted to do.
Before, I was running, along with my studies, a successful online letting agency in the Netherlands (roughly making €250k/year in revenue) but since laws changed, the business got far less revenue & I sold part of my shares in 2016.
In 2017, I went to work at a ridesharing company in Uganda and also had a brief internship at the Belgian embassy.
However, I really felt the urge to make something new. It was super frustrating to work for someone else after I had been working for my own company. My only motivation to work for someone else was to learn. 😅
I decided to quit my internship, and truly had no idea what I wanted to do. 😝 I was 25 and thought:
"OMG, I do not have any good ideas, what am I going to do? My savings are decreasing? Should I get a job? Should I go back to university to do a MBA and be better at business?"
I decided to leave Africa, book a one-way flight ticket to Taiwan, and thought I would get inspired and start something online there.
How I came up with the idea
While running my online letting agency I always needed on-demand graphic designers to design banners, posters, or even do long-term full scale projects such as redesigning a landing page. I was always scouting Dribbble (or even Upwork at times) but mostly all I got was: unreliable designers, high expenses, and results that weren't guaranteed.
When I was at my coworking space I overheard some guys running a startup who were tired of looking for designers and also saw many post-its with "Looking for a freelance UI/UX designer". I thought: OK let's try to fix that 😃
Step 1: Building the MVP
I literally opened my laptop, went on Themeforest, bought the "Stack" theme, and "coded" the site in 5 hours. I say "coded" because I actually used the drag and drop function of Stack & edited just some bits of code via SublimeText.
I am not technical. I just know a little bit of HMTL/CSS and PHP.
That's all. You do not need more to build your MVP, seriously. If you have a great idea, just create a simple HTML page to validate demand. There are a lot of online services that help you do that (starting with Wordpress, but also carrd.co is quite a good one and allows you to charge your users). I know, I know, it will hurt because you will feel like a loser of trying to promote a site that looks ugly, but really, make it a point not to seek perfection.
I looked at what I needed for my MVP to deliver the highest possible value with as little possible of work (and code): A website where they can see the work we did, a few questions/answsers, a chat to answer more questions (I would also even go on Whatsapp with potential customers), and of course, a payment system (I used Paywhirl for that, so that I would not have to code a payment page). That's all! OK. Let's do it 😃
Wait. This is basic stuff I already know, Robin: Product/Market fit and MVP. How can I come up with an idea and be successful?
I have always been a fast follower (creating businesses based on proven ideas) and I like to copy and remix existing businesses.
When I started my letting agency in the Netherlands there were 35 agencies in a town of 120k people. All agencies were doing everything. One of them was even doing the following: Selling bikes + organising events + selling insurances + selling forks and plates + renting homes for students + renting homes for expats. I just thought: "OK, I'll do a letting agency just for international students". In addition I thought: "I will build a group for international students in order to gather demand, other agencies do not do that".
A good way to get ideas and remix pieces is to be insanely curious about stuff, and be a bit more unique. Soon, you'll start putting bits and pieces together and have something quite unique.
This processs has actually a name: It's called creative destruction (that's how economist Schumpeter called it). As an entrepreneur you shift resources from an area of lower productivity to an area of higher productivity and get profits for yourself.
In my case, sure I could have created another freelane design business but instead I sought to shift resources from a lower area of productivity (my designer friends in Asia not having a lot of work despite being excellent) to an area of higher productivity (suggest those services to a niche in the market who need constant design help which was undeserved). By identifying which resources are at stake in a system and where you can shift them to influence the outcome it results in created value.
Step 2: After shipping, talk to customers.
Once you put online your product, the idea is to gather demand for it. You have a few ways to do that: direct sales, content marketing, referrals, Facebook ads, affiliate sales, ...
Then I would advocate to talk to customers as much as possible, they often have the answers.
For us what worked particularly well was to reach founders on niche Facebook groups if they would be interested in our product. Secondly, directly reaching out startups on Angel List was quite successful too. We grew to $10k MRR solely by actually reaching out directly on founders on Facebook and Angel list.
Takeaways
- Always think about your value proposition. It is good to talk to users to get it right, but even better is to actually launch something and put it in front of them with a buy button.
- As regard to finding an idea to work on, look at what works, and try to see which components you can move and how you can create something unique.
- More on that: Try to find problems you may have and try to be curious.
- Just ship!
If you want to follow me on Twitter: @Vinrob and my business is called ManyPixels
$10k in 2 months is impressive, do you spend any money on ads during the launch? Where's the traffic came from?
Hey Eldy! No money spent during the launch. For two reasons: We did not know if we had a product / market fit. Spending money on ads would have been like a shot in the dark at this stage.
Instead, we reached out on founders on SaaS groups on Facebook. These were our primary customers. I basically made a post on a few groups that said: "Hey guys! I lanched this. Do you like it? Yes? No? Why not?". There was some discussion and some founders sent me private messages wanting to get a on Whatsapp call. I then talked to them for 5 to 15 min on Whatsapp and stressed that we had a 10 days, 100% money back guarantee and that we would do awesome work.
Surprisingly, most of them converted. We had a few refunds in December but mostly happy customers :-) We are now working on scaling / improving our service delivery by creating service blueprints.
This comment was deleted 4 years ago.
Interested in this also
This is so inspiring Robin.
I am curious how you got your first paying customers? You reached them on Facebook and AngelList, but what did you pitch them when you had 0 portfolio to show them?
Hey supersarkar! Thanks :-)
We already had a portfolio from our designers.
Hi Robin, great story. You mentioned that you had designer friends who wanted more/better work, and that became your initial pool of designers. How have you found, evaluated and hired designers then on to grow the business?
Interesting story! One question: How do you deal with clients who request "too much"? Do you fire them or just work on their stuff very slowly?
Thanks for sharing. Impressive!
BTW, your website is not working without the www part when you don't use https. http://manypixels.co/ gives an 403 error.
Fixing this today! Thanks for the heads up!
nice story, Robin. Thanks for sharing!
Great read, thanks. As for your business, I don't understand how it can be so cheap. If a business gets a designer to do its UI it could mean months of full time work, yet they'd be paying them less than $300/month?
Hello Duarte!
Short answer: Each designer deals with a few clients per month.
Our clients can only request one task at a time. We have an incredibly fast turnaround (& high quality) but the work is limited in the sense that it is max one task at a time. In general in a month you can get a lot of work done though (many landing pages, business cards, brochures, Facebook ads, illustrations) so clients get a lot for the price they pay. We work with the best designers & work is unique too.
We did this by streamlining as much our processes as possible (understanding client needs, making hyper detailed briefs to pinpoint those needs being the major step) then actually the other key is that I am in Asia (where our designers are located) and understand the culture.
We pay designers a fair share (they earn way more than they would on their own on average) & they have a long-term, fixed income.
Thanks for the explanation. It still seems strange to me that you're charging $300/month and not $3000/month but I guess it's not quite the same thing as having a dedicated designer? I presume no designer works full time for one client, rather say 10 different ones, doing smaller projects and your profit comes from the time you're charging the client but they're not asking for something. That's a very smart business model but I'm surprised your clients don't demand loads of work from your designers.
This comment was deleted 4 years ago.
This is inspiring Robin. Keep it up. I look forward to following the growth of ManyPixels
Thanks :) Planning to kickstart a blog soon where I'll be writing all of our progress and also building in public. I will also post here frequently.
Congrats and keep it up!
Just an FYI that confused me at first: renting is also know as “letting” in other parts of the world, so letting agents are similar to real estate agents.
Yes, same :) Letting for UK and renting for US I believe ^^