I love how bullish you are on fixing the bottlenecks caused by design subjectivity. I find myself thinking the same way.
As a previous freelancer who did both design and development, I have two questions:
In such a service-oriented business, how do you protect your business against unreasonable demands from clients?
Are there ever misunderstandings where clients think they're going to get the code for a working website? This has happened to a few designer friends in the past. Maybe it's just my location, but it seems like most businesses are looking for a complete design + development package. I'm just curious if you've ever had to deal with fallout from this.
Thanks!
1
Hey Mark,
Two important things will enable us (I think), to scale and maintain the service (quality and speed) that we want while still enabling us to make money on the long term: a. Avoiding scope creep b. Having clear production processes. If we make projects that are well defined, within our abilities and have clear way to undertake them we can be really fast and complete 20-40 tasks a month for clients.
Now as regard to unlimited, the client can only request one task at a time. They can submit as many tasks as they want but they will be scheduled after if a job is in process. Realistically they can get a lot done. Right now the fastest we can deliver a task is about 12 hours but is actually more due to to our PM's being a little bit late in dispatching tasks. That's by top priority for March: being able to deliver way faster, and still maintain the quality (we had quite a lot of delays due to not having right PM's in place / no project management tool but this is being fixed)
Yes it happens a lot actually. We do mention in our FAQ the formats we support (and HTML/CSS isn't listed) but we still get clients who tell us : But when do you provide the HTML? We will list integration partners hopefully later on to do various tasks.
2
Thanks for the reply. ManyPixels is very impressive, I wish you good luck in the future!
5
That's nice, I'm happy for your achievements. I'm curious, how do you pay your designers? Monthly salary? Per project? Also, where do you live now?
4
I found out about ManyPixels in the Indie Hacker Forum a while ago so I wanted to share my experience here for others. Sadly, I've experienced their turnaround time being much longer than what their website says. My first design request was fine, but my second one took 2 weeks. I expect some delays, but two weeks is significantly longer than 3 days. Their lack of communication and overall process is pretty bad. On the positive side their designs are actually pretty good for the money and the convenience of being able to send off design requests whenever I need to for a fixed cost is nice.
1
Hey! Right now the biggest issues we have are the following (by critical importance):
Lack of communication (I am planning to do a blog post + email to all of our customers this weekend to fix this)
PM's not dispatching tasks on time (Right now this is still not fixed but will be as of next week with a daily report where they have to dispatch the tasks twice a day. Our Head of Production did a root cause analysis and we are fixing each issue one by one -- See here: https://imgur.com/a/a4e4O)
Designers not having the right processes to undertake the tasks / understand briefs (we are building a bank of inspiration designs and clear guidelines and instructions on when a project will be considered as 'successful' to maintain quality at scale)
Some designers not taking Manypixels' work as priority and rather focusing on their freelance work (I will meet tonight half of the team in person and have an open discussion on how to build incentives together -- while the whole team is pretty committed, we sometimes ask too much. We are planning to create a "Pro" status for designers who constantly get tasks on time, achieve a lot of tasks, and achieve great customer satisfaction. We are also planning to do more onboarding / training for them)
Email me at robin@manypixels.co and I will add you extra weeks as a compensation.
1
This comment was deleted 7 months ago.
1
Hey Octoclam, by the way can you still give me your ID / email (feel free to send it to robin@manypixels.co) -- I didn't get an answer from you on the other thread and would still really like to follow up on your progress :)
1
This comment was deleted 7 months ago.
1
I have given you my personal email address in the past thread you made (robin@manypixels.co) and cannot find your emails. I Can you care to give me your ID / username (you can send an email to my personal email address for this)? I sincerely want to help and I understand it's not your fault.
0
This comment was deleted 7 months ago.
1
But can you forward the original email you sent to robin@manypixels.co ? I have reviewed this weekend all emails (sent to robin@manypixels.co and info@manypixels.co and all other support emails) and they have all been answered. I can't find your username in our database of customers (octoclam) and need your email address if you have used another username. Our email address work and we reply to all emails within 24 hours. Keep me posted :)
4
Holy shitballs! $10k to $50k in one month? Nicely done man. I can see ManyPixels making it to $100M biz if you solve the subjectivity issue.
I was about to take out my credit card and try you guys out. Tried DesignPickle before and it wasn't exactly what I needed. I still have an account with them.
Happy to pay 1.5x your pro fee if I can get what I want in terms of a regular designer help.
Then I saw the comments thread on ProductHunt about the turnaround time for recent customers were too long and they cancelled and they still haven't received their refunds.
And there was no reply to those comments on ProductHunt. (UPDATE: Just realised the comments were hidden on PH. I had to click to see the whole thread, so i will take my words back on this)
If you can throw in HTML/CSS work and raise the fees to 499/month or even 599, I will still be highly interested.
I also run my own business so I know the iron triangle of fast, good, and cheap can only pick 2.
In my case as a potential customer, I will say, I prefer good and cheap. I can do with a slightly less urgent delivery.
Today, I will be keeping my credit card in my wallet.
Still rooting for u or other similar businesses to crack this problem of reliable, affordable, and quality designer services.
2
This was the paragraph that caught my attention from the whole article (great read btw, thanks for all the lessons and insights):
I want to create a Pixel school which will give free English lessons, free business courses, and free UI/UX courses to aspiring entrepreneurs in key cities in Asia. This would help us strengthen our brand, hire talented designers, and also give back to the community. I am planning to start small with this with a small bootcamp this summer and see how the response is and if there is real value in it.
Congratulations on the incredible growth! You actually inspired me a while back to start my company DEVY.io where we do this but with web and mobile development.
Thank you for everything, including your facebook group ;)
1
Hey Robin, thanks for your post. Do you think this would work / or know of any existing companies that do "unlimited service" but for digital marketing? Of course, your advice is to ask the customers themselves, but I figured you would have done this research yourself as well!
Thanks!
Jeff
1
Wow some free schools, I'd love to attend it. I'am from Indonesia
1
Wouldlike to know that How did you find the hunter on producthunter to launch your product there? Or did uo dod yourself?
Thanks!
1
And how much you pay your each employee from 50k?
1
Excellent startup!
How did you find your customers?
Didn't U target through content marketing like from google search by doing SEO on page and off page?
0
Mostly reaching to founders directly by niche Facebook groups and some big launches. Later on we will definitely do SEO (that's in progress), referrals, affiliates. However for March the top goal is to satisfy our 200+ customers and have processes in place to make sure they stay with us and are able to take more customers. This is the hardest part right now.
1
Love your story! I think I even remember reading an article from you in the beginning (maybe Reddit or Medium?) where you talked about your past business and what to do not next. Congrats on your incredibly successful journey so far!
How did figure out in the beginning what to pay your designers or how long client project would take?
What I mean is how did you figure out how to balance both sides in the beginning, e.g. how many projects one designer could handle?
1
Honestly it was pretty hard to know what to pay them. I did some basic napkin calculations that were like this :
plus How much clients pay us per month: 259 to 349 USD per month
plus How many clients a designer can take per month
minus Fixed costs per month (servers)
minus How many refunds we will have
minus How much a designer cost us per month
= Our profits. From that I changed the above variables. No science at all and is probably not working but better to start with something and improve after. I am keeping the communication open with designers if they want more. As long as the team is happy and that we can still make money and grow sustainably it is fine (for now)
1
Thanks for your reply, Robin!
One follow-up question: How did you estimate how many clients a designer can take per month?
Thanks again!
1
I have been trying to sell my design services for a long time, maybe I'm charging too much money. Cause those guys in India charge $6 an hour! Or maybe I'm just looking in the wrong channels. Anyway, I have to figure out how to land the design work cause I'm good enough to do it.
1
Super inspiring! How did it work in the very first MVP you made? Would you manually send the design requests to the designers you have in your list?
1
Correct, I sent the requests on Skype to them. Was a pretty bad way to work but it worked with the first clients.
1
The packages look attractive. Honestly, I am interested in your design service for landing pages or social media graphics.
Who are your trusted partners to do the HTML/CSS?
By the way, if your sample works can be magnified, it would be much better for reference.
1
The design world was blown away when someone came along and was selling design work for 1/10th what it was before, 99Designs. And now you've come along and are selling it for 1/10th what 99Designs is doing. How does this work? Is it cheap labor in developing countries moving around the lay-out of pre-made designs and using stock art libraries?
2
And now you've come along and are selling it for 1/10th what 99Designs is doing. How does this work?
You're looking at it from a perspective that they deliver instantly, that they're paying $x for a fixed product. They're not. Rather than pay $x for a finished product, you pay $y for a retainer and the vague promise of delivery.
Their product isn't design, it's time management + retainers: distributing x clients in a period of time (e.g. monthly) over y designers. More delay to delivery = more profit.
This has been my exact same experience with these services. The promise is unlimited but it’s very limited. This can work for you if you don’t have very much work to get done.
It can also be done with almost any service - writing, design, development, etc.
there are major trade offs for the price point. You may get good work done in the end but be prepared to spend a considerable amount of time on revisions and communications bottlenecks.
1
Great comment. That whole thread was interesting as it mirrored this with dev rather than design.
I definitely think you are right and I'm more curious to know if OP understands this or is under the same disillusion as the other thread.
Here is from ManyPixels FAQ:
"How much work can you realistically expect in a month?
Let's say you need to redesign your whole website with 7 pages, need business cards, a new Facebook cover, as well as some stickers & flyers.
Website redesign (Landing page): 1 to 3 days per page - but since your pages will be more or less similar we should be able to do it within 5 to 7 working days.
Business cards: 1 to 3 working days.
Flyers & stickers: 1 to 3 working days.
Facebook cover: 1 to 3 working days.
Which still leave you with a lot of room to request more work
In any case, we strive to work efficiently and always aim for high quality work. "
1
Here is from ManyPixels FAQ:
Note that they ingeniously explain the duration of the tasks, but there is no promise that they'll only work on your tasks, that they'll work on your task continuously until finished, or that they'll work on any of your tasks for any given period of time. :-)
And as usual, these times are a general guideline that fit smaller customers. Anything outside of their business model and profit margin = they take a hit in their profit margin until they took too many hits and they need to add intentional delays (or reject these larger tasks) to increase the profit margin again.
I love how bullish you are on fixing the bottlenecks caused by design subjectivity. I find myself thinking the same way.
As a previous freelancer who did both design and development, I have two questions:
In such a service-oriented business, how do you protect your business against unreasonable demands from clients?
Are there ever misunderstandings where clients think they're going to get the code for a working website? This has happened to a few designer friends in the past. Maybe it's just my location, but it seems like most businesses are looking for a complete design + development package. I'm just curious if you've ever had to deal with fallout from this.
Thanks!
Hey Mark,
Now as regard to unlimited, the client can only request one task at a time. They can submit as many tasks as they want but they will be scheduled after if a job is in process. Realistically they can get a lot done. Right now the fastest we can deliver a task is about 12 hours but is actually more due to to our PM's being a little bit late in dispatching tasks. That's by top priority for March: being able to deliver way faster, and still maintain the quality (we had quite a lot of delays due to not having right PM's in place / no project management tool but this is being fixed)
Thanks for the reply. ManyPixels is very impressive, I wish you good luck in the future!
That's nice, I'm happy for your achievements. I'm curious, how do you pay your designers? Monthly salary? Per project? Also, where do you live now?
I found out about ManyPixels in the Indie Hacker Forum a while ago so I wanted to share my experience here for others. Sadly, I've experienced their turnaround time being much longer than what their website says. My first design request was fine, but my second one took 2 weeks. I expect some delays, but two weeks is significantly longer than 3 days. Their lack of communication and overall process is pretty bad. On the positive side their designs are actually pretty good for the money and the convenience of being able to send off design requests whenever I need to for a fixed cost is nice.
Hey! Right now the biggest issues we have are the following (by critical importance):
Lack of communication (I am planning to do a blog post + email to all of our customers this weekend to fix this)
PM's not dispatching tasks on time (Right now this is still not fixed but will be as of next week with a daily report where they have to dispatch the tasks twice a day. Our Head of Production did a root cause analysis and we are fixing each issue one by one -- See here: https://imgur.com/a/a4e4O)
Designers not having the right processes to undertake the tasks / understand briefs (we are building a bank of inspiration designs and clear guidelines and instructions on when a project will be considered as 'successful' to maintain quality at scale)
Some designers not taking Manypixels' work as priority and rather focusing on their freelance work (I will meet tonight half of the team in person and have an open discussion on how to build incentives together -- while the whole team is pretty committed, we sometimes ask too much. We are planning to create a "Pro" status for designers who constantly get tasks on time, achieve a lot of tasks, and achieve great customer satisfaction. We are also planning to do more onboarding / training for them)
Email me at robin@manypixels.co and I will add you extra weeks as a compensation.
This comment was deleted 7 months ago.
Hey Octoclam, by the way can you still give me your ID / email (feel free to send it to robin@manypixels.co) -- I didn't get an answer from you on the other thread and would still really like to follow up on your progress :)
This comment was deleted 7 months ago.
I have given you my personal email address in the past thread you made (robin@manypixels.co) and cannot find your emails. I Can you care to give me your ID / username (you can send an email to my personal email address for this)? I sincerely want to help and I understand it's not your fault.
This comment was deleted 7 months ago.
But can you forward the original email you sent to robin@manypixels.co ? I have reviewed this weekend all emails (sent to robin@manypixels.co and info@manypixels.co and all other support emails) and they have all been answered. I can't find your username in our database of customers (octoclam) and need your email address if you have used another username. Our email address work and we reply to all emails within 24 hours. Keep me posted :)
Holy shitballs! $10k to $50k in one month? Nicely done man. I can see ManyPixels making it to $100M biz if you solve the subjectivity issue.
@Vinrob
I was about to take out my credit card and try you guys out. Tried DesignPickle before and it wasn't exactly what I needed. I still have an account with them.
Happy to pay 1.5x your pro fee if I can get what I want in terms of a regular designer help.
Then I saw the comments thread on ProductHunt about the turnaround time for recent customers were too long and they cancelled and they still haven't received their refunds.
And there was no reply to those comments on ProductHunt. (UPDATE: Just realised the comments were hidden on PH. I had to click to see the whole thread, so i will take my words back on this)
If you can throw in HTML/CSS work and raise the fees to 499/month or even 599, I will still be highly interested.
I also run my own business so I know the iron triangle of fast, good, and cheap can only pick 2.
In my case as a potential customer, I will say, I prefer good and cheap. I can do with a slightly less urgent delivery.
Today, I will be keeping my credit card in my wallet.
Still rooting for u or other similar businesses to crack this problem of reliable, affordable, and quality designer services.
This was the paragraph that caught my attention from the whole article (great read btw, thanks for all the lessons and insights):
Great mission and approach to giving back!
Rooting for you @Vinrob and ManyPixels 👍
Congratulations on the incredible growth! You actually inspired me a while back to start my company DEVY.io where we do this but with web and mobile development.
Thank you for everything, including your facebook group ;)
Hey Robin, thanks for your post. Do you think this would work / or know of any existing companies that do "unlimited service" but for digital marketing? Of course, your advice is to ask the customers themselves, but I figured you would have done this research yourself as well!
Thanks!
Jeff
Wow some free schools, I'd love to attend it. I'am from Indonesia
Wouldlike to know that How did you find the hunter on producthunter to launch your product there? Or did uo dod yourself?
Thanks!
And how much you pay your each employee from 50k?
Excellent startup!
How did you find your customers?
Didn't U target through content marketing like from google search by doing SEO on page and off page?
Mostly reaching to founders directly by niche Facebook groups and some big launches. Later on we will definitely do SEO (that's in progress), referrals, affiliates. However for March the top goal is to satisfy our 200+ customers and have processes in place to make sure they stay with us and are able to take more customers. This is the hardest part right now.
Love your story! I think I even remember reading an article from you in the beginning (maybe Reddit or Medium?) where you talked about your past business and what to do not next. Congrats on your incredibly successful journey so far!
How did figure out in the beginning what to pay your designers or how long client project would take?
What I mean is how did you figure out how to balance both sides in the beginning, e.g. how many projects one designer could handle?
Honestly it was pretty hard to know what to pay them. I did some basic napkin calculations that were like this :
= Our profits. From that I changed the above variables. No science at all and is probably not working but better to start with something and improve after. I am keeping the communication open with designers if they want more. As long as the team is happy and that we can still make money and grow sustainably it is fine (for now)
Thanks for your reply, Robin!
One follow-up question: How did you estimate how many clients a designer can take per month?
Thanks again!
I have been trying to sell my design services for a long time, maybe I'm charging too much money. Cause those guys in India charge $6 an hour! Or maybe I'm just looking in the wrong channels. Anyway, I have to figure out how to land the design work cause I'm good enough to do it.
Super inspiring! How did it work in the very first MVP you made? Would you manually send the design requests to the designers you have in your list?
Correct, I sent the requests on Skype to them. Was a pretty bad way to work but it worked with the first clients.
The packages look attractive. Honestly, I am interested in your design service for landing pages or social media graphics.
Who are your trusted partners to do the HTML/CSS?
By the way, if your sample works can be magnified, it would be much better for reference.
The design world was blown away when someone came along and was selling design work for 1/10th what it was before, 99Designs. And now you've come along and are selling it for 1/10th what 99Designs is doing. How does this work? Is it cheap labor in developing countries moving around the lay-out of pre-made designs and using stock art libraries?
You're looking at it from a perspective that they deliver instantly, that they're paying $x for a fixed product. They're not. Rather than pay $x for a finished product, you pay $y for a retainer and the vague promise of delivery.
Their product isn't design, it's time management + retainers: distributing x clients in a period of time (e.g. monthly) over y designers. More delay to delivery = more profit.
I went into more detail a while ago in another comment: https://www.indiehackers.com/forum/show-ih-unlimited-web-and-app-development-for-a-small-fixed-monthly-fee-a10b25b8b5?commentId=-L6vxv_8CC-JXXw22Jul
This has been my exact same experience with these services. The promise is unlimited but it’s very limited. This can work for you if you don’t have very much work to get done.
It can also be done with almost any service - writing, design, development, etc.
there are major trade offs for the price point. You may get good work done in the end but be prepared to spend a considerable amount of time on revisions and communications bottlenecks.
Great comment. That whole thread was interesting as it mirrored this with dev rather than design.
I definitely think you are right and I'm more curious to know if OP understands this or is under the same disillusion as the other thread.
Here is from ManyPixels FAQ:
"How much work can you realistically expect in a month?
Let's say you need to redesign your whole website with 7 pages, need business cards, a new Facebook cover, as well as some stickers & flyers.
Website redesign (Landing page): 1 to 3 days per page - but since your pages will be more or less similar we should be able to do it within 5 to 7 working days.
Business cards: 1 to 3 working days.
Flyers & stickers: 1 to 3 working days.
Facebook cover: 1 to 3 working days.
Which still leave you with a lot of room to request more work
In any case, we strive to work efficiently and always aim for high quality work. "
Note that they ingeniously explain the duration of the tasks, but there is no promise that they'll only work on your tasks, that they'll work on your task continuously until finished, or that they'll work on any of your tasks for any given period of time. :-)
And as usual, these times are a general guideline that fit smaller customers. Anything outside of their business model and profit margin = they take a hit in their profit margin until they took too many hits and they need to add intentional delays (or reject these larger tasks) to increase the profit margin again.