Hitting $1.2M ARR within a year with productized design services

Nick of Baked Design quit his $300k/yr job with almost no runway, built a following on X, and started a productized design service. Then, he fired all his clients and grew another productized design service to $1.2M ARR within a year.

Here's Nick on how he did it. 👇

No backup plan

I spent years focused on learning design and climbing up the ladder, with the goal of working at Meta. But when I reached there, I felt lost on what else I could do beyond this

I guess that and a burnout caused me to look for other opportunities or a way to step away from design for a while. So I resigned from my $300k job at Meta with $10k savings — I'd spent $100k on a wedding and $250k on a house downpayment a few earlier.

So I didn't have much runway to play around with. I guess having no runway and no backup plan played a big role in shaping me. It helped me accelerate my journey over the next six months in business and on X.

Finding an idea, and another, and...

During this process, I came across “remote house cleaning” and started building a local house cleaning business.

The problem I faced at that business led me to start a staffing company called Movevirtual with my wife. We reached $25k MRR in a matter of months. At one stage, we were managing 8-10 cleaning businesses and bringing in revenue for their businesses every single day. 

My wife trained the staffing agents (VAs) and I focused on onboarding clients. We took these cleaning businesses from $0 to $16k revenue in 3 months, but it all felt tiring & not rewarding as clients become overbearing and hard to manage. So we fired all the cleaning business clients and our MRR went down to $11k overnight.

While working on Movevirtual, I tried my luck at growing my presence on X with design roasts which helped me start multiple small design ventures —and eventually Baked Design.

I’m currently focusing on four businesses, Baked Design ($137k MRR), Movevirtual ($7k MRR), Local Design Studio ($12k MRR), and a local cleaning business ($1.6k MRR). But 90% of my time is allotted to managing and designing for clients at Baked Design because my design studios bring in 98% of the revenue with an 80% profit margin.

Getting started on X

While still running Movevirtual, I pivoted to focusing on design roasts as a way to make noise and get known on X within the indie hacking community. Instead of calling them "roasts", I called them “Baked”, as I was direct with my redesign with no harsh feedback or suggestions.

Over six months, I designed over 50 websites, solely by searching for posts on X and roasting them without anyone’s permission. I focused on finding recent posts on X (within seconds or minutes) and time-bound myself to do a design roast within 15-45 mins.

Over time these posts got people's attention and it became a new theme in the indie hacking community and designers. I soon became known for regularly roasting designs with my loud design style which attracted many views.

I had fun, but I also had to pay bills, so I started getbaked — a one-time design service ($50 to $300 design requests) and a design kit (indie design kit), which helped me sustain for a couple of months, along with the other income from the cleaning business and Movevirtual. 

Failing at scaling

I never reached out or cold DM’ed anyone to get work. I focused solely on establishing myself and setting a tone within a single community. The Indie hacking community has been a blessing in that sense.

But I had to experiment to see if I could scale things up, so I started offering productized design service subscriptions for $50/mo, and then increased it to $300/m. This did work — cheap services with good quality helps — but then I fired all the clients to focus on starting a true agency.

This is where Baked Design comes in. I started offering larger price packages and it was a dud for a month or so. No one booked a call, I had to go back to roasting designs to keep up the morale.

What I have seen is people don’t care if you have worked at Meta until they truly believe in you and your work. So, at that point, I guess real paying clients didn’t really trust me or my expertise.

Gaining momentum

Then, a little under a year ago one of my roasts hit 110k+ impressions on X. Someone saw the post and booked a call, but never joined so I searched him on X and DM’ed him to see if he would join the call. He apologized and wanted to pay without the call. I insisted on getting on call, and that’s how I got my first Stripe notification for a $4,317 subscription payment. And that kicked off a journey that’s beyond anything in my life and career!

I kept doing my roasts, and getting on calls. I got better with my pitches — more on that later — and asked people to pay on the call. They did, and these interactions gave me confidence that I could do this.

So I kept closing and quickly accelerated the revenue from $4,317/m to $167k/m over the next 5-6 months. Now, Baked Design is bringing in $1.2M ARR

Tech stack

Here's the stack:

• Figma - Daily driver

• Framer & Webflow - Building websites

• Lottie - Animation

• Slack - My source of truth, task manager, lead management, and everything else

Closing leads

Revenue growth happened in incremental stages, as I grew the business from a one of design request to small monthly retainers. Roasting designs as I grew my account on X resulted in better reach which in turn helped in call getting booked.

I focused on closing 80-90% of the calls with a casual-conversation approach, where I talked about my experience at Meta and other startups, and learned about their businesses.

Listening is key here. Focus on understanding before saying anything. It helps you improve your pitch and present it differently. I focused on showing the real work with a real timeline, jumping into Figma history and showing a potential client the actual time it took to design and deliver immensely helped me in gaining trust.

Knowing about the product, researching, and having knowledge about their competition helps in further closing the gap. Any lead who needs time gets an invite to the Baked Slack so they are always within my reach. I never let anyone leave the call without sending them a Slack invite.

Parting advice

Having a clear plan or goals is not something I'm used to in my life, I try to take things head on. When I started this journey, I did it for fun and, in the process, I learned how to place myself among other designers in a crowded platform.

For others wanting to go on in this journey, I suggest you take things at a slower pace and enjoy the process instead of trying to speed run. Six months might feel like a lifetime on the first day, but the compounding effect it has over time is worth the effort.

Also, be around the people who want your product or service and act like a regular person — never as a brand. People interact with people; not brands. Be yourself and be truthful.

What's next?

Getting better at design is my primary goal for this year and going forward. Using AI in my workflow has helped me a lot in decision making, so doubling down on that would be a great goal this year.

Apart from that, consistent with the business revenue and profit margin, this is my fifteenth month of consistent $100k+ revenue in the last 22 months of starting Baked Design.

To keep this up, I need to be better at managing my business and the team within so I have more time for myself to explore and ideate. Being a new father does affect your energy levels so keeping up with the baby while running a busy design studio is a challenge I’m slowly getting used to.

You can follow along on X. And check out Baked Design.