Awesomic journey from $0 to first $100K ARR

In this blog post, I am sharing Awesomic startup journey — how Roman and Stacy launched Awesomic and earned the first $100k ARR a couple of years ago!

What Is Awesomic?

Awesomic.io matches companies with vetted designers on the same day for a flat monthly fee. You simply sign up for the platform, create a task, and get a result in 24 hours.

We’ve collaborated with more than 550+ companies, agencies, and startups worldwide. Additionally, Awesomic got into the Y Combinator S21 batch, while in 2020, we had raised an angel round from Pipedrive founders and European unicorn investors.

Birth of an Idea: from Concept to MSP

The idea of creating Awesomic came up when Roman was working on a previous startup with his “partner in crime” Stacy. They struggled to find the right designer. They had to change contractors often — rarely did they provide enough focus on the product because of working part-time. Typically, it takes up to 14 days to find the right candidate using typical freelance platforms, especially when a wide range of design skills is required to complete a project, like branding and logo, UI/UX, and marketing design.

Thinking over this problem, Roman came up with the idea to create a platform that would manage a wide network of designers and instantly connect them with customers. Customers would be able to create the tasks and directly communicate with designers — with no middle man. That was Roman's next new startup idea.

Roman knew that they needed to validate the demand first before creating the product. It would be easy to get stuck on product development, which has happened before, and Roman didn’t want to repeat past mistakes. Creating a good product takes a lot of time and resources, so Roman needed to know that people would love my product idea.

In 10 days, was created a landing page for the new startup (initially named Pizdata) that describes the concept and provides the option to sign up. That was the first stage of our startup development.

Getting The First Customer

The launch was not fancy — neither Techcrunch nor Product Hunt had been involved yet. After Roman started a website, Stacy wrote a Facebook post about our new startup. On the next day, Roman got the first customer due to this post — it was Outtalent. Tilek Mamutov, the CEO at Outtalent just got into YC S19 batch after 10 years in Google X. He had an idea to help engineers get a job at FAANG companies, but had no website or logo. So, that was our first task. Roman invited Stacy to join Awesomic as a co-founder as we had already worked together on 3 previous startup ideas!

In the first 2 weeks after the launch, we got 3 customers and our MRR was $1197, which could be counted as $14K ARR — that was our starting point. We were super excited about such a quick launch and the first month working on Awesomic.

From MSP to MVP

The customers loved the new way to find designers and deliver results. In the first two months, we had 5 active users and $2400 MRR = $28.8k ARR. At that point, we were unable to continue manually handling communication between designers and customers in addition to finding new designers.

So, the solution was to build an MVP (Minimum Valuable Product) and automate the process. I did a one-man-hackathon for 72 hours in a row and created the first version of the Awesomic platform.

Luckily, I’d coded high-loaded systems, payment solutions, and built software development teams for fast-growing startups for 7 years before creating Awesomic. These skills helped to iterate fast on product development.

‘You Are Unfundable and Unscalable’

Customers loved the MVP version of Awesomic from the beginning. In the third month, we had 7 customers and around ~$3000 MRR ($36k ARR).

In those days, one famous VC investor, from the US, with hundreds of investments in portfolio came to Kyiv for a few days, chasing the next unicorn in Europe. Luckily, he was holding office hours in our local coworking space Lift99, and we were the first ones who signed up for this opportunity to pitch a new startup and share our startup story.

Unfortunately, Stacy and Roman left the meeting room after only 10 of the 20 minutes that we’d reserved. We got crushing feedback that Awesomic would be unscalable and unfundable (that means it would never be able to grow).

A few minutes later, we caught up with Ragnar Sass, Founder and CEO at Pipedrive and Lift99. He asked how everything went, Roman and Stacy told him the truth, and Ragnar said, “I know a company. Investors told them the same at the beginning, and now they have $1b in annual revenue. The best thing to do in the VC communities is to PROVE THEM WRONG.”

“Prove Them Wrong” – stuck for a long time in Roman head 🙂 We'll do that. We'll definitely do.

The First $100k ARR and Beyond

In a couple of months after launching on Product Hunt, we reached $100k ARR. What helped us do it (apart from the hype around the initial name) was continuous and valuable feedback from the PH community. Celebrating that milestone on our entrepreneurship journey with a cake felt like a great idea.

In the early days, our hyped name Pizdata helped us grow too. But we knew that our core audience didn’t get the joke, so we started looking for a new name. After 6 months of search, we came up with “Awesomic” – awesome on the cosmic level.

For now, Awesomic has delivered 10 000+ design projects for 1000+ companies like Silviaterra, Reface, and People.ai.

We’ll be describing the next chapters of our startup story in the following articles. For example, how we spent all the money and took out a 40% APR loan to launch on Product Hunt and our first $1M ARR.
Stay in touch!

Update: 18/07
We have finished posting about our scaling a startup from a
bunker story:
https://www.indiehackers.com/post/scaling-a-startup-from-a-bunker-a-true-founders-story-ca77dbc2d1