Finishing off 2021 with 80% YoY Growth, mistakes, learnings & $180k ARR

Hello Fellow Members,

I’m Junaid Ansari & along with Amin Memon, I have co-founded Draftss.com

Draftss is a Graphic Design & Code subscription to help businesses with on-demand graphic design & code requests without spending a huge amount of money on hiring designers & saving tons of time.

2021 started in the most unusual fashion for all of us as we had to face some additional challenges bestowed on us by the covid pandemic😷. It came at the worse of times but we converted every obstacle into opportunity & made the most of it in the best possible way.

Here is some crazy stuff that happened with us in 2021:

• We almost doubled our revenue from $100k to $180k ARR 🤑
• We automated our entire productized business & now work only 1 hour a day! 🤩
• We fired a lot of inefficient team members & hired new superheroes in our team! 🦸🏻‍♂️
• Created more than 10,000 designs & revisions for our clients 🎨
• Worked with loads of new brands 🤘🏻
• Went from 1st page in SEO to the 7th page 😭

Everything that went wrong:

We faced a few setbacks because of many things that happened. Some of them were due to our own errors while some of them were not under our control. The best part is, I learned through them & now we have transformed ourselves to not repeat those mistakes again.

We didn’t focus on our SEO enough which cost us dearly. It was too late before we realized it as most of the keywords we were ranking for dropped in SERP from 4th to 50th 🤯. For a few of our main keywords, we went from the first page to the 7th page. We tried to figure out what was going wrong but eventually failed. Another thing that follows with poor SEO is poor social presence. I had my own reasons for not signing up on Instagram or Facebook as there is a lot of unnecessary abuse on Social Media. I am still unclear about the idea of using Social Platforms for my business but it surely holds value to improve the overall SEO game.

I never really sensed the urge to hire a person to take care of SEO before 2021. This year, we are setting up a dedicated team to handle SEO & Social Media. We shall start with LinkedIn as it is the most professional platform and then gradually move towards Facebook, Twitter & Instagram.

Every Draftss customer wants their task to be completed at the fastest pace possible. One of the feedbacks we received was that our service felt slow to a few customers. At Draftss the time taken for every task to be completed is pre-decided but we had to fasten up for the urgency of our customers. If we try to do stuff very fast, the quality suffers. If we focus on quality, time suffers. We worked thoroughly on SOP when designing & managing briefs to optimize time at all possible places to give the best results in record time. The bright side of this issue is that now we have a fast service in the market with of course keeping quality in mind.

It is always a great feeling when you add more people to your business. I hired tons of people this year as my business flourished. Back in January, we had 22 people in our team & now we have 40+ people working for us in Draftss. The downside of hiring is that sometimes you end up hiring inefficient people who can’t help you but instead be a liability at times. We hired 100+ people in 2021 but because of substandard quality of output, we had to get rid of some of them. Getting the right talent is the key to success. After deep evaluation now we have gathered our A-Team.

At one moment I thought it would be better to outsource all our work. It would’ve saved all our efforts in hiring, training & retaining the team. We looked out for companies that could provide such services & we found none. It won’t work out for any business that gets varying amounts of work every week or month. The bright side of this experiment is that we got more serious in the hiring process & added only highly efficient people to our team. It helped us in increasing our business because we all were in the same boat.

Everything that went Crazy Right!

Running a business gets easier when you have reliable people working for you. Automating Draftss helped me buy more time to decide the forthcoming steps. In 2021, I only had to spend 1 hour a day on average to manage Draftss as we totally automated and productized our service. I started delegating my responsibilities to people which helped me in thinking about new strategies for my business. It assisted me in making the business process more efficient & is also less risky.

I achieved automation by hiring great managers and setting up proper SOP’s. I introduced good incentive programs for the employees, so there is constant motivation to achieve the required goals.

I also create a private knowledge base for the entire team divided into departments. I add all the questions that our team would have while working on the projects + added different scenarios along with the next steps/decisions that they need to take in such instances. Inculcated a new habit of updating the knowledge base with whatever questions our team comes up with.

Assigning my work to my superheroes helped us improve our efficiency & productivity. On the other hand, I had more time to focus on high level tasks. Certainly, the best decision for Draftss to pave the way for success in 2021.

Our email marketing campaigns were a success. Almost each campaign had a 50%+ open rate. The overall email conversion increased & we bagged in quite a lot of customers using this classic marketing technique💰.

I did try a few experiments with discounting offers, I started the 1+1 FREE offer for our subscription plans. Users get one month of free service on signing up for a 1 month plan. We received a great response from the offer but it was a headache to manage it on Stripe, as they don't support a feature like the 1+1 plan. There wasn’t any way to change the subscription expiry date on Stripe, due to which I had to manually cancel the plan after the first payment & track one more month of usage in Google Sheets. Since we had to cancel their subscription the churn rate blew like crazy and then we had to get behind the customer to re-subscribe for the services again at the end of 2 months to continue with their subscription.

Soon after that, I planned to give 40% discounts to lure in customers but I realized that many of our competitors copied our style. So to be a step ahead of my competitors I increased my discount to 50%. Being honest here, that was certainly one of the best decisions of this year. It always works if you have good ARPU along with a good percent of LTV for your company. In 2022, I’m planning to integrate different discount strategies for Draftss.

With the improvement in the quality of designs, turnaround time & customer service, our refund ratio went drastically down to 0.5% in 2021😁.

It was also a year of more interaction than ever. Our customer service team was always up for solving problems. We gained a lot of traffic from various platforms such as Facebook Groups & Slack.

What’s next?

The future is exhilarating as we are going to launch a new version of Draftss soon. Learning from our past experience & experiments we have upgraded our services to come in full force for this year. Draftss 3.0 will be more advanced & have the best user experience.

We are planning to launch new services in 2022:

• Motion Graphics
• Angular JS Development
• React JS Development
• Shopify Development
• Video Editing

In 2022, I am aiming for Draftss to reach $700-$800k ARR on automation. Increase the team size, increase the pricing, launch a new website for Draftss. Setting a dedicated Marketing team to handle content, SEO, Ads, experimenting with different pricing ideas and more!

TLDR: Here is some crazy stuff that happened with us in 2021: We almost doubled our revenue from $100k to $180k ARR 🤑. Automated my productized services, Created more than 10,000 designs & worked with loads of new brands. Lost a lot of SEO traffic but still grew. En route for a more happening & productive 2022.