Growth challenge: how would you grow/scale DrawKit?
Based on all your collective experiences and ideas, I'd love to hear your thoughts on possible ways to grow and scale DrawKit (https://www.drawkit.io/)
DrawKit's existed for 1 year now, traffic is great, SEO is great, the mailing list is great and growing every day, and it's averaging around $500 - $800 monthly revenue.
However, all current income and growth is dependent on my time (manually creating new illustration products and packs) which isn't sustainable and has a ceiling.
How would you change DrawKit into more of a recurring revenue SaaS type model, so that value = income, and not time = income?
Some of the ideas I've been thinking of:
- Making the Custom page a freelancer marketplace for illustrators
- Introducing a second style with every illustration 99c instead of free
- An annual subscription for all premium products
Thanks in advance for your help 😊
Came into this thread with 11 answers already, and can't believe nobody has stopped to ask the obvious question...
Why is income dependent on new packs and products?
Really good point to think about! I guess it's due to interest and return visitors. I had to take 2 months off for another project and site visits have tanked since I stopped posting new illustrations. Or are you saying enough new visitors are coming on to the site that for them each product is a new product?
According to SimilarWeb, you make about 50k visitors per month.
If the numbers are accurate, the MRR is pretty low and could be about 1-5k-2k with ads alone.
Again, if the numbers are accurate, the conversion rates are very low. You should analyze what people do on your website.
If they don't like the style of your illustrations, hiring someone and then resell his work could be a great boost to your revenue and it is scalable.
The marketplace is a good alternative. You would have no financial risk and a higher growth upside, but it will also require more work to attract the talent.
If they are looking for freebies, it means that you should revisit your traffic acquisition strategy because you are attracting people who aren't willing to pay for your work. If that's the case, none of your or mine ideas will work.
Anyway, you can improve the website conversion. The hero doesn't have a CTA. The email forms are too small and require too much scrolling. You could cut at least one step. At this point, you sell five packs in totals. You should link directly to the illustrations after "choose your adventure".
Another problem I see is that you distract people from buying. You basically say: buy these illustration or get the free one ones, in the same sentence. People will scroll down first and if they like the freebies, they probably won't buy. If they don't, they need to scroll up to buy.
To close, I like more the freebies than the premium packs. It is clearly a matter of personal taste, but maybe can help.
Hey @Luqa! Thanks for taking the time to help :)
Hmm that's really interesting, I didn't realise I could be making so much with ads. I have a sponsor page and linked to it in every newsletter https://www.drawkit.io/sponsor but never had anyone buy. Perhaps I should place 'ads' around the site, advertising the ad slot, and be a bit more aggressive about it?
Great actionable advice with researching user behaviour, adding a CTA to the hero, tweaking link behaviour, thank you, I'll get to work 😄
I think you're right as well, part of the problem might be the user's intent in coming to the site; free vs paid resources. I'm going to start changing how the site's positioned to start to make this change to start attracting more people interested in buying, not just getting free illustrations.
Thanks again for the help
If your goal is to sell ads, then attracting people for freebies is the most effective way to grow traffic and email list.
If your goal is to sell the premium packages, then you should look for different people.
You should do cold outreach to companies that you believe are well-suited for your audience. In my experience, it is better to have only one sponsor for both the newsletter and the website to reduce the amount of work on your part, while still making good revenues.
If you plan on going the ads route, another idea to grow your traffic is to feature on your website other free illustrations that are available all over the Internet, so that your website can become an hub for people looking for illustrations. The guys from delesign and manypixels will probably be ok with being featured.
You can do a lot with nocode for the marketplace. With the subscription model, it probably would earn a lot, but you still kindof remain a 'content factory'. I see this with course making sites. Since the product is content based, it's ultimately always based on time as they constantly have to put out new content to keep paying customers happy.
On the other hand with a SaaS, you are always working to improve it...so probably go the route that feels less like work
Hmm very true, it's work either way, just need to choose the type of work you prefer! Did you also check out the marketplace stuff from Nocode Conf? That's what originally had me thinking that, was very cool! 😄
Hey! I feel like something like https://contentfly.co/ but for illustrations could be a good model *if it's done ethically. What is the nocode conf marketplace stuff?
Offer Customisation. Currently, you have to download and make the modification. If basic things like changing colour, rotate, flip etc available in the product, it would be awesome.
Offer 'Custom' design. As a client, I would like to download 8 images and get 2 images drawn in same style, but getting a freelancer and assuring he will draw in the same style has its own risk. You offer that.
This is very interesting, so you're saying basic customisation as a site feature? I need to learn to code haha but yes, I like the idea. I'll look into the best way to make it happen.
Definitely! This is actually a key part of the site: https://www.drawkit.io/custom and it works quite well to get clients
For the use case of designers having to create many illustrations in the same style fastly, a subscription model including software plugins could be very interesting.
For me as a designer this would make your product way easier to use. Consider the sketch plugin "Iconify", it offers the absolute best UX for designers to use Icons in their sketch projects.
There are two things you should consider to scale your business that were already mentioned:
Firstly, to make your business scalable you should, as you said, offer illustrations from other designers. One thing you have to make sure is, that the quality of the illustration sets doesn't decrease. Make attractive offers for designers to submit their illustration sets and reach out to specific designers that you believe make quality illustrations. Mid-Term you should also have a good process for designers to submit their illustration kits.
Second, an affiliate program would be another scaling opportunity. When you have such a program, reach out to the page owners of the first search results for search terms that you want to lead on your site and introduce them to your affiliate program.
One Idea concerning your website: maybe you can create more conversions by showing the benefit of using more illustrations in their products with a little showreel where for example you show a Website with bad or no illustrations at all and then finished with your illustrations. This shows how you actually solve a problem and why people should buy it. I know there are some other use cases of your website and maybe you should make them stand out more on your website to imrpove your Site's KPIs.
I don't know about your KPIs, but if you see good potential for improving them, you should consider this first before scaling your product with lots of effort.
This is excellent advice, thanks very much @matze28.
Love the idea of letting other illustrators and designers submit their own illustration products. I'll have to think on the best way to build this, would love a dashboard for them eventually to see their own sales etc.
Hmm really good idea about showing the actual benefits on an example website, I'll see what I can do with that, I think it could work really well!
Thanks very much for taking the time to help 🙏
Is it me, or is this website kind of bad?
I read: "DrawKit is a collection of FREE (...) illustrations" and then I scroll down, and just see paid "packs" (which I am not even sure what it means).
So I am like "Ok, even if it's paid, but good, I want it" So I want to look for examples of these illustrations, but I don't know where to click. In the menu I see tabs: packs, systems, animations, customs.
At this point I am like "where are my damn illustrations???" and quit the website.
Ahhhhh, I just now have seen this small font which says "Or keep scrolling for free illustrations". I think you need to fix it - you almost lost me and I am 100% in your target audience.
If I was you, I would be selling these, instead of giving them for free. One illustration should be very cheap - I am sure for their websites people will buy quite a few of them anyways.
What I want is a system, where I click on few images and can buy them IN ONE transaction.
Have you done research what kind of illustrations people are looking for their websites the most?
Fuuuck I think I have some interesting ideas here (very raw, so might be shit in the end, but at least worth investigating...).
Mail me at podlasin.mateusz@gmail.com if you care. :) I am a web developer from Poland trying to find cool business ideas.
Hahah this progression thread was amazing 😆 For starters, you're right, the website initially was entirely free, so the free illustrations were still above the fold. As I added more features and products they got forced further down the page, so the website needs some layout tweaks/maybe a small redesign to account for all the new sections. Thanks for giving me that push 😅
Yeah that's an interesting thought. I can't charge for the current free illustrations, as they were released under the free license, but future styles could be very cheap for a single illustration 🤔
Haha I'd love to hear your ideas! Send me a DM on Twitter instead though? Interested to hear what you're thinking https://twitter.com/jamesdaly90
Here are a couple of ideas
Thanks for the ideas @taher! I really like the referral/affiliate idea. Not sure if I'd like to earn money from products people have created for free, but paying them could also be a great plan to get more packs. Thanks for the help 😊
How about starting an affiliate program that gets others involved in sending you customers?
This is a really great idea! I had this on my list from like 6 months ago, can't believe I'd forgotten about it. Thanks @abeLuna 👍