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How we acquired 200 subscribers and got to $50k MRR
By
Robin Vander Heyden
November 16, 2018
How we acquired 200 subscribers and got to $50k MRR – Indie Hackers
I've heard some very critical things about Manypixels, how do you handle critical feedback and your consumer relationships?
Agree 100%. Was thinking about trying out the service, and over and over I've heard negative things about them.
I really hope Robin (you're the founder, right?) that you focus more time on getting your customer experience on point.
Yeah, he wins the award for posting the most articles on IH I think. $50K MRR on a productized service like this is nothing. Net revenue is parsley and most folks are not happy with this "all you can eat" design services from what I can tell based on his and other services. Since IH is the perfect customer base for him, it's no wonder he keeps posting these articles.
Hey Travis!
I posted our costs breakdown below.
I totally agree with you we are not quite there yet and people are not yet happy with the all you can eat design model, working on this to make it better!
Hey Siimon, I replied directly to Sam below.
Our focus is to get the experience right and I'll write a full post on all the mistakes we did and what we are planning to do to overcome this.
Hey Sam!
First of all - I 100% agree we are not quite there yet and I take full responsibility for it.
All those customer feedbacks are legit: These customers were not served well and they totally are right to complain!
Here is what I did so far and what I am planning to do next:
I created Manypixels because I felt it wasn't a great experience to hire a designer online, especially for small ongoing tasks. The prices were not transparent, the communication wasn't good, and some weren't reliable.
I took a one way flight to Indonesia (and I am still there today) to find great designers, paid them about 1.5-2.5x the local salary full time, and started offering a fixed price subscription model. I also created a basic website and started looking for customers.
I will make a whole post on this but here are the mistakes we did:
Mistake #1 - Promising everything
Design is difficult and we have people now going on Manypixels asking for full-scale branding projects or large UX / UI projects with no clear goals (an agency is probably better suited for this).
It just does not work. Instead what we are going to do is breaking down projects into small, focused, with clearly defined goals design tasks (for example instead of full website redesigning, we would do a Lead capture landing page design for customers who already have an ongoing brand, or social media ads).
So what happened is that we had projects that took weeks to complete and even though we were providing daily updates that did not cut it.
Here is a WIP of those offers:
After this we should be able to complete most projects in 4-12 hours and offer a great experience.
Mistake #2 - Not offering great experience
Currently we have a not so great customer experience. We use Front/Jar/Paywhirl and many other tools and excel spreadsheets to handle our operations --> This sucks.
We are about to launch a new platform where it is all in one and when you can automatically order a design. Here is a preview: https://imgur.com/a/COySg4p
And of course I am available to hear any feedbacks or suggestions as always!
Looking at those examples you have posted, it doesn't seem like an accurate representation of quality I've seen posted on IH. Do you believe like that could be possibly misleading to other users? What are you currently doing to improve the quality of your service (apart from the new platform)?
Hey Sam!
Totally understand. Right now in my opinion what happens in 95% of the cases is communication issues.
Designers are good (you can see their stuff on Dribbble: https://www.dribbble.com/manypixels) but where problems arise is due to expectation mismatch or communication problems (either from designer or client side). This is where stuff breaks.
My "bet" is that technology will fix the expectation/communication problems that companies are experiencing when hiring freelance designers in developing countries.
So as a first step I want to promise less and match expectations better (we have about 20-25 type of design requests you will be able to order).
As a second step use the platform to empower clients/designers to communicate better (for example there will be a clear brief system, a good revision system where you can comment on the designs etc). That's my idea.
Good thoughts. One bad experience can ruin 100 good ones - but you already know that. Best of luck!
Nice work Robin!
May I ask how much of that $50k MRR is profit? A large portion of revenue has to go to paying the designers, right?
Hi Davis!
Here is a rough breakdown of our costs:
Total: $31k in costs
Awesome! Way lower in costs than I would've thought :)
I'm definitely gonna use some of those advises for my e-mail gardener startup!Thanks for sharing your experience with us!
Thanks for sharing Robin!
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Very cool practical ideas for getting in front of early users.
Great story @Vinrob!
I'm curious, what is the average number of task per customer per month? And, on average, how long does a task last?
Thanks 😊
This comment was deleted 8 years ago
This comment was deleted 8 years ago