14
11 Comments

The surprising way I run my $800k ARR design service

Anyone else run their business this way?

Despite my revenue, I don’t focus on growth. I don’t track any metrics whatsoever aside from MRR. Profit is easy to figure since I’m the only employee. I’ve never done any marketing. I don’t know what I’m going to owe in taxes at the end of the year. I don’t have a roadmap or a plan to grow. I open Google Analytics maybe once a month, if that. Heck, I don’t even track churn and I run a subscription business. 😂

My focus is 100% on output and making my clients happy. Being the only employee, I don’t have time for all of the other stuff. I’m sensing I’m not the only one operating like this, so I’m curious to see who else is and how it’s working for you. 😊

  1. 2

    Are you interested in taking on an employee or partner? I'm an experienced UI/UX designer with frontend and webflow expertise. My design skills are comparable to the work you producing.

    Learning about your story is inspiring me to start this sort of productized service. 4-5 clients would replace my full-time job income.

    https://atomparish.com

  2. 1

    I know you probably really enjoy that hands on part of it, (otherwise you wouldn't be doing it) but my question is, do you ever think in terms of scaling or hiring?

    First of all, I am nowhere near that mark, (and I know every person is different with what they want to do and what the enjoy to do) I feel like if I get to that mark, I would want to start having someone to take care of things that I don't enjoy as much.

    Just wondering what are your plans in regards to this for the future.

  3. 1

    Brett you are really talented designer and very happy for your phenomenal growth on the merit of your creativity and skill!
    Measuring MRR and not having marketing funnel, the only significant risk for you is churn. Shark tank reference may have created the marketing leads for you but you may have to prime that flywheel to even continue the ARR. Great designs are not ARR.... that's our boon and our bane!

    1. 1

      Thanks Nick! Couldn’t agree more!

  4. 1

    Congratulations on your success!
    I'm very interested to understand how you've been able to balance the work of Designjoy now you must have around 20 active clients with unlimited requests. I've always been told I should not offer unlimited anything unless my model can scale to something close, what has your experience been with this? What is your USP in comparison to a design agency or an individual consultant? Is there any one act that you would attribute to your success if you were to reproduce it?
    Sorry for the bombardment of questions, but your service and business model is uniquely impressive.

  5. 1

    how many hours u work a week?

    1. 1

      Pretty much got it down to a 40 hour work week now. Sometimes it goes beyond that, but rarely anymore.

  6. 1

    Wow, just think what you could do if you did track churn! xD

    (Kidding, I'm nobody to tell you how to run your biz @ those figures).

    I think there's some magic in focusing on the right things - in your case, happy clients.

    Tangentially related - like a few other IndieHackers, I've found it useful to disable a few notifications (like failed payments, early churn notifications) - helps keep energy high!

    1. 1

      Right! I’m not saying those other things aren’t good things to focus on, but in my case I’m so dang busy keeping up with the work, I simply can’t. And oddly enough, it doesn’t seem to be hurting me too much.

  7. 1

    wow! I guess I can adopt functioning like you xD, yes I think problems are not metrics and trackrecords but overanalyzing it (i.e. that one customer churned out OMG! xD etc).
    I guess what you do is focusing on work and what you ca do than resisting what happens(in spirituality its called karma yoga)

  8. -1

    This comment has been voted down. Click to show.

Trending on Indie Hackers
How I grew a side project to 100k Unique Visitors in 7 days with 0 audience 49 comments Competing with Product Hunt: a month later 33 comments Why do you hate marketing? 28 comments My Top 20 Free Tools That I Use Everyday as an Indie Hacker 14 comments $15k revenues in <4 months as a solopreneur 14 comments Use Your Product 13 comments