This founder isn't a designer, but he built a $150k MRR design service anyway.

Maximilian Fleitmann is a serial entrepreneur building his holdco, Wizard Ventures. He grew the biggest business in his portfolio — a subscription design service called Magier — to $150k MRR, and he isn't even a designer.

Here's Max on how he did it. 👇

Holdcos and creative subscriptions

Over the last 15 years, I have started, scaled, acquired, and sold multiple projects and startups — so I guess it’s fair to consider myself a serial entrepreneur.

The overarching company I am building is Wizard Ventures — the culmination of all my experience. It is my personal venture studio and internet holding company where I incubate all of my new ventures.

The biggest and most successful one at the moment is Magier.

Magier is a creative subscription service, trusted by the world's top brands to get exceptional design faster, more reliably, and at scale. We started the company exactly two years ago and it scaled way quicker than I ever imagined — we just crossed the $150k MRR mark with 10-20% margins. We hope to get our margins to 35-40%, but we've been investing heavily in non-design related overhead.

The second business we are running is MagicLibrary. MagicLibrary is one of the world's largest collections of ads that you can download as Figma and Canva templates. It makes creating ads for your company super fast - we started it in the fall of last year and it is currently doing around $3k MRR.

Today let’s focus on Magier.

A luxurious problem to have

The story of how we built Magier could be a long one, but in the end, it comes down to three key factors.

First, at Wizard Ventures, we were looking for a business that could become our own cash cow — something close to cash, with healthy margins, and scalable by us as founders.

Second, the business model was already proven. There was clear demand and successful examples in the space — Superside, Manypixels, and Awesomic, to name a few.

And third, we had firsthand experience with the exact problem we were solving. In every company I built or invested in, there was always a lack of design capacity. Multiple teams needed high-quality designs fast, but finding great designers was time consuming. Agencies and freelancers weren’t real alternatives — they were either too expensive or only a short-term fix.

Validating the idea was simple. In one weekend, we launched a basic landing page, did some demo work ourselves, and started selling. Within a week, we had three paying clients — but no designer.

It was a stressful but luxurious problem to have. From day one, we were profitable, giving us the resources to reinvest in the team, marketing, and growth.

The easiest business no launch

A service business is probably the easiest type of startup to launch — all you need is a laptop and some clients. And that’s exactly how we started.

For our first clients, we did the designs ourselves. It felt great because money was coming in on a monthly basis, and the business worked exactly as we had envisioned: fast scaling, high margins, and founder-led sales.

One key lesson I learned early on is that momentum is everything. When you're just starting, you don’t need a perfect landing page, an extensive portfolio, or an A+ team from day one.

Just get started. Once you have traction, you'll have the time — and the resources — to refine everything else.

Subscription revenue

The great thing about Magier is that the business model is super simple. We make money in two ways.

The most important one is our design and Webflow subscription — clients pay a fixed monthly fee between $2.5k and $5k. This accounts for 90% of our revenue. The remaining 10% comes from one-time projects, like rebrandings, pitch decks, or smaller development tasks with fixed scopes.

Since inception, our revenue has grown steadily. Of course, there were months with slight drops or sideways movement, but overall, we’ve consistently added new MRR.

One key realization was that regular price increases are a great way to grow. Over time, our service has become more professional, making it easy to justify higher pricing.

I also have to say — subscription revenue is the best business model you can have. I’ve run businesses before that relied on one-time payments, and it was always a struggle. With Magier, every month builds on the previous one, making scaling so much easier.

Double down on distribution

Repeat after me: The most important thing in building a company is distribution.

But what do I mean by that? I’ve seen many companies struggle and fail — and almost never because they couldn’t build the product. More often than not, it was because they didn’t have a proper channel to find customers.

My belief is simple: If you’re solving a real problem and customers are paying you, you can figure everything else out.

I’m really happy that we focused on marketing and sales early on — though, looking back, we could have doubled down even more.

Growth

Our go-to-market strategy has evolved a lot over the last two years. We won our first 10 customers ($20k MRR) through our own network and cold outreach emails.

From $20k to $80k MRR, most of our growth came through referrals — happy customers recommending us to fellow founders and marketers.

Now, as we scale from $80k to $200k MRR, we rely on three main channels, which took time to build, but now generate 75% of all new customers.

1. SEO

We’ve published over 100 articles that consistently bring in potential clients, targeting keywords at all stages of the funnel. Every week, we release a mix of in-depth articles (created with freelancers) and programmatic SEO pages (built in-house).

2. YouTube

I create tons of videos on marketing, design, and Webflow — one of the most underrated channels out there. Where else can you get a steady stream of leads that compound over time?

I still generate leads today from videos I uploaded two years ago. No other platform offers that kind of longevity. Our goal is to release at least 3–5 videos per week.

3. Personal branding

Four team members consistently create content on LinkedIn about entrepreneurship, marketing, and Webflow. Especially in the age of AI, people crave authenticity — because at the end of the day, people buy from people.

If I had to choose just one growth strategy for Magier’s future, it would be personal branding. To put it in perspective: In the last 365 days, we’ve generated 5M+ impressions on LinkedIn and tens of thousands of interactions with our brand.

Niche down and delegate

There are two main challenges that I think about a lot because they still affect me every day.

Too broad

The first is positioning and defining our ideal customer. When we started Magier, we took a broad approach — anyone, regardless of industry or country, could become a customer and get all the designs they needed. But that created an insane amount of complexity.

If I could do it over again, I would start with a more specific core audience and a limited service set (e.g., an ad creative subscription for SaaS companies). Having that focus makes it infinitely easier to attract the right clients and streamline delivery.

Too involved

The second challenge is my operational involvement. As an entrepreneurial Swiss Army knife, I was deeply involved in so many processes while building the company. And even now, I’m still heavily involved in day-to-day operations.

With a team of 30 people, you can imagine the insane amount of admin work. I should have delegated more responsibilities earlier. That’s my challenge for 2025.

Parting advice

Don’t overthink — just start doing and figure it out along the way.

Too many books have been written about entrepreneurship, building a company, and what you should or shouldn’t do. In the end, you’re crafting your own story and need to find your own path.

So many times, people have told me, 'Max, this will never work.' But this is what I realized: It might not work for them, but it might work for me.

If you have that kind of boldness, success becomes inevitable.

What's next?

Our goals for this year are bold. We want to hit $200k MRR and grow the team to 50 people. That means a lot of late nights and hard work.

To make it happen, we need to focus on two things:

1. Keep our current customers super happy — so they stay with us and recommend us to others.

2. Increase our number of demo calls to 50+ per month. Right now, we’re at about half of that, so there’s work to do.

If we nail these two things, we’ll get there.

And my personal goal for 2025 is to share more of how we actually build the company on Linkedin and Youtube to inspire the next generation of entrepreneurs. You can also follow along on X.