After 3 months we've hit £30k MRR with our unlimited design and content subscription 🎉

Back in 2017, I launched a branding agency called Notepad. Through blood, sweat, and tears we managed to scale the agency to £80k - £90k a month in revenue but this was on a project-based service model. If anyone has ever sold creative services, you'll know just how feast and famine a business model like this can be. Some months you're stacked and all the cash comes in, some months you have no work and you're scrambling around for new clients.

So earlier this year, we decided to do something about it.

Inspired by all the unlimited design subscriptions and productized services that have popped up in the past year, we decided to start exploring whether such a model would be of interest to our past clients. Since launching we've helped a lot of SMBs and SaaS companies with their brand strategy and website design, but never really found a model which allowed us to work with them on a long-term basis.

After having meetings with around 15 of our clients and talking to them about what other design and content needs they might have, we started to float the idea of providing ongoing design and content services. Quite a few needed some briefs tackling but working on 1 brief at a time was proving quite sporadic for us, and quite expensive for them. So, we suggested taking a similar approach to companies like DesignJoy, Dispatch, and Superside, but instead of just providing design services, we'd give them a Senior Copywriter, a Senior Designer, and an experienced Project Manager on an unlimited basis for £5k a month. No contracts. Pause or cancel anytime.

In short, it's really taken off. We've now got 6 active clients on the subscription and none of them have paused or cancelled yet. In fact, half of them are now paying quarterly which gives us a good 3 months of visibility on capacity requirements.

So, the plan now is to broaden out our marketing to market the business to clients we haven't worked with (1 of our 6 clients is a brand new client). We're also currently using existing software to deliver the service (Trello, Figma, Adobe, etc) but in time I think they'll be an opportunity to develop our own in-house SaaS solution which links to things like time-tracking, reporting, etc

It's the first time in 5 years of running this business that I've felt we've found a really high-value proposition that is genuinely scalable.

Really excited to see where it goes and happy to share both the highs and the lows as things unfold over the coming months with the IH community. I'm also sure I'll be leaning on a lot of you for advice when we hit roadblocks. Wish me luck!