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21 Comments

$66k ARR, 50+ clients, 8000+ designs created

While gathering the year ending stats for Draftss.com in 2019, we realized that we have achieved pretty major milestones.

Some of these are as follows:
$5.5k MRR
54 clients
8267 designs created
114 pages coded

We have covered these milestones in detail here: https://draftss.com/blog/draftss-year-in-review-2019/

  1. 3

    Super inspiring!. Junaid, do you guys do UX/UI for web products? How can I get in touch with you?

    1. 2

      Thank you @Foundersity

      Yes, we take care of UX/UI for Web products. I would be happy to take you through it. You can reach me on [email protected]

  2. 3

    Wow great progress!

    1. 2

      Thank you for your appreciation :)

  3. 3

    Congratulations! 🎉

    Interesting business idea, personally I haver never seen this kind of service before (where you subscribe to a service that offers unlimited personalized designs, if I understood correctly).

    1. 3

      Thanks :)

      Absolutely! Unlimited Designs & Code on subscription.

      1. 2

        Hello Junaid :)

        How do you afford to pay your team? I don't think that $89 is enough for more than two designers?

        1. 1

          Hello @imedadel,

          We assign one team to multiple clients such that all team members are working on at least one task at any given point of time. This makes it feasible for us to optimize our resources to the fullest and stay profitable.

          In cases where clients are subscribed to more than 2 task at a time, we do not allocate other clients to that team.

  4. 3

    Congratulations! If you ever need a tool to test all those sites you're delivering, give https://reflect.run a look ;)

    Joking aside, great numbers. Congrats, again.

    1. 3

      Thank you for your kind words :)

      Sounds great. I'll take a look.

  5. 2

    Congrats Junaid. Well-deserved milestone 🎉🎉🎉

    For payment gateway, do try Razorpay. They support subscriptions + international payments. We have been using them for quite some time at Springzo. No issues, so far. For all our subscriptions, we use a mix of Razorpay & PayPal.

    1. 1

      Thank you :)

      The founder of Razorpay was part of one of my local networking groups. We explored Razorpay as an alternative to our current provider but it didn't turn out to be feasible for us.
      Some of the problems that we faced were,

      • Their checkout had other payment methods such as upi, etc. which wasn't relevant to our audience and we couldn't remove those methods completely from the checkout screen.
      • We couldn't create coupon codes inside Razorpay.
      • Support were unable to assist us with the technical know-how and was non-responsive. We had to reach them several times to fetch one response.

      I'm curious, why are you using a mix of Razorpay & Paypal?

      1. 1

        Yep. These three issues, they are definitely a problem with Razorpay. That said, they were not deal-breaker for us. We do use RZP more as a backup payment gateway - a couple of our customers pay via the same (recurring). PayPal is our primary payment gateway.

        Also, do note that with PayPal, the effective fee comes to about 8% (transaction + conversion fees). RZP and Stripe India cost a bit lesser.

  6. 2

    Congrats!

    Interesting unlimited requests business model. Curious, how many team members or freelancers currently support these requests? Has any client made an overwhelming number of requests in one month?

    1. 1

      Thank you @Esmee!

      We have a full-time design team that works from our office, a full-time remote design team that works locally, and freelancers who have been working with us on a project to project basis when there is an overflow in the number of projects. Altogether we have a strength of 50+ designers who can work at any given point of time.

      Yes, we receive an overwhelming number of requests from time to time. Almost all the overwhelming number of requests are mostly from design companies who use our services. An example of such a request is 100-150 illustrations for an online free resource website. In such cases, we work on a pay-per-illustration pricing model or fixed pricing so we can complete such tasks in the shortest time possible.

      1. 1

        I'm curious, after you told them how you could still get it done, did they agree to pay and move forward or did they cancel the request?

        1. 1

          It becomes difficult to cater to a huge number of design requests using the subscription model. Hypothetically, it takes 2 days to design an illustration, it would take 200-300 days to finish 100-150 illustrations.
          These companies were already using our services and were more than happy to complete the project on a pay-per-illustration model.

          1. 1

            Sounds like you have some reasonable customers.

  7. 2

    Thats awesome, great work! What's the goal for this year?

    1. 1

      We are planning on achieving the goal of $50k MRR by the end of this year with Draftss.

      We have several other projects lined up that we are planning on completing and launching this year.

  8. 1

    I'll try to ask this without getting too specific. How much of the available max requests per billing term does your typical client use? So for example, let's say their subscription includes 10 requests per week, does the average customer use like 5 or 7? Or do most customers try to always use the maximum amount of requests per period?

    I guess you should always be prepared for every client to use the max number of requests every period but I've always been curious what the typical customer behavior is like in reality when subscribing to unlimited types of services.

    I'm not looking for super specific numbers or anything, just wondering ballpark guesstimates for utilization.

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