Draftss.com
Unlimited Graphic Design & Landing Page UI/UX with code
Hey, I'm so happy to launch the new & improved version of Draftss.com - a productized design & code service on subscription 🤩
We've made lots of improvements to our services & here are some of the things that we have done:
- Faster turnaround time of 1-3 days on all design tasks 🚀
- Hired experienced project managers
- New & Improved dashboard for managing & tracking your requests 🤘🏼
- We now support Unbounce, Squarespace, Weebly & more
- Webflow interactive & animated websites
- Quick support & lots of new additions 📞
If you have any questions or suggestions — about the product, UI, graphics, or code — please shoot them my way.
P.S. - Launch discount code "NEW" to get a 50% discount on the first month.
Finally, after years of trying to scale Draftss.com, we have achieved $21k MRR last month.
Alot of people who have been in this domain would feel that we have been slow as compared to other competitors.
I'd like to share that we might have been slow, but we are consistent. We constantly scale our team but ensure that the quality of output increases with time.
We had bootstrapped Draftss from 2 founders in 2018 to a current team size of 30 members & achieved all of this while building other products like Prospectss.com, Artworkss.com, Codingss.com, etc.
-
1
I can see how there could be some confusion about the numbers, though. For example, if I'm looking at my own business and I know that I only need $20k in MRR, then it's easy enough to say "Okay, let's go with $20k in MRR." Visit this urgent care new orleans for more details. But if someone is looking at my business for their own needs and they're not sure what kind of price point they should be looking at so that they can compare it to other companies, then this tool might not be helpful.
It was a great experience to be interviewed by @patwalls on how we validated the idea behind Draftss.com, the trial & errors on the road to automating it to $7.5k MRR. You can read all about it here in detail: https://www.starterstory.com/how-to-start-a-graphic-design-website-coding-subscription
SEO accounts for more than 70% of our clients at Draftss.com which is heavily influenced by the content that we write in the blogs. We try to cover content that is relevant to our niche by generally touching the basics of each topic. This has successfully let us rank on 6-12 of keywords relevant to our niche.
You can read all our blogs here: https://draftss.com/blog
-
1
Site design looks great man!
Good job. Very intriguing :)
-
1
Awesome! I wanted to learn how the weekly model has improved customer acquisition compared to the industry standard of monthly payment?
-
1
How long did it take to start ranking? Did you play with the post frequency much?
-
2
Initially, the blogs were pretty inconsistent. It took around 6-8 months for the SEO juice to kick in and that time we were ranking between 3-6 positions since there were not as many players in this niche as there are today.
We did play with the frequency from 1 posts a day to 4 posts a week. It seems like it's not the number of posts that impact the ranking, but rather the quality of content within these blog posts.
-
We added an affiliate program for Draftss.com last month and received a total of 10 affiliate signups from people who came across the affiliate program.
From these 10 affiliates, we received a total of 164 visitors and converted 2 visitors to customers.
How do you get your affiliates to sign up for your program?
What kind of traffic do you get from your affiliates?
What kind of conversion do you get from your traffic from affiliates?
-
1
That's a really good start!
How did you get those 10 affiliates with no marketing? Do they just see the link in the footer? Did you send emails to your existing users?
-
1
Currently don't but I've just registered an account with the tool you are using as we needed a decent one so thank you for sharing.
Pretty excited to be featured in my first podcast about Draftss.com. Had a little chat with @AllanCaeg over remote setup, price-market fit, client communication, and aggressive hiring during Covid-19.
You can check it out here: https://worldpodcasts.com/growing-amid-covid-switching-to-remote-and-client-communication-with-junaid-ansari/
All of us are aware of the widespread destruction caused due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Despite all these measures, there are loss of jobs due to lockdown, loss in demand due to businesses cutting down costs. The most affected are the employees who are taking salary cuts or asked to resign.
After working out with my partner, we decided to help the affected designers by having them onboard with us at Draftss.com. We have already hired 5 designers to the team and have several other designers lined up to get things going.
To generate some extra revenue to support designers, we have slashed our pricing to offer BUY 1 GET 1 FREE deal on our Monthly Design Plan. Pay for 1 month, get 2x months of service. We have opened up 10 slots for this deal. We have covered everything in detail here: https://draftss.com/blog/supporting-designers-during-covid-19/
-
1
Great Idea! I love that your company is helping designers who are out of work. I am launching a remote job board platform this week. If you would like me to include your jobs on my site, let me know, and I’ll send you an email with the listing form and description of my company!
-
1
Thank you, Lauren. I am glad that you appreciate our efforts.
For the designer applicants, we have evaluated 100+ designers this week. We have a certain process and test tasks that we conduct before having designers onboard with us. All of these have been conducted and we have scheduled 10 designers who will be joining us based on the number of plans sold. The more people support, the more we would keep hiring.
Lastly, I thank you for the job board listing, but we are good for now. Although I would love to check out your job board platform once it is live. Do let me know when you launch it.
-
-
1
Are you really hiring or just signing designers up on your platform?
In light of the recent COVID-19 situation, we as responsible members of the community have decided to take strong steps to prevent the spread of this pandemic.
We have enabled a work-from-home facility for all our employees, effective from Saturday, 21th March 2020.
HOW WE ARE BEATING THE VIRUS!
-
The entire Draftss Team is now 100% remote & is ready to handle the workload at the same strength 💪
-
Draftss Team starts 30 mins early & finish 30 mins late to cover the remote communication time 📱
-
We are using some great tools to boost productivity and efficiency while working remotely👨💻 (Loom, Whatsapp, Dropbox, Hangouts, Slack)
HOW YOU CAN BEAT IT TOO!
-
Try and shift to a Work-From-Home model for your company.
-
Get the majority of your tasks done by remote companies to handle the workload at the same strength without any hassle 👩🏻💼
-
Promote remote work. For smooth collaboration use tools such as Zoom, Slack, Loom, Dropbox, Trello, Dashlane 💻
I would love to help if you have any design or web development tasks. We are giving out Promo code - "BEATIT" to get 10% off 💸 use the Draftss team.
Here's a list of full scope of services supported by Draftss: https://draftss.com/unlimited-graphic-design-code-service-list
Just this morning I woke up and read an email from one of our customers who finished their project with Draftss.com yesterday.
Quoting the words:
"Draftss delivered. Full stop. A high level of precision. Rapid communication. The code did exactly what we wanted it to do. I honestly couldn't ask for more."
A few simple words of customer's experience with your service becomes a great source of motivation to get your day started.
I would like to ask other founders, what are your other motivators at the start of the day that keeps you going?
-
2
That is fantastic indeed. Well done.
I love getting good customer feedback email here as well - we get at least a couple a week nowadays. Also nothing better than waking up and seeing Stripe notifications for new customer signups to my SaaS while I was sleeping. I love those. As do notifications from Capterra and G2 Crowd that customers have posted a positive review of our system.
It still feels a little surreal when a customer send a screenshot of our system along with a support request and I have to stop and think: "They are actually using something that came entirely out of my imagination and knowledge out of my head". I feel like a part of my brain has been downloaded into their company and they are using it to improve their business.
It certainly provides fuel to keep on keeping on.
-
2
Thanks :)
Good customer feedback is definitely helpful. Positive or negative, both can be pretty helpful if a founder understands how to make the most of it.
Yes, notifications of new customers are extremely motivating. We (myself & @aminmemon) have built some funny one-liner emails that we receive every time a new customer signs up.
The best one that always makes me chuckle is: "One more client!!! JD we need more designers."The feeling of knowing that someone on the internet is using your product to make his life easier is pretty overwhelming. Being in the design industry, we often come across designs that we have created. At that moment you feel like telling everybody "we made this".
-
-
2
That's very nice, Junaid. I checked your website, your portfolio looks amazing.
Motivators? Pending list of activities keep me going, he he. No, but seriously, love what I am doing ; and when you see so many possibilities around (create, converse, convince, help), can't think of a dull moment.
All the best.
-
2
Thanks for your appreciation. I am glad that you liked it :)
That's true. When having a bulk load of tasks that need to be completed, you just gotta get things done. With motivation or without.
But when you love what you are doing, even work is kind of exciting.
-
-
1
Congrats!
Good to hear you’re making the design and development community more exciting.
It’s rewarding when you see people download your product, talking about your services. Nothing special, just a little template that save people’s time in presentation design.
Sometimes motivation comes from friends and families :)
-
1
Thank you, @felix12777 :)
Definitely motivating to have family and friends who understand and support your vision.
Zlides looks good. I loved the logo icon.
-
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/
-
3
Super inspiring!. Junaid, do you guys do UX/UI for web products? How can I get in touch with you?
-
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 jd@draftss.com
-
-
3
Wow great progress!
-
2
Thank you for your appreciation :)
-
-
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).
-
3
Thanks :)
Absolutely! Unlimited Designs & Code on subscription.
-
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
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.
-
-
-
-
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.
-
3
Thank you for your kind words :)
Sounds great. I'll take a look.
-
-
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
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
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.
-
-
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
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
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
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
Sounds like you have some reasonable customers.
-
-
-
-
-
2
Thats awesome, great work! What's the goal for this year?
-
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.
-
-
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.
Comment