How we launched a web design studio — without a website!

Greetings indie hackers!

It's my first time participating, despite being a reader for a long time. I hope we can share and grow together for years to come!

After 15+ years as a low-key freelancer and 10 years as an academic, I'm extremely excited to launch a design studio with my brilliant partner, designer Mohammed Yarroum.

Our studio is called REKTANGLE. We specialize in branding, websites, and web apps.

We love working with founders and investors, and we've got the experience to help achieve their business goals using design — digital products, art direction, brand identity, web development, technical SEO... We create pretty much everything that you might need from a designer — decks, graphics, social media visuals, websites, icons, logos, typography, illustrations, motion...

We adopted a subscription model for payments and ToC, as well as a request-revise-approve model that so many subscription-based design studios are using. Essentially, we are a design studio ran by human experts, that you can interact with as if it was a SaaS. We love this model, and our clients love it too! It's so much more efficient than the communication-heavy workflow of a traditional design agency.

Our tech stack for this is basically just ManyRequests, built by the brilliant @Vinrob & co. We also use Figma and Notion extensively. That's pretty much it on the software side.

We have been very inspired by the subscription-based model that many designers have been using lately, and learned a lot from @brettwill1025 and others. We do take on bespoke projects too, but we're keen to use this kind of more or less automated system for payments and project management as our main thing. Over time, I'm sure we'll develop our own take on it too, and we'll keep sharing our learnings!

We do consider ourselves apart from other subscription design agencies. We specialize in a particular visual style, which builds on modernism, Swiss grids, mid-1900s typography, bold 21st century colors... We have 20+ years of experience building websites and web apps, and with that a deep understanding of the engineering that goes into digital brands and products. And over time, we hope to differentiate ourselves further as experts and thought leaders, building on my experience as a design academic and creator.

Currently we have one steady client, and close to signing up the second. We're able to accommodate up to 6-8, but not more, for now. So if you're in need of design work, we're happy to talk, though at the rate things are going, we're hoping to be at capacity within weeks!

Now, to the main story...

As you might have guessed from the title, even though we basically sell websites and web apps, we don't have a website!

We love web design, and we're keen on having an awesome, award-winning website eventually. In fact we're already working on it. And while normally I'd put together a website, just get something out there, in time for our launch, this time, together with my partner Mohammed, we decided to skip it. We'll publish the website when it's ready!

That said, we do need to do sales and marketing. We need to showcase our work, and share it with potential clients, whose first question almost invariably is: "Can I see your work?"

So how did we do it?

Instead of a website, we crafted a "prospectus" in the form of a Notion doc.

In it, we present samples of our design and dev work, info on how we work, pricing, our personal links, as well as a Calendly embed where you can immediately book an intro meeting with one of us to talk in person.

Check it out: https://www.notion.so/rektangle/REKTANGLE-PROSPECTUS-91e8c5414c314491a554a932cd6489a5

You might notice that we also don't have a logo! Again, even though we sell logos, we decided against investing our time in creating one for ourselves right now.

In all of this, we have a point:

As I said, we love working with founders. And though we also love finely crafted design, we like to make the point that our design practice is focused on fulfilling the needs of founders, to achieve their business goals.

And not every business needs a logo and a website. We understand this. Logos, websites, and the fine details of visual design are not what makes or breaks a business at the start.

We take pride in properly understanding and fulfilling the real needs of our clients, the things that matter, rather than peddling design work that we enjoy, but you may or may not actually need.

We love talking to and learning from fellow entrepreneurs, no matter if they are potential clients or not. If you have any feedback, suggestions, critiques, or just want to exchange ideas, you can find our contact info on our prospectus, or just hit us up on Twitter as @rektangledesign.

Peace!