WhoKnows Agency

This year I kicked off a design & marketing agency with my best friend. We didn't really know what that meant, at all.

After 6 months doing it full time and investing 101% of our energy into it, things are slowly transitioning into a bit less of a freelance thing, and a bit more into a business mindset.

The truth is we started as a couple of freelancer kids doing creative work for a very cheap price, for a few companies that couldn't afford a real team.

6 months in, and I'm setting my mind a bit more CEO-oriented, trying to get away from that type of clients, and trying to involve myself into a space where small and medium sized businesses are in.

Since May, we've been able to consistently pull in at least $3k as a monthly revenue, which sounds killer.

It's funny since our actual incomes are not growing much, because we're outsourcing every day a bit more work.

But that sounds great, right? We're slowly building a team, and slowly delegating as much as we can, in order to do focus on one thing: scaling.

After trying to set my mind into a bit more of a CEO-oriented mindset, I'm currently working my way to pull in $50k in revenue by the end of the year, in order to build a strategy to scale 100% in 2020, reaching $100k.

In order to do that, I'm trying to get higher ticket clients, and that means scaling from selling $1000 websites to $5000 ones. Transitioning from $500 a month ad management retainers to $1000 ones.

We'll see how things go!

Last month I shared that, for the first time, we reached $2k/pm in revenue at WhoKnows.

That was, indeed, great.

But one of my biggest thoughts was: what will happen next month? Will we be able to mantain it? What about even scaling it? What if everything collapses and we make way less?

Obviously our main goal was scaling it. We tried. But we failed.

But it was a beatiful failure, because we were able to mantain the number, and make a bit over $2k again. And that was HUGE.

For the first time, we were able to say 'this is slowly getting stable'.

We've been using two apps to manage finance. First and mainly, Wave. It's a free tool, built for small businesses like mine. It's an accounting software and works like butter, straight in the browser. Secondly, we've been using a beta app called Incomee, built to track income as a freelancer. Every month I just tap the app on my phone and check how much I've made from the agency.

Things are slowly working for the long term. Let's see what april brings!

During the past month a lot went on at my agency, specially around the outsourcing subject. Basically what happened is that we got so much work we had no choice. That thing we've been trying to avoid finally became a fact.

Now, there's a hole lot around outsourcing. As creatives, sorry, as selfish creatives, we want to be on top of things. We don't trust others. We think we are the only ones able to solve our client's problems. And we think our reputation is in danger if we hire someone to do the job for us.

Only a few months ago, this was my thinking: if I outsource or hire someone to do the job, I'll loose time by managing that person and the project, I'll have to explain everything. It's easier to just do it mysfelf, I now it will be good at least. And I'll loose money.

On the other hand, now things changed a bit on my mind side.

Yesterday a new member of the team sent us some work and I was blown away by how happy I felt. Not for the result of the work itself, but for the relief it caused me. There was someone on the other side doing stuff for me, while I could worry on something else.

What a few months ago was loosing money, now was actually saving money or, eventually, making more.

Suddenly we had so much work that, in order to keep scaling the client list and projects, we needed to start outsourcing. No excuse.

And here's the bigger part: you just can't spend 120 hours a week working. It's impossible. Period.

But you and your team all together can. If 3 people are working 40 hours a week, things get easier. You can focus on only one project during those 40 hours, while the rest of the team can do the same thing, on different projects.

I knows this sounds silly, but it's hard. At least it was for us.

Now we cannot wait to outsource even more work. Yesterday we signed a new client for a Shopify redesign work. As soon as I saw the payment notification I thought 'I need to outsource some of this'.

While a new member of the team is working on that project, I'll be able to manage every project, get new clients, talk to the retainer clients, and maybe start focusing once and for all on things like growth, scaling and content marketing and strategy for our agency (which are things I haven't worked on at all, everytime I'm about to start working on new stuff, we get a new client and I sit my ass to work on that project).

A few days ago we received the last payment of a new client, taking us to over $2k a month in revenue.

For the first time, we were able to outsource a big chunk of a project, since between my co-founder and I we just couldn't keep up with everything (good feeling).

February was a great month for us, since we met a ton new leads through referrals. And something quite funny happened: we got a new lead from a retainer client we've been working with for the past 4 months. That new lead, before even paying us for work, referred to TWO new leads (all of them are already new clients for us).

So yeah, big month of onboarding new clients and projects, slowly outsourcing and making more revenue.

Next challenge: mantaining that $2k of monthly revenue in march, and scaling it with a couple more leads.

After working as freelancers and getting clients, my partner and I decided to launch WhoKnows as a full service design & marketing agency.

Today marks the day we're hitting 1k as a monthly revenue (being based in Argentina, it's not so bad. A $1k salary is a good decent one for a person living here).

We've been trying to not only get retainers and projects on a monthly basis, but also get fixed-rate projects at the same time.

Right now we're working on a Wordpress update for february so we can kick off a retainer marketing strategy in march, with the same client. And those are the types of projects we're trying to get: website/store/product first, then marketing strategy (funnels, ads, social media) on a retainer basis.

We'll see how it goes!

Today we're launching the website we've been working on for the past month. It's a small 4 page site, additionaly containing 4 case-studies from a few projects we did throughout 2018.

For the moment, we're launching everything in spanish (our native language) since we're mainly focused on getting clients from Latin America.

Still, the goal of using Indie Hackers is not only documenting our growth process as a B2B business, but also sharing with this wonderful community how two 22 year old guys go from full-time freelancing all the way to full-time owning a company and scaling a team.

In case you are curious enough (or you speak spanish), you can check out our site at thewhoknows.com

After two years working as full-time employees and freelancers, me and my best friend decided to go all in into a digital agency. The goal is transitioning our freelance careers into a two-founder full service design and marketing agency.

Right now we're kicking off branding work and a design sprint to get the business model and long term goals clear.

We'll be working for two months on the brand, the site and some case-studies so we're able to launch sometime in january.

While we do this, we will keep working as a freelance team with the clients we've been getting for the past months.