The Million-Dollar Paradox
One designer. One million dollars in annual revenue. Zero employees. It sounds like an entrepreneurial fantasy, a headline cooked up to sell a course. Yet for Brett Williams, founder of Design Joy, it’s a reality built on a radical business model.
In a candid conversation with Chris Do, Williams peels back the curtain on his design subscription service, a model that allows him to manage 20 to 25 clients, work just six hours a day, and generate revenue that dwarfs most small agencies. This isn’t about working harder. It’s about working smarter by completely rewriting the rules of client engagement.
The journey from a typical freelancer to a seven-figure solo entrepreneur reveals a counterintuitive truth about the creative business. The path to more freedom and higher income isn’t paved with more clients at lower prices. It’s paved with fewer, better clients who pay a premium for a productized, systematic service.
But there’s a catch. Two, in fact. As Do immediately points out, this model is not for everyone. “You must be good, period, full stop,” he states. “And if you're good and fast, because not all people that are good are fast, a model like this could really be incredible for you.”
Good and fast. These are the non-negotiable table stakes.
Escaping the Freelancer's Trap
Most creative professionals operate within a well-worn set of pricing structures. Each one has a ceiling. Each one has a trap.
First comes the hourly rate. You turn in timesheets and bill for the hours you work. The trap here is simple: you are punished for your own efficiency. The better and faster you get, the less you make on any given task. The only way to grow is to work more hours, a direct path to burnout.
Next, you might graduate to project-based fees. You estimate the time and effort, assume some risk, and quote a flat price. Do this well, and you can make more money. Do it poorly, and you end up working for free, subsidizing the client’s project with your own time.
The supposed holy grail is the retainer. A client loves your work so much they commit to a fixed monthly fee, buying your time in bulk for stability and cost savings. But a subscription, as Williams defines it, is something else entirely.
A retainer is about reserving your time. A subscription is about selling a product. It’s a subtle but critical distinction. It’s what business theorist Ronald J. Baker, a frequent subject of discussion at The Futur, calls the next evolution of value pricing. Do notes, “I didn't know anyone in the design service space that was doing it, doing it effectively, and doing it well.”
Williams saw an opportunity. He noticed a company called Design Pickle offering unlimited graphic design for a low monthly fee, using a large team of designers. He asked a simple question: What if you applied the same business model to the opposite end of the market?
“They had nobody before done it for the more premium end of things like branding and product design and landing page design,” Williams explains. “So I filled the gap and launched Design Joy.”
The result is not an army of designers. It’s an army of one.
The Anatomy of a Productized Design Service
The traditional agency model is built on ambiguity. The subscription model is built on clarity. Williams structured Design Joy not like a service, but like a piece of software.
“If you go to, you know, sign up for a piece of software, right? There's going to be a pricing page with some pricing cards and some features associated with that plan,” Williams says. “That's how I sell design.”
His site lays it all out. There is one core plan: $5,000 per month. For that fee, clients get:
- Unlimited design requests. Clients can add as many tasks as they want to their queue.
- Unlimited revisions. Williams will iterate until the client is happy.
- A 2-3 day turnaround. Most requests are delivered within 48 hours.
- Pause or cancel anytime. This flexibility removes the friction and perceived risk of a long-term contract.
This is not a retainer. It’s a product with fixed parameters. The client knows exactly what they’re buying, how the process works, and what the terms are before they ever click “subscribe.” The outcome is consistent because the process is invariable. As positioning expert Blair Enns says, low variability in process equals low variability in outcomes, a concept Do has explored in conversations like his masterclass on budget with Enns.
This productized approach creates a powerful filtering mechanism. Clients who need endless meetings, custom workflows, or hand-holding are naturally disqualified. They see the terms and self-select out. The ones who sign up have already bought into the system.
The financial engine of this model relies on the ebb and flow of client needs. “You end up paying the same amount whether you use Design Joy a lot or whether you don't use it at all,” Williams explains. While no one pays $5,000 for nothing, he estimates that 20-25% of his clientele consistently underutilize the service. They value the access and peace of mind more than the raw output. For them, it's an insurance policy for their design needs.
This is where the model achieves profitability. The busy periods are subsidized by the quiet ones, all under a stable, predictable monthly recurring revenue.
The Psychology of Price: A Tale of Two Clients
The most profound lesson from Williams’ journey is not about systems, but about psychology. Specifically, the psychology of the buyer. When Design Joy began, Williams charged just $450 a month. Today, he charges over ten times that. The work is the same. The designer is the same. The client, however, is a completely different species.
To understand how he can manage 20+ clients, you must first understand the stark contrast between a low-budget and a high-budget buyer.
The $450/Month Client Profile:
- They are not an established business. Often, they are technical founders or individuals with an idea, looking for a cheap and fast way to get a brand or website built. They are pre-product-market fit and cash is their primary concern.
- They are extremely needy. Because their own project is their entire world, they have immense focus on your every move. “They were constantly like on top of things,” Williams recalls. “As soon as I would send them something, they'd be like two seconds in, ‘Hey, here's the feedback.’”
- They are budget and time-conscious to a fault. Their goal is to extract maximum value in minimum time. They ride you hard because every day costs them precious runway.
- They run when done. The moment they get what they need, they cancel. There is no “valley” of low activity for you to make a profit. They come for the peak and leave before the ebb.
Now, contrast that with the clients paying $5,000 a month today.
The $5,000/Month Client Profile:
- They are an established business. They can afford to commit $60,000 a year because they have a working business model. Design is not a desperate Hail Mary; it's a strategic investment.
- They are educated buyers. This isn't their first rodeo. They know how to work with creatives, provide constructive feedback, and respect the process. They speak the same language.
- They are the opposite of needy. Williams notes he has clients who “may request one thing a month.” They have an entire company to run. Your design project is just one piece of a much larger puzzle.
- They trust your expertise. They didn't hire you to micromanage you. They hired you to solve a problem. They let you do your job. “They have a level of trust in me,” Williams says, “which every designer wants and yearns for.”
- They value quality over hours. They aren’t concerned with how long something took. They are concerned with whether it works and generates a return for their business. This mindset is the core of true value-based pricing, as discussed in Do’s masterclass with Ron Baker.
This transformation didn't just happen. Williams engineered it. He realized he was providing far more value than his price reflected, and that his low price was attracting precisely the wrong kind of client.
The Price Increase Paradox
For years, Williams played the volume game. He thought the path to growth was more clients. Every time demand outstripped his capacity, he would incrementally raise his prices. He did this with immense fear.
“I was insecure on what people would actually pay for good design work,” he admits. “I thought, you know, charging 2k a month was a lot.”
His intention in raising prices was defensive. It was an attempt to “curb the demand a little bit and to distance myself from it.” But something strange happened. Every single time he increased his price, the opposite occurred.
“It always had the opposite effect for me,” he says. “I would get more work, but better clients.”
The jump from around $2,000 to $5,000 a month was the most significant. At $2,000, he was a steal. He was attracting clients who knew they were getting a deal and were determined to squeeze every drop of value out of it. It was a market segment defined by scarcity.
When he doubled his rate, he expected the floodgates to close. Instead, they opened to a different, deeper reservoir of clients. “It was an instantaneous turning point in every aspect of my business,” he recalls. “And lo and behold, the clients did not slow down. The demand did not slow down. It increased.”
This is the price increase paradox. The fear for most creatives is that raising prices will price them out of the market. The reality is that it propels them into a *better* market. A market with bigger budgets, more respect for creative expertise, and more interesting problems to solve. You leave the nickel-and-dimers behind and enter a world where clients understand that good design is an investment, not an expense.
“It's okay to leave those behind,” Williams asserts. His success proves a fundamental principle Chris Do has taught for years: if you want higher quality clients, charge more money. Pricing is a positioning tool. It’s the single loudest signal you send about the quality and value of your work.
The System is the Scale
Managing up to 40 clients at his peak and 20-25 now is not a feat of superhuman endurance. It is a feat of ruthless systematization. Williams architected his business to eliminate every possible point of friction and inefficiency.
The entire operation hinges on a few core systems.
First is the workflow management. “I do everything through Trello,” Williams states, a Kanban-style project management tool popular in the software world. Every client gets their own Trello board. The system is dead simple.
- A Backlog column: The client can add an unlimited number of request cards to this column. This is their design wishlist.
- A Current Request column: The client drags one single card from the backlog into this column. This is the task Williams actively works on.
- An Approved column: Once work is reviewed and finalized, it moves here.
That’s it. The “one request at a time” rule is the masterstroke. It is the governor on the engine. It prevents clients from overwhelming him with simultaneous demands. It forces them to prioritize their most important task, creating a single, linear queue of work for Williams to execute. It's the only way the promise of “unlimited” becomes manageable.
Second is the communication protocol. “I do zero calls with clients ever, for any reason whatsoever,” he declares. “I have a zero-tolerance policy for meetings.”
This isn’t a preference; it’s a pillar of the business model. Meetings are unstructured, inefficient, and non-billable. By eliminating them, he claws back dozens of hours a week. Communication is asynchronous, handled primarily through Trello comments. This boundary is not something he negotiates with each client. It’s written into the terms and conditions on his website. Clients who need meetings simply don’t sign up. He built his own personal brand of service, a key differentiator discussed in Do's talk about what successful personal brands do differently.
Third is the design process itself. Williams uses what he calls “assumption-based design.” He skips the traditional, time-consuming steps of wireframing, mood boarding, and extensive ideation. When a request for a landing page comes in, he goes straight to a high-fidelity design.
“I will crank that out probably in about an hour and go straight to high fidelity,” he explains. “I let the design speak.”
This is perhaps the most controversial part of his method, and it only works because of the two prerequisites: he is good and he is fast. His years of experience allow him to make educated assumptions that are, more often than not, correct. “I pretty much can take a request at this point and know exactly, I already have a vision for it in my head,” he says. It’s faster to create a beautiful, tangible design and revise it than it is to debate abstract concepts for weeks.
From Obscurity to Virality (and Burnout)
For four years, Design Joy operated relatively quietly. Williams was steadily growing, making an impressive $80,000 a month. He was a practitioner of “building in public,” sharing his revenue milestones on the platform Indie Hackers, a community for bootstrapped entrepreneurs.
It was one of these posts that caught the eye of Dan Rowden, a well-respected developer and entrepreneur in the indie-hacker space. In February 2022, Rowden tweeted about Williams, sharing his business model and revenue. “He did that,” Williams remembers, “and that tweet ended up going massively viral.”
The effect was immediate and seismic. In a single month, Design Joy’s revenue doubled from $80,000 to $160,000. It was the moment the broader tech and startup world discovered the productized design model. It was validation on a staggering scale. It was also a nightmare.
“I hit like the worst point of my life where I hit max burnout,” Williams confesses. “I was like a literal machine at design... and I burned out. I didn't want to get up. I didn't want to work. I hated everything I did.”
The system that was built for scale had finally hit its human limit. The rocket ship had taken off, but the pilot was blacking out. Faced with a crisis, Williams made a series of brutal but necessary decisions.
He canceled the 100+ sales calls that had flooded his calendar. He doubled his price to $5,000 a month to slow the influx. Most importantly, he refined his client list, methodically cutting loose clients who were draining and difficult to work with, even if they were profitable.
This crucible of burnout forged the business he has today: leaner, more profitable per client, and sustainable. He now works just six hours a day, a testament to the power of client selection and ruthless process optimization. That painful experience echoes lessons from other entrepreneurs like in the discussion about why doing more can break you.
Your Path to a Productized Service
The story of Design Joy is not a blueprint for becoming a millionaire. To try and replicate managing 20 or 30 clients alone is, as Williams suggests, a recipe for misery. The real lesson is smaller, more powerful, and far more achievable.
“I teach people to take on five clients, charge them five thousand dollars a month, and make 25 grand a month,” Williams says. “Which is life-changing money for anybody.”
Five clients. $300,000 a year. Working a few hours a day. That is the true potential of this model. It isn’t about building a massive agency of one. It’s about building a small, highly profitable, and calm company of one.
How do you get there?
First, be brutally honest about your skills. Are you good? And are you fast? If not, this isn't your model. Your time is better spent honing your craft.
Second, define your product. What exactly do you offer? What is the scope? What is the turnaround time? What are the communication rules? Write it all down. Put it on a landing page. This is your contract with the world.
Third, price for the client you want, not the one you have. Your price is a magnet. A low price attracts bargain hunters. A premium price attracts clients who value expertise. Stop playing the volume game and start playing the value game.
Finally, systematize everything. Choose your one tool for project management. Define your one channel for communication. Create a repeatable process for delivering work. Eliminate every decision that doesn't directly contribute to creating value for the client.
Stop selling your time. Start selling a productized outcome.
The opportunity is not just to make more money. It’s to reclaim your time, your focus, and your sanity. It's to build a business that serves your life, not the other way around.
TRANSCRIPT
you must be good period full stop you must be good and if you're good and fast because not all people that are good are fast a model like this could really be incredible for you [Music] all right we are now officially recording so so Brett this is going to be a wild adventure
and I'm in full transparency to our audience who's going to be watching or listening to this later we we have many mutual friends who sometimes egg us on to do things they might say go eat that food or go to this country and sometimes we do it most of the times we don't
but Brett you're one of those people where our mutual friends on the internet said that you guys should have a conversation and I saw your profile I'm like let's talk but beyond that I've not prepped for this call so I'm going to be discovering things as our audience and listeners are going to
find out about them so first of all Brett please introduce yourself and tell me a little bit about who you are and what you do fair enough yeah um so my name is Brett Williams I I really am a designer by trade I've been designing since uh 09 so a little bit um
and I run a not so fairly known agency called design Joy which is a design Subscription Service um so sort of a nuanced take on uh the agency model just spun up in a little bit different of a way um so I've been running it for six years and the the catches I
do everything myself so it's a one one-man agency um at scale of uh of a big of a big agency so um yeah I've been I've been kind of sharing my journey as I've built it and all the struggles and all the successes [Music] um and yeah I got a lot of people
interested in kind of um Minds open to kind of what's possible if you productize design so that's what I do this is perfect when did you make this transition from doing it the way you used to do it to doing a subscription-based service yeah I did it the summer of 2017 uh comment
coming off of a uh inevitable layoff at a boring Corporation boring you know ux UI job working for someone else I was always had kind of the entrepreneurial Spirit if you want to call it that and uh they're at the time there was another agency called design pickle that was doing it for
um yeah subscription based plans for graphic design but there had nobody before done it for the more premium end of things like branding and product design and landing page design so I fill the Gap and launch design Joy I see it's quite interesting so you saw a different way of running a business
and you thought hey that's pretty cool but what if we just did this for a higher end clientele instead of it being an army of designers it's an army of one right so yeah exactly yeah man you got it right yeah um they yeah design pickle has like thousands of employees I have
one yeah I just you know targeted the opposite end of the Spectrum in terms of clientele and the type of work but apply basically the same business model now subscription is a fairly New Concept especially in bespoke service space and so let's make sure we're all talking about the same thing most people
will know several different ways of pricing subscription will be probably the newest one and if you're listening to to Ronald J Baker he said this is the future this is value-based pricing 2.0 and it gave me some examples of it but I didn't know anyone in the design service space that was doing
it doing it effectively and doing well so I think we're going to do a deep dive on this on today's conversation and I hope to learn and unpack as much of this as possible with a person who actually is doing it you seem pretty happy pretty well balanced so he's not ready to
kill himself he's not jumping off the ledge here everybody so it must be working right so we'll learn together with you okay and through your trials and tribulations most people who work call themselves like a business owner an entrepreneur when in fact they're mostly outsourced contractors for other design firms and you typically
would charge hourly and you turn in timesheets and whatever you just bill based on hours that you work then some people migrate towards project-based fees where you guesstimate how long it will take you to do and you assume a certain amount of risk therefore you can charge a little bit more if you
do this really well you'll make a lot more money if you do it really poorly you go out of business because you'll be basically subsidizing the project with essentially low or free work then some of you might get some clients right and work like it's a beautiful relationship they might put you on
what is known as a retainer so retainer is then basically buying in bulk and committing to you a certain amount of money in advance of doing that work because they love working with you so much and so it gives you some stability it gives them some cost savings what is the difference between
a retainer and a subscription or are they different yeah right um in some ways they're the same it's you know reoccurring fixed price but um it's the way that it's it's it's a subscription is a I guess a more um familiar term to those that haven't previously partaken in retainers with agencies um
and it's the whole point of this thing is it's it's productized so it's it's selling design like it were a physical product so the it's a recurring fee it's a fixed fee I pay I I charge five thousand dollars a month that's the only option that you have other than you know quarterly
and yearly plans and the outcome is fixed as well so there's fixed parameters around what you get for that price and then you can pause or or cancel that subscription anytime you want um so it's just a more leisurely way of selling it but in theory it's it has a lot of similarities
between a retainer and a subscription how do you have fixed outcomes so when I say fixed outcomes maybe that's not the right word so um if you go to you know uh sign up for a piece of software right there's going to be a pricing page with some with some pricing cards and
some features Associated for with that plan that's how I sell design so if you go to my site which is design Joy you'll see that plan you'll see that you get you know what I call unlimited requests unlimited revisions two to three day turnaround on requests you get all of these inclusions within
your your package um and then that's that's the fixed outcome part now the actual output and very and the the volume of output is variable depending upon the client depending upon several factors like how how fast they are provide feedback you know how frequently they actually have a design request so you end
up paying the same amount whether you use design Joy a lot or whether you don't use it at all a lot of people say is this kind of like the gym model uh you know where you sign up for an iPhone I have a gym subscription never go right is it kind of
like that and you kind of rely on that um not really I mean no one no one's going to pay 5K a month not use it at all so it's not quite that drastic but there's certainly 20 25 of the client tell who continue to pay that rate per month and and very
Mo like very much under utilize it but they're okay with that because it's something that is there if they need it and they're okay with eating the cost if they don't have don't want to use it so the benefits sort of outweigh the cost of it just letting it run and paying forward
even if they don't have a need naturally otherwise they'll pause or cancel it so as a one-person Studio how many clients can you sell subscriptions to in a given month yeah um yeah it's funny because if you're not familiar with me which you're not um this will probably blow your mind a little
bit and you'll have probably a lot of questions I'm ready to be blown away okay so it's not as crazy it used to be so at the height if you were to talk to me a year ago I was about 30 to 40 clients a month that I was managing and most of
them most of them were um in the technology space most of it's B2B SAS companies that's who that's the the sphere of which I'm I'm most well known in um so I don't do a lot of the other stuff like Ecom and all that uh today it's about 20 to 25. okay so
I'm gonna do the math here everybody all I can say is it's a lot it is a lot yeah that's like this is crazy this is fantastic okay we're gonna have a good conversation today if you on the low end are servicing 20 clients who are paying you five thousand dollars a month
you are bringing in a hundred thousand dollars gross revenue give or take because they might do a quarterly or annual plan it might get a little cheaper right is that the idea or no yeah and I and I have a few clients who are on sort of like retro pricing so they're not
paying the full account so I don't actually track my mrr anymore so I couldn't even tell you what it is but it's I know Michael can tell because I look at everything so you're doing north of a million dollars in Revenue a year doing a subscription model and you don't have bags under
your eyes uh you don't I probably do but I have Lighting on them I probably do for sure let's talk about that dude how many hours a week are you working yeah so today um so it's worth it's worth noting that I I I've this thing took off like a rocket ship uh
about the same time covet happened and so there was about a two to two and a half year period where I was working constantly I have I have three kids I have a wife um I I was pretty much M.I.A it was awful it was the worst and probably best time of my
life um and I was working around 12 to 13 hours a day some it might be a 10 hour day here and there but I was working pretty much around the clock um and today I work about six hours a day so I work less than a full-time gig and make really good
money doing it so what was the big change that you were able to cut your workload down by half and yet still service 20 clients this is kind of unfathomable for a lot of people so you're you're probably wrecked right now everybody so pull yourself together and we'll get into this and we'll
learn how you did it and what we can learn from it okay so how did you cut your workload in half it's funny how it happened I when I it's worth mentioning that I never intended for this to be anything it was literally a weekend project for me um I had a full-time
job until just a couple of years ago I've been doing this for six so it was never intended to be what it is today and um there's certain things that along the way that just sort of took it to the next level on overnight and then um about uh I would say six
or seven months ago is when it really took off um and I I it was a tweet on Twitter by a guy um named Dan Rowden on Twitter and it went took my revenue from 80k a month to 160 a month in a matter of a single month um I and I was
still doing all the work and I to be honest with you I hit like the worst point of my life where I hit um max burnout I was never burnt out before I was like a literal machine at design like I felt like I was a robot I would never get burnt I
loved doing the stuff I crave it like it's it's such a passion for me um and I I burned out and that was the first time in my life if I'd ever experiencing like that before I didn't want to get up I didn't want to work I didn't I like I hated everything
I did um and I just overnight canceled all my calls that I had for you know prospects signing up doubled my rate and um he didn't even allow people to book a call so it's like yeah you're not probably gonna spend 5K a month without talking to me so you know I reduced
the number I kind of like reduce the number of sign ups and cut some clients who were pretty draining and who utilized it a lot and were pretty difficult to work with so I refined my client list and ultimately was left with a client list that was really easy to work with um
I love doing their work their work was fairly easy so it's really a reshaping of my client list is how I'm able to now work way less even though I still have a lot of clients that I work with but um it's also worth mentioning too you know I have so let's say
for the sake of conversation I have 20 clients um when I wake up every day there's probably 10 of them that actually have needs on that particular day and half of those are might just be in like the revision cycle they might just have small needs like revisions of stuff I've already done
and then five of them might have new requests so it's at first you hear 20 clients um and it's not really fathomable but once you actually look at the the specifics of it you can start to see how if if you're if you're faster what you do uh you can you can make
it work but a part of that is also due to the business model which we'll get into as well which I would love to hear your take on it because I think there's gonna be a lot of things that we perhaps May disagree with um there but and it speaks volumes to how
I'm actually able to do it so it's important to summarize the way that you were able to do what you do and cut your workload into half is you uh very intentionally and very purposefully sought higher quality clients so you went the opposite direction which is what most people do which is um
they take on more clients for less money so they have to sell more units of time in order to be able to make that but if they were to double their rates they could work with the same amount of clients and make twice as much money or the preferred thing is to cut
your workload in half and service the ones that you have better spend more time working with the ones and this is a concept that I think a lot of creative people still can't get over I'd love to get your Insight on this because one of the arguments is when I tell people being
efficient in charging hourly punishes you for for being good and they can't get that because there's like no dummy they actually use that kind of language on the internet they'll say no dummy you do the work quicker uh you could just take on more projects so their answer is volume so for the
people who think the answer to growing a business is higher volume and then therefore lower price and just keep just work more and more until you can't work anymore how can you help them understand a different perspective yeah I play the volume game for a good four years um severely played the volume
game at a limit that I don't think really much people can comprehend as a designer and you know um it I wouldn't say it was all bad it gave me like I felt like I packed in 20 years of design experience in just a four year period just based on the volume that
I was cranking out so it did it did contribute greatly to what I'm able to do today um but I realized like I think part of it's an insecurity I think as a designer I don't think I'm the best designer out there I wouldn't say I'm anywhere close to being one of the
best um but I I was insecure on what people would actually pay for good design work like I thought you know charging 2K a month was a lot to charge and you know I looked at the demand that I was receiving and thought well there's more demand that I could manage here there's
more that I than I could ever take on myself and so I just kept incrementally increasing and every time I increase my prices I thought I was doing it to sort of curb the demand a little bit and to distance myself from it and to kind of take on less work and it's
funny enough it always had the opposite effect for me I would get more work but better clients um and the clientele I had today compared to what I had previously is night and day difference on all accounts um that you know I I work that's why I'm able to work as little as
I as I do because they're they're willing to pay they have the budget so it's not they're not nickling and diming you for everything they're not trying to squeeze every little bit of juice out of you every single day because they've got to meet you know they don't have enough budget for another
month right they're they're okay with it just continuing to roll over and they stick around longer churn is less um it's just a game changer all around it's really cliche but um I think most designers would be surprised by how much people are actually willing to pay for for good work because good
work good designers are so hard to find um which is why part of the reason why I even created design during the first place the Rarity of talent is there's designers everywhere but the Rarity of talent is actually quite quite a lot because I think there's a lot of average people who are
just kind of in it for the money they're not really obsessed with it so they do okay but then you take the guy that's like that's quick and can provide quality which is like a combination to be reckoned with like those type of designers are rare so people will seek them out and
pay whatever it takes to get them I mean you know it's not everybody I did close a lot of clients off when I did my price increases but it opened the door to a new host of clients that I never thought I could actually ever attain so um there's a couple things and
I I can't reinforce this enough so I'm going to say this so that people don't get up all of me in the DMS later which is our conversation today is predicated on two principles that Brett has mentioned already so I'm going to say it again so that you know I'm hearing him and
I'm saying it back to you so it's reinforced in you you must be good period full stop you must be good and if you're good and fast because not all people that are good are fast a model like this could really be incredible for you so if you're a person who's really good
but you sit there and you grind on something for like three weeks the subscription model is not going to work because you're going to have a backlog of requests that you can't handle so you have to be good and you have to be quick now here's the thing when your focus and you
know what you're doing by doing what you do over and over again guess what you get quick you develop systems I'm sure you have all kinds of systems built assets ways of working workflow in order to allow you to be quick people have heard me say this before if you want higher quality
clients charge more again Brett has said this there's something weird this is a psychological thing a hurdle that a lot of creative people can't get over like what what do you mean charge more to get higher quality clients something is different about the buyer when you change your prices up into a certain
point now I want to ask you this question I want to dive deeper into this when you migrated from 2K to where you're at now which is 5K a month was there a clear turning point in which when you pass a certain dollar amount all of a sudden the clients get easier and
better yeah I mean that was the jump so with 2K I mean 2K a month to spend on good senior level design work is quite honestly a steal like I felt like I was selling myself out at that rate um at 2K a month uh so the jump at 5K was um again
it sounds really cliche but it was an instantaneous turning point and every aspect of my business um and lo and behold the clients did not slow down the business the demand did not slow down it increased so for whatever reason I mean again like your natural tendency as a designer as a business
owner your fear is to price yourself out of markets not knowing and understanding that that actually propels you into a better Market that is huge and exists out there it's okay to leave those behind now I always I always tell people too if you want to service those lower markets if you don't
have the skill level or the quickness like do what you can do in your own like status where you're at today like and do the best that you can do at it but I felt like I was under utilizing my skills and talents and charging two less for them and providing way more
value um at too low of a cost and you know I saw that in demand like it was crazy how many people wanted to sign up for design Joy uh and at 5K it's still that there's still a lot of demand um but day-to-day business like just day-to-day life and general communication with
clients um the projects that I'm working on they have an understanding of how the process is supposed to work and they're bought into that process and they value design which is wonderful it's not just a part of their business it's a core part of their business and when you work with clients like
that it's a game changer when you're going from 2K to 3K to 4K to 5K it was it just like every time you would raise the rate you found that they're better clients and if if that's a logic and the answer is yes would go into 7 8 9 10K be like even
better yeah I mean I started out charging 450 a month so I've seen the full scale of what what it takes what what clients look like at that rate and what clients look at 5K and I still think 5K is low like for a senior level designer I mean you you're paying what
100 120 in like a normal Market nowadays so 5K 70k a year whatever is still fairly low I could I honestly I could charge way more than that but my stress level would increase so I don't want to go there but I feel pretty comfortable working if you know six hours a day
and making what I'm making but yeah every single jump um and the intention of me raising my prices wasn't to get more more make more money or to get more customers it was actually to slow things down because of the the floodgates like I felt like I was drinking out of a a
fire hose um so every time I did it it had the opposite effect of what am I intended to do um right so yeah it's it is funny how it works and you really I feel like you you can hear it over and over again I know you've taught this I've I've got
this from you for many years um but until you actually live it it's hard for I think it's hard for people to wrap their brain around yes that is such The Human Condition that we cannot hear or concept and understand it until we put ourselves through it like we don't understand the fire
will burn your hand until you put your hand in a fire that burned my hand I'm not gonna do that again tell me help me understand this because this is fresh for you relatively speaking when you're working with a client that is paying you 450 a month for doing what you do because
you're not really fundamentally a different person you're the same person versus the client that pays you five thousand dollars a month to do the same kind of work what are the psychological differences between these two buyers of services let's go down column A let's call them the 450 a month client what are
they like psychological like if we're going to build a profile of them what what is their makeup and this will be very clear if we can contrast the two yeah um I mean they're they're I don't know if this is necessarily psychological but the profile that I would describe those companies as or
the they really most of the time weren't companies they were actually like technical Founders and people just had an idea and they saw design joy as a cheap and quick way to execute um a website a brand or a whole Suite of of assets um and they didn't have a big budget so
they were they were the most needy clients ever like they were constantly they were constantly like on top of things like as soon as I would send them something they'd be like two seconds in hey here's the feedback in order so we can just keep moving on it and um and then a
month goes by budget's up all right we're gone right bye so they took everything that I had poured my you know passion into and then just took it and ran with it which was fine because it's unfair that's what I offered um I offered them the ability to do that and then yeah
I mean that's they weren't bad I mean they were fun to work with it actually was some of the most fun projects they were so random um but they were just so so needy and um I couldn't say really much more than that they like uh like attitude wise and how they treated
me as you know as their designer was was largely the same because I was still in an industry that I felt like respected design now if I were to work with like local shops I mean that tends to be a lot different they usually don't understand how this works um but yeah I
mean they were just far far more needy of of my services some okay let's contrast that now with a client that's going to pay you five thousand dollars a month what is the difference there well I mean first off I have several clients who pay me 5K a month who may request one
thing a month um so and they continue to pay the 5K um but they again like they they value design really a lot they understand its importance and they have a level I think of trust in me as in which every designer wants and and yearns for is that level of trust that
like yeah you can push back but respect me as a designer respect my experience they do that really really well and they're very constructive in their feedback which makes your work much more actionable um you actually know what you're trying to achieve versus when you work with a lot of clients you're kind
of shooting in the dark hoping something sticks so clients are able to communicate their needs much better um again they're like they're the opposite of needy they have requests every once in a while but other than that you know they're good to go they don't stress it and they have the budget to
be able to to work and operate like that and so they stick around way longer they have longer contracts and I don't have to fish for new clients as often now here's a summary of what I got from you and feel free to correct me if I don't understand this but I I've
been talking about similar things maybe not in this description model but let's let's go over to everybody so when you're working with a lower budget client this is like one uh what is it one-tenth the budget so we're talking about a very different kind of person you said these are tend to be
Founders they're not real companies yet they're still looking to validate a business model product Market fit so the psychological profile is they're looking to do things quickly to explore ideas and as soon as they get what they need they need to leave because it's about preservation of cash it's oftentimes they're looking for
cheap down dirty and quick they just need that and because they don't have a whole lot going on they tend to have a lot of focus and attention on the things that you're doing so they tend to express themselves in a very demanding and needy way they're very budget and therefore time conscious
so it's like hey what are you doing tomorrow isn't this we did they're just right on you and the writing you probably the entire time and then they run when done they literally finished the project and they run the whole way that subscription or um what do we call this again retainers the
way that subscription retainers were work is that there are the Ebbs and flow like the peaks in The Valleys like you lose money when you're doing the work all the time and you make money when it gets into the valley where you're kind of chill so these people will come in and pay
you but as soon as they don't need you they cut and run then it doesn't leave a lot of room for you to make profit and I mentioned this they're usually not established businesses let's contrast that with someone who's going to pay 10 times as much well first of all they're they're probably
established businesses because who can afford to commit to sixty thousand dollars a year or more unless they have a business they're educated buyers of creative services and they have less needs and it's not that they have less needs they got a lot more that they're dealing with they're running a whole company in
Enterprise they have different departments and so they're not sitting there looking at you every single minute and they understand because they have a business model that when you give them high quality design and it works the way it's supposed to work they make tons of money so they're not so concerned about the
volume or the or the hours in which you put into something they care about the quality of the product that you give them and every everything that you deliver they're going to feel the benefit of and so by spending sixty thousand dollars they've already made the decision beforehand because it's a lot of
money they need to pick someone and trust them you've heard that expression in business management find someone smart let them do their job and get it out of their effing way they they're also because I said they're an educated buyer they know they've been here before this is not their first rodeo they
know how to work with you they know what the expectations are they know what's reasonable to ask of you and what's not they have a shared language and so when you talk about construction constructive feedback because they've done this before whereas a first-time buyer of creative Services they give you all kinds of
crazy feedback a lot of it's not actionable I think one thing that I that I want to add on to that that helps sort of illustrate the possibility of someone else doing this um and I'm not saying anyone has to do it exactly the way I've done it is one of the luxuries
of productizing something is that the clients who do sign up for your services are already bought into the way that you do things so again if you go to design Joy the way that I run my ship is clearly outline there you're not going to sign up unless you're bought into those philosophies
and some of them are kind of wild like I don't one of the notable things about design Joys I do zero calls with clients ever for any reason whatsoever even if they want to cancel their subscription and they just want to chat beforehand um I have a zero tolerance policy for meetings communication
is is very minimal and oftentimes clients will request something and receive zero communication until it's done so there's there's caveats and there's weird nuances about the way that I run my business that are very contrary to the way normal agencies run things but because I Define those things up front on my landing
page they already bought into it so I don't have to experience clients signing up and then dealing with breaking the news that hey I can't hop on a call with you like they already know those things so it's it's it's advantageous and it helps sort of I guess refine your client base naturally
and protect yourself from letting bad clients get in even though it does happen occasionally but you you minimize that by defining things up front how do people submit a work ticket to you so I do everything through Trello uh so I knew you're gonna say it I knew it I knew it okay
yeah I mean like yeah I mean it's just the most streamlined like it has no no distractions I mean people are already familiar with the way it works so it's a really simple process in Trello and yeah it's it's dead simple and you can sign up for design joy in 30 seconds which
just makes it even more attractive because you don't have to hop on a call with me you don't have to have a meeting um you know I don't know wait list like it's instantaneous access so it it's it's very attractive to to companies okay let's break down a couple of things then then
we'll get into workflow so you're giving us tactics now so if you are curious about setting a retainer or a subscription-based model and you can productize what it is that you do and that you're good in that you're fast we've set up a lot of ifs there then the way that you do
this is you set up a lot of conditions or terms in which to work with you they're called T's and C's terms and conditions and you outline the work process so that it acts as a natural filter to remove anybody who doesn't feel like this is the way they want to work the
way that you're able to do this is if you buy into your program the way it works and the only way that you can do it for 5K a month is you kind of have to kind of work with me in this capacity if you're if you're not I'm not I'm not ready
nor willing to change the way that I work to accommodate one new client it's not worth it to me and it'll wreck your process right so there's an expression that Blair ends says which is low variability in process equals low variability in outcomes so if you don't deviate from the process you'll get
what other people have gotten and they're happy with it and I can stand by that everybody needs to understand that so you need to document and understand under what terms and conditions you will work and you get to dictate that because you get to accept them or not accept them based on those
things what's cool is when they try to deviate you can point back to that not always but you can point back and you can say yeah so that's what we don't do if this doesn't work feel free to cancel let me know yeah yeah I feel like you're I feel like you're a
professional in productive Services um yeah I mean that's that's exactly it and it's it gives you a grounding to to stand on and I I'll be the first to admit when I started out I was freaking desperate for clients I mean I was willing to bend the process in any way I see
fit in order to land a client whether that meant I was working in their own tools or anything or emails sometimes they use different they want to use Trello they want to use a sauna I'd be like all right whatever and that that like led to so many downfalls and I I'd have
to keep that in the back of my mind and I'd make so many mistakes and it just um it made the process of how could I manage 30 clients when each of them had their own unique ways of doing things so in order to like actually scale it and manage it properly yeah
I have a zero tolerance policy for anything that falls outside of my scope of work the type of request I do how I communicate meetings or no meanings um it kind of is one of those things where it's a take it or leave it type of service so I don't I don't bend
over backwards or mend my services and any way shape or form to land any clients whatsoever anymore all right let's just quickly dip into Trello for people who don't know what Trello is it's spelled t-r-e-l-l-o and if you've ever watched an episode of HBO's series Silicon Valley you'll know what I'm talking about
okay now people who work in software ux and UI are very familiar with this traditional graphic designer is like what okay so visualize this in your mind or a graphic will appear here imagine three or four columns you don't want to get too many columns and the First Column is usually to do
this is usually where clients submit tickets for things that they need you to do and then the next one is doing so you the creative would move to do to doing so they know that it's something is happening you can see some progress in in just imagine like like little sticky notes that
are moving from one column to the next and when you're done you move it to a column called to review or for review so it's okay I'm doing it and now it's ready for you and if it is approved and then they can just move it to approved and then you can get
rid of that ticket or they have some notes and then they would put it back into do and so you're constantly just moving cards around and you can't learn five different systems or ten different systems you need it to be one system because there's a premium placed on your time anything that you're
doing that's non-billable hurts you meetings are usually non-billable hurts you client interactions project management not always billable it hurts you so the way that you can work six hours a day and make over a million dollars or something close to it means you have to streamline all of this is that how you
kind of use Trello exactly yeah for sure I mean it's spot-on I think you know um one of the key things that I wanted to avoid and it's all in order to do this at the scale that I'm doing every every decision I make may seem in some regard as lazy or or
you don't care enough but it's all purposeful so Trello is a tool like a tool for me that I feel like again a lot of people already have experience with and there's not a lot of bells and whistles to distract you so when clients get in um they know exactly what they do
I have onboarding cards I don't even onboard clients they just sign up I send them an invite to Trello everything's there for them to understand how this process works the way that mine's set up I have a column that is uh the backlog so clients by terms and conditions are allowed to submit
as many requests into that backlog column as they want think of that as like you're planning ahead column um and then to the right of that I have what I call a current request column so you can drag one of those over there and let and drop it and that's the requests that
you want me to work on you can only have one of those in fact if you drag two of them over there the column lights up in yellow um indicating that and then there's an approved column you can move requests through those three columns in any which way you want at any given
notice and and that's in a nutshell how it works so it's precisely you know exactly as you explained okay before we continue on you said something that almost you just threw out there and you just walked away from but you said within a month you went from I think sixty thousand dollars to
120 000 worth of work because somebody did something on Twitter I mean we can't that that's a gold nugget right there so let's unpack that what happened how did it happen why did it happen and what was the how did how did that result in you doubling your revenue for in a single
month yeah it's crazy I actually went to 160 so it literally double okay 160. um yeah so yeah I I had been running design Joy I would say fairly quietly for the entirety of of its lifespan so since from 2017 on to um last year I think it was February of last year
it happened yeah February so um I was doing moderately well you know making 80k a month and then a gentleman that I've become friends with since named Dan Rowden uh who is just a goat um he's done he's done many many many many products um and great developer great great entrepreneur he actually
um tweeted what I was doing and and kind of what the the amount of money I was making doing it it was just a quick hey this guy's making this much here's his service um I didn't have a Twitter at the time well I did but it was vacant I had never tweeted
before never really logged in and um he did that I remember getting a message on intercom which is the chat tool that I use or used on my website I said hey I've Found You from Dan Rowden I like your server and I was like who who the heck is Dan Rowden and
then I logged onto Twitter saw how it was and then that tweet ended up going massively viral and led to not only an additional 80k in mrr but a hundred plus bookings um the only calls I do for design door are those that are looking to chat for 15 minutes before they sign
up I had a hundred of those booked and those were the ones I ended up canceling when I hit hit the wall that I described earlier so it could have done potentially way more than that had I like either scaled hired a team whatever but I stopped it but yeah literally literally Revenue
doubled within just a blink of an eye because Twitter had finally found out about productized services and it wasn't there wasn't a community there beforehand if you're not active on Twitter how does Dan even know about you was he a client or were you featured somewhere for him to find out about you
and then want to share that tell me about that yeah so I I'm a big building public guy I know there's a lot of debate around that I I've built design joint public since day one um I got inspired to build design Joy by those building in public on a platform called Indie
hackers which if you're not familiar with it I mean an indie hacker to me is just some some guy or girl just bootstrapping their business doing all the work themselves hacking it together to make it work um I I took kind of like Affinity with that community on indiehackers.com started publishing updates around
his own design Joy anytime I'd publish an update it to be honest with you it sounds super vain but like it was usually around Revenue that I achieved because I kept achieving more and more and more and so I published and I think it was a pretty notable thing for our one-man agency
to be making this kind of money so anytime I did publish something it gained some notoriety and he found a post um on there when I hit adk I think it was and he saw that and then tweeted it and that was what it was very good so this is an argument for
many of you who refuse to share transparently uh and and not to participate in the in any kind of PR Outreach marketing social media content because the unintended benefit is Dan Saul the progress or potentially will sell one thing that you shared and he was blown away by the unique combination of you
being a one-person Studio doing subscription-based pricing and being able to do the kind of Revenue that you've been able to generate and he shared it with the public and he must have a pretty decent size following because this is such a radical concept for many creatives to even see or understand that he
shared in a caught and then now it grew Beyond service professionals it was clients seeing this and saying hey this sounds like a great idea we can afford this let's go do it and then you're just overwhelmed with the amount of requests for you to talk to them right yeah and that was
just the like that was just the immediate effect of it um but since then because of that tweet I've been able to grow a following on Twitter I would say it's not as big as yours but I would say a mildly decent following on Twitter um and that's all I do now for
I've never really had to work for lead you know to gain leads and stuff through design Joy of usually did any hacker stuff and that would bring in some leads in in Word of Mouth spread from there but Twitter is the only thing I do nowadays um I tweet once every few days
um usually about design Joy the idea of productive services and gain the following there so most of my clients in one way shape or form come from there okay excellent okay I'm I'm trying to monitor time here I think we have right around 10 minutes to continue our conversation I have to get
into this part where most people are going to be scared where you say okay we're gonna do a retainer subscription model the first fear and it's a well-founded fear which is I'm gonna get reamed I don't use the word reamed I'm gonna get so much work I'm gonna get abused and and how
do I manage not selling it for ultimately minimum wage because I'm doing so much work how do you control that I think your Insight on this is going to be critical yeah yeah I think a lot of people do get scared they they see the word unlimited and they think how on Earth
do you do that for one client let alone 10 20 30 40. um I mean there is a certain level of of of I guess clients that is is too much but the way that you the way that you sort of control that is buy that one request at a time rule so
again like I spoke about early on you take a subset of a subset of a subset of your clients actually have big things going on at any given time um it's somewhat manageable that time but again like it's one request at a time and I I teach people too so I do a
lot of like I just I'm about to launch a course I do a lot of coaching calls with people wanting to do this sort of thing the thing is like I don't teach people I have never taught people how to make a million dollars a year running a productized service that's the wrong
expectation I don't think I don't wouldn't wish that up on anybody to go what I've gone through the last you know five six years I teach people to take on five clients charge them five thousand dollars a month and make 25 Grand a month which would be which is life-changing money for anybody
um and if you can just drill it down to that and make it that simple and concrete it's not easy because I don't conflate being simple with being easy but it makes it seem much more attainable because under this model I mean if I took on five clients I'd be working an hour
a day you know I'd be very very easy to work with five clients under this particular model um and you're able to like treat them really well you're able to over deliver I mean you're able to do daily work for clients at that rate if with that few clients so that's that's what
I advocate for I don't get people to get the wrong idea that they should try to emulate what I've emulated and get 20 30 40 clients I think that's the wrong idea and I don't think that leads to anything that's remotely sustainable unless you to build out a team um but yeah once
you start once you simplify it down to that concept it starts to see not seem so scary and then you can always adjust I mean that that the process of design Joy has been a process of adjusting and evolving and figuring things out and I'm still figuring things out I don't quite have
it all together whatsoever at this point but yeah I think the idea is is lower your expectations and just Target five clients you know there's eight billion people in the world you can find five of them willing to pay what you what you want to charge um and and go from there yeah
I think targeting certain sectors make a lot of sense you had mentioned earlier that it was B2B SAS and and they understand the value of design in the way that you deliver it if you're working in say logo design somebody might not think that it's worth five thousand dollars ever let alone a
month sure so that becomes problematic so you got to Target the right kinds of buyers educated buyers who when when receiving delivery of set services and products that they feel a greater value from receiving that than they paid and they'll stay with you forever if you keep doing that the critical part that
will underscore here is that they can put in as many items as they want in the backlog but they can only put one into a request for you to work on at a time right that's that's the bread that's the critical part it's the only way it works right and then they are
forced then to prioritize and how quickly you can move through this is entirely up to you because there are would you say 48 hours or was there on average a typical size request is 48 Hours yep so then that means that whatever is sent to you you have to be good enough and
fast enough and the task has to be really laser focused so that you can get this thing done because some things as as we all know will take longer than 48 hours and that cannot be something that's part of your services otherwise the whole system breaks down again right no it actually can
so I I you in theory clients could request a design that is uh large in scope let's say an entire website redesign that's 50 60 plus pages in that case I I split it up into two day spreads so I'll deliver a chunk here every couple of couple days and I'll deliver another
chunk and that that request could sit in the current request column for months on the in theory so yeah I don't actually Define it that that that's oh I see okay so if they put on a thing that might be a two-month long project for you it just sits there and there I'm
working on it and do they get any kind of feedback that progress is being made yeah every like I said touch bases are every two days on average sometimes they're daily so it's it's a constant feed of updates that keeps them interested and keeps them happy I don't ever go many days or
weeks without any sort of updates and all of them are tangible updates they're actual designs not hey I'm working on this it's here's this is finished go develop it while I finish this other stuff over here okay so if you're building a complex multi-page website would the first thing be like here's the
wireframe or here's the content architecture and then they get to sit on that and prove that so the one thing that makes my Approach so different and I know that there you could name many con and I could personally this is not how I typically work but through design Joy this is the
way it's worked for me there is zero process in the design uh of anything whether it be a brand whether it be a website so when I get a request in let's say it's a it's a landing page for a SAS company I will crank that out probably in about an hour and
go straight to High Fidelity there is no wireframing there was no ideation there are no mood boards there is nothing I let the design speak I send it to them oftentimes they're good with it maybe they have minor revisions so I've just skipped a bunch of steps that I could have taken that
could have taken a lot more time to ultimately arrive at the same conclusion I would have if I had just jump straight into it so I call it assumption based design so I make a lot of assumptions because I do a lot of product design too which is really risky to do assumption
based design but my whole philosophy is put something out there see what the client thinks see what the users think we can always come back and adjust I mean design is meant to be evolutionary you're constantly improving it constantly refining it and we can skip a lot of the steps and like I
said ultimately most the time arrive at the same conclusion as we would have otherwise very interesting so you skip a lot of steps to get straight into High Fidelity prototypes because you find that that to be the most useful tool in communication here you go here's the design instead of going through 17
different layers here's the design let's talk about it and not talk about it react to it and then I'll go back and I'll revise it as needed right yeah but I think it's all predicated on what you said earlier on on one of the one of the the the the requirements of this
is you have actually have to be good at what you do I mean you have to have a high level of experience which I've I feel like I've had so much experience with hundreds of companies through design Joy alone that I pretty much can take a request at this point know exactly I
already have a vision for it in my head it's just a matter of moving pixels around on the screen and getting it getting it on paper um and so those assumptions like I said most of the time they're they're close and then we just refine it but yeah you have to be you
actually have to be good and you actually have to have experience to approach design in this way and it's not the right way like and under certain other circumstances without outside of a practice service where speed isn't such a a factor certainly there's benefits in in taking those those steps to arrive going
from low Fidelity wireframing Post-it noting like all those sort of steps do provide value but I've learned that through my experience utilizing it I'm able to arrive there much quicker if I just skip all those steps altogether right how many years post-graduation do you think you need to spend in the field working
as a professional before you can get to the point in which you can say with relative confidence I can make certain assumptions about what it is that you need I don't think it's a matter of years I think it's a matter of of two things I mean first off I'm I have an
obsessive personality disorder I obsess over things that I'm passionate about and design has been one of those things since College um that I've just surrounded myself with I've just constantly in taking design patterns and Aesthetics and branding and basically created a repository in my head so that when I have a request come
across the table I I already have a million different directions I feel like I could go with it and I just pick one and run with it instead of instead of wrestling around with Will which direction do I go um so it's it's through design Joy it's funny because the the thing that's
allowed me to build design joy and to what it is is by building design joy and going through it you know I've gone through with designs the scalability that I've gone through and the number of clients that I worked with again most people can't comprehend I can't even hardly comprehend it until I've
gone through it and gotten that experience so it's less about years and more just about how much design experience you have um yeah because I don't have a lot of years of design um but that's not to say that a designer with two twice as many years could do what I do so
it's really just about how obsessed you are with it how much you surround yourself with it how much you digest of it and how much you do of it and less about how long you've been designing is there any objective Benchmark that you could share so that people are like I think I'm
ready for this or I'm not ready at all objective no I mean that's a it's a really subjective kind of question uh and and I don't even know if I'm at the point where I should be doing that I just keep doing it because it's working for me right so if all of
a sudden it stopped working for me and I would get you know I'd start delivering designs to clients and 90 of them would come back and say hey this is nowhere close I would probably have to change the way I approach design but as long as I keep getting the answers and the
results that I want I'm going to keep doing it that way and the more experience I get the the better more refined I get at that and the less revisions I have to come back in that they didn't do so yeah I wouldn't say that like approaching Design This Way should be the
norm for your typical designer out there because no one no designer is really done and gone through what I've done with design Joy um so it's it it you I always tell people take what you want from what I've done and throw away what you don't think for yourself like if this is
not the way you want to approach design work so be it I'm not going to tell you it's the right way or or the wrong way it's just what's worked for me based on my own experience but there's no objective Benchmark I can think of oh very good you mentioned something that you
said you wanted to run the business model and we could debate or talk about it have we already talked about it or is there something that you wanted to specifically bring up no I mean I think it was the it really I mean it was just what we talked about the whole process
because I mean I I think that that I don't get a lot of pushback from business owners on that because they ultimately just want a design piece done they don't really care about a lot of times at least the people I work they don't care about how you get there they're just more
interested in the actual output um but I've known just from talking to other designers that it's not that way because it goes against everything I think you're taught um as a designer whether I didn't go through school I'm self-taught but I'm sure that they teach you not to do this in design school
and I'm sure that you even teach not to do this as well um but that's why that's why I have the caveat that's like under this specific model with this specific designer it works it may not work for you though so I don't know if that's fair enough but um that works for
me I mean your whole ethos is really I've done something it's worked it helps you great if it doesn't don't worry about it do what works for you so it's hard to get upset at somebody because they're they're not you're not being like super prescriptive to saying this is the answer to all
of your problems this is just my answer to my problem and I think by you sharing this I think a lot of light bulbs have gone off in terms of other creatives like I wonder if I could apply this to what it is that I'm doing or I need to start thinking about
that so I I have one more question for you unless something else comes up which is this does your business model work best for you if it's just you or have you thought about scaling and adding people to your team of one so that you can do this at greater volume or to
work even fewer hours that's the million dollar question that I get asked all the time and it's it's a fair question and it's something that I I've evolved with and struggle with for since day one really um so there's many there's many different angles I could take of this I mean at the
end of the day I'm a designer I actually like designing uh I don't really have any aspirations to lead a team manage a team grow a team um certainly being a part of a team super fun I've done that in the past that I would love that in some aspects but as far
as managing people it's not really something I'm interested in um I don't need any more money I make enough money as it is as a one-man one-man band um so it's not a money thing and even from a Time efficiency thing it's not really that either because I only work six hours a
day and I like what I do so there's really outside of those time money or preference there's really no other reason for me to hire a team and and go down that road I'm comfortable waking up in the morning and taking care of myself and my family and that being it yeah there
are some clear differences between you and I appreciate and recognize and admire what it is that you do and I think you can be a great resource for many people so people like you mentioned this you you teach and you do some coaching and there's a forthcoming course if people want to find
out more about you Brett and find out about how they can possibly switch over to this subscription-based model which has many benefits where can they go what do they need what do they need to look at or read or watch yeah sure um I mean I I've been on several podcasts you can
just look up design Joy on Google and probably find those Services I'll do some YouTube videos designjoy.com is my site that's the the service I sell and then um I'm on Twitter Brett from DJ uh is my handle and basically share the ins and outs of running design Joy um and try to
teach people that there are alternative ways to doing this the whole design thing um but yeah and then I'm launching a course on I think next week uh sort of running through the blueprint of what I've done to build design Joy um good and the bad and what I'm still trying to learn
so it's kind of a tell-all if so to speak how much is the course uh it's 150 bucks and I've had 1600 people sign up for it in the last month so it's grown quite a bit long larger than I thought so now I'm about to have about a thousand competitors in the
space which is great like you said there's eight billion people there's there's really not that much yeah I'm not I'm not I'm not I'm joking I'm not worried okay so 1600 people have signed up for this 150 course I think that's a bargain so if this conversation turns you on I'm gonna suggest
you do a couple things one go go look up Brett on designjoy.com go search for his name and see what he's written about talked about and you can probably see a bunch of things if I go to designjoy.com will I be able to find where this course sales page is no um the
course is called productizeyourself dot Co that's the course uh URL perfect okay wonderful well congratulations that's a that's a crazy successful launch there well way bigger than I thought yeah I don't know how I did it just happened thanks to Twitter the algorithms favor me right now so I'm gonna eat it up
yes well I think I know how it happened you are one of a very few people that I think can say that this is what you do and you feel you figured out a system your your first in your your early and you're doing it well and you have a lot of attention
around this so that's what first movers get to get the benefit of that and and what was interesting to me was where this all began so say what you will about these companies who have thousands of designers working for them like design pickle you just looked at the business model and you said
you know what it's not all bad the parts that I don't like I'll change and I'll try it and you started out pretty humbly at a very very low rate of like 450 a month and now you're up to five thousand dollars a month so you didn't just jump way past where you
think you could deliver and that's a mistake a lot of people make too they're like okay and you said this too if you charge a lot more it would bring different kinds of clients different expectations and would bring a certain level of stress that you may want to get to one day but
oftentimes I see people fail because they have zero proof they don't know what they're doing and they're going after things that are way too big their eyes clearly are bigger than their mouth and their stomach and so there's a lot to unpack from this episode anything else we need to talk about no
I mean you're yeah you're spot on no I think you pretty much got it okay at all well that was this is wonderful this beautiful I believe your name has come up several times and then I think I lost track of it so I'm just super thrilled that we are able to finally
have this conversation because I do need to talk to more people that are in the creative service space like you who are doing well productizing and doing subscription whenever I hear of a successful entrepreneur who's a creative doing really well in life I could not be more happier like my my my my
soul is filled with joy I'm smiling on the inside and on the outside because I just like it when people crush it and you seem like to be a good guy doing the right thing at the right time in the right place so I wish you continued success thank you very much Brett
for coming on the show today thank you man it's been a dream appreciate it foreign
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