He Built a $2M/Yr One-Person Business - Steal His Playbook

1. AGAakash Gupta0:00

   So I've actually never revealed this before, but in the last 12 months, my business just crossed $1 million in revenue. You didn't quit your full-time job until you were earning $80,000 per month.

2. BWBrett Williams0:14

   It was a, a long journey there, a lot of painstaking hours managing my full-time job with DesignJoy. But, uh, happy that I finally had the guts to do it, 'cause I don't do traditional marketing, I don't have lead gen, I don't have pipelines, I don't have a team. It's just, it's just me, right? Been a journey on just kind of believing myself and trusting myself and, like, going, like, full in, betting on my own abilities.

3. AGAakash Gupta0:35

   So for people who don't understand what it is and why what you're doing is different, can you describe that for us?

4. BWBrett Williams0:41

   How designers engage with their clients and how design is sold.

5. AGAakash Gupta0:45

   How do you handle, and is this the hell and back you're talking about, weekends or vacations or just sometimes in life we have slower periods?

6. BWBrett Williams0:52

   You know, I don't take vacations. I'm notorious for that. Really don't even know what I would do with myself on a vacation.

7. AGAakash Gupta0:58

   [laughs]

8. BWBrett Williams0:59

   But now everything is X. You know, that X is where everything comes from. It's the only platform that I have any involvement in whatsoever. Only place I post, share things, interact with people. It's exclusively X today. I'm enjoying having the reach right now, but I see a lot of other people struggling with it, and it's platform risk. It's everywhere. I've had a lot of success on social media way before DesignJoy. [bass boom]

9. AGAakash Gupta1:23

   Really quickly, I think a crazy stat is that more than 50% of you listening are not subscribed. If you can subscribe on YouTube, follow on Apple or Spotify podcasts, my commitment to you is that we'll continue to make this content better and better. And now on to today's episode. [bass boom] So I've actually never revealed this before, but in the last 12 months, my business just crossed $1 million in revenue. We have two people on today's podcast who have created $1 million one-person businesses. Brett, welcome to the podcast.

10. BWBrett Williams2:00

    Appreciate it. Thanks for having me on.

11. AGAakash Gupta2:01

    You're about to cross two million ARR if I multiply your MRRs for last month by 12.

12. BWBrett Williams2:07

    [laughs]

13. AGAakash Gupta2:08

    So you're a little bit further ahead than me, and I want everybody to hear your story.

14. BWBrett Williams2:14

    Yeah.

15. AGAakash Gupta2:14

    And I think it starts with everybody wants to build this one-man business, and I think what both of us did that probably most people don't think of doing is we actually built this business while we still had a full-time job. I didn't quit my full-time job until the revenue from my business had exceeded what I was making as a vice president of product at a unicorn. You didn't quit your full-time job until you were earning $80,000 per month. Take us back to that time period and how you created this business on the side of your full-time job.

16. BWBrett Williams2:47

    Yeah, I mean, um, look, I mean, under the hood, DesignJoy is really about as, uh, lean of a, a startup, if you wanna call it that, as possible. Uh, it's really... It's, it's a lot of just grunt design work. You know, there's not, there's not much going on under the hood. There's not these, uh... Everyone thinks I have, like, all these fancy, you know, elaborate automations set up and this and that, but it's really, uh, it's really a, a landing page, a Trello board that I manage requests in, and my day-to-day is just doing just pure design work. It's a completely output-focused agency, which is very contrarian to other agencies that exist out there. A lot of them are process-driven and, um, and very slow because of that. But yeah, I, um, I had a corporate job, just like many probably people listening.

17. AGAakash Gupta3:37

    [laughs]

18. BWBrett Williams3:37

    Wasn't, wasn't super fulfilling. [laughs] Um, I always had that, like, entrepreneurial desire to, you know, like, screw working for somebody else. Like, I, I just wanna do my own thing, and, uh, but never had, like, the guts to really jump out and do it. Uh, but, you know, I, I had this comfy corporate job that allowed me a lot of, uh, stability, or so I thought. [laughs] Uh, so I, I seized the opportunity, built DesignJoy in a weekend. It was a Friday night project that launched on a Saturday, and Sunday my life was [laughs] was di- was very different than it is today. Uh, and then, yeah, I kept that job, the corporate job, for I think it was about four or five years of running DesignJoy. Yeah. Uh, and then, um, kept hitting those revenue marks that were [laughs] anyone else would've jumped ship a long time ago from their full-time job and went all in on des- on y- you know, your thing if it was making 70, $80,000 a month, but I, that was not me. But I did it long enough. I hit those revenue marks long enough month after month after month that I finally, uh, finally had the guts to, like, start thinking about it. Um, and I got laid off from a job, and then, uh, ab- about the time I was b- about to make the jump, I got laid off from my corporate job, but still was not ready, so I looked for another job. I applied to 60 places. Even though I was making $80,000 a month, [laughs] uh, I still looked for another job, got another job, and then, uh, stayed there for a little while. And then I just woke up one day and was like, "Screw it. Um, let's, let's do it." So I jumped all in on DesignJoy. And it was the most, like... It was the most freeing feeling ever to, to have built something from the ground up that you can now, like, sustain you and your family, uh, was a really cool feeling. And then, you know, things just quickly grew and, and scaled after I, after I went full time on it. Not that I even really changed much about my approach, but it just... The, the focus that I had on it just, uh, it... Like, ev- I think revenue doubled, like, within just three or four months, uh, for DesignJoy. Um, so yeah, it was a, it was a, a long journey there. A lot of painstaking hours managing my full-time job with DesignJoy. But, uh, happy that I finally had the guts to do it.

19. AGAakash Gupta5:48

    I had no idea it was four to five years. That's an incredible amount of time.

20. BWBrett Williams5:51

    Mm-hmm.

21. AGAakash Gupta5:51

    What was holding you back? And looking back, would you have jumped ship earlier?

22. BWBrett Williams5:56

    Yeah, I mean, the thing that held me back the most, it was, uh, the way that DesignJoy kinda spawned into the world.... was very fast. I mean, it was a, it was a tw- it was really 24 hours from like ideation to execution to launch to getting customers, right? It was like very, uh, very minute time in, in history and I, I guess in my mind I'm like, "Well, it could also go away just as fast because maybe it's a trend. Maybe, uh..." 'Cause no one had really done it before. No one had really tested the waters. Maybe it was just something that like s- you know, sparked really big and then just faded away into the ether like a month later. And so I always, it was always in the back of my mind, I'm like, "Okay, no one's done this before. No one's done it like I've done it. Um, maybe, maybe I just had a stroke of luck at first," and I needed, I needed to like actually... It was so unbelievable that I needed to see it continue on for a long period of time before I realized this is actually something that's sustainable, that I can actually do for a, a long period of time. So it was a lot of like, it was a lot of founder insecurity in not having done it before, and I felt like I wasn't deserving of the success that I was seeing. [chuckles] So I thought, thought maybe it'd go away for that reason as well eventually. Uh, but yeah, it's some, it's those things I still struggle with even now having, you know, done $2 million last year. Like, I still have those, those like voices in the back of my head that says, you know, "This thing could die tomorrow," right? 'Cause I don't do traditional marketing. I don't have lead gen. I don't have pipelines. I don't have a team. It's just, it's just me, right? So yeah, there's a, it's a scary world but, um, you do something long enough and you start to, you start to kind of trust the process and actually see yourself for who you are versus what, you know, you think you are, which is this, um, some, you know, incapable, inferior kind of, you know, designer in my case. So yeah, it's, it, it's a b- it's been a journey on just kind of believing in myself and trusting myself and like betting, going like full in betting on my, my own abilities. But yeah, it's a, it was a long time to, to juggle both.

23. AGAakash Gupta7:59

    So for people who don't understand what it is and why what you're doing is different, can you describe that for us?

24. BWBrett Williams8:07

    Yeah, I mean, look, I mean, what I'm doing is not necessarily revolutionary. I would say it's actually the op- the opposite approach of just grossly oversimplifying, uh, how designers engage with their clients and how design is sold. So design, I sell design like I sell, like you sell a product, meaning that like you can go to my website, you see exactly what it is you're getting. Um, it's a subscription, which is a lot of people kind of conflate it with a retainer, but it's, it's totally not a retainer at all. There's some similarities. There's some overlap. But it's basically you subscribe for a fixed rate per month. You can pause or cancel the engagement anytime, so it's very flexible, very budget friendly. Um, it's a great alternative to hiring internally full-time or, or working with kind of in- inconsistent freelancers out there. Kind of get the best of both worlds from like a freelancer and agency perspective. And, uh, you pay, you know, $5,000 a month, which is the base rate, and you, you're allowed one request at a time. So, uh, your request could be a landing page. It could be a, a branding project, like a rebrand or a logo. It could be, you know, a product flow within, with an application. Um, it could be anything really. Uh, and you get that usually within about 48 business hours, um, so to speak. So it could be a little more, it could be less, and I do that across the board for about 20 clients at a time. And, uh, and then, yeah, that's pretty much it. It's like, it's kind of like Netflix but for design is the best way to probably put it.

25. AGAakash Gupta9:32

    And that is really the revolutionary thing is your offer, your packaging, your service, right? Obviously, your design is really good, and that's why people come to you and stay with you, so that's the base. But I think the takeaway here is how you've basically productized yourself. How did you discover this packaging, and how can other people think about developing similar packaging?

26. BWBrett Williams9:54

    Yeah, I mean, I, I would love to say it was like, it was an original idea for me, and it, it, it was in a way but also wasn't. So there was another company that was doing something kind of similar in the beginning, but they were doing it for like very low level design work for like small shops. Like, it was, it was purely graphic design, no web design, no product design, no branding. And but that was one of the things that I took favor with. Those were the things that I felt like I was good at. And so I basically applied that model to, and I thought, "Well, why, why couldn't you do it?" And I'm, I'm super fast. Like, I've been fast since from the beginning of my career, right? Like back, going back to 2009 when I was in college, like I was designing in Photoshop just insanely quickly and having to just crank out a bunch of, bunch of assets every single day. So it, it really kind of groomed me to be able to take on a lot of clients at a time, and I felt... You know, at the same time, like going through it also allowed me to do it as well. Like, a lot of designers look at it and like, "There's no way you can take on 20 clients at a time." And I'm like, "Well, if you do it for two, two years or three years, you'll, you'll start to kind of, you know, get a little bit quicker and more efficient with your craft." Um, but yeah, so it wasn't, it wasn't a totally original idea. How, how I did it and how I sold it online kind of was in a very simplistic fashion. Like, I didn't build my own tool. I just used Trello. Um, I started out charging like 450 bucks a month, which is just nothing, right? Now I charge 5K. So, um, but basically the business is the same as it was eight years ago. I use the same tools, same processes, different price tag. Um, but how I do the work and how I facilitate the work is ex- is precisely the same with drastically different revenue numbers. But, um, yeah, it's, it's like one of those things where it's a pain point 'cause I've been on the other side. I've been a, a, a, a product officer. I've d- but I've done a lot of agency work as well, being, you know, working for agencies, and I've just seen a lot of the pain points of clients working with agencies and just being slow, expensive. Like, if you have a design project but you're also pay- you're also paying the salary of like the dev guy, the product manager, the designer, the CEO, and you... It's just, it's just bloated costs, you know, everywhere. And so, and it just, it just overcomplicates tasks like branding and stuff. It just becomes... It's almo- o- over, over romanticized, over glamorized. We have to go through these 16 different steps to arrive at a logo.Um, so I just cut all that out and like, "I'll give you a logo in 24 hours, you know, and it'll be good. It'll probably be as good, if not better, than those that take six months to do for you," you know? Um, so yeah, I've done a lot of things different than most agencies out there and, uh, turns out there's a big segment of people who want just that. So that's, that's where I am today.

27. AGAakash Gupta12:31

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28. BWBrett Williams14:36

    [lip smack] Well, I mean, there are some prerequisites. I mean, I don't, I don't know-- Look, I mean, the success that I've had individually, I don't know if someone will ever do it quite like I did it. I mean, there's been a lot of other designers in particular who have reached the 100K a month mark in revenue for their subscription business, but they always have teams. It's like always, always, always, uh, always have teams that they, they use to do the work. I don't know that anyone's insane enough to do what I did by myself, right? And I don't, I don't-- I wouldn't, I definitely wouldn't, uh, recommend it because I went through hell and back to get to where I am, and that's not an understatement. Um, but yeah, I think, like, the prerequisite is that you are both good and fast at what you do. That's the two terms that I always use. Like, I am so strict on the type of work that I take on at DesignJoy so that I can be efficient, I can take on more clients, make more money, g- deliver work faster. Like, there's things that, like, i- in the design world that I'm, like, moderately good at. Like, I'm moderately good at 3D design. I'm, like, learning animation. I'm doing all these things, but, like, not enough to plug them into the DesignJoy offering because those would bog down everything else. So, like, if you're a fast, like, thumbnail designer, like, stuff like that, I mean, now with, like, AI-

29. AGAakash Gupta15:52

    Mm-hmm

30. BWBrett Williams15:53

    ... um, you could take on an insane amount of clients with something like that. But yeah, you have to, you have to f- d- define what it is that you're good at, only offer that, set up a price, probably, like, really s- start really low to get, to get people in the door. Um, I always advocate for demand-based pricing, so, like, your price raises as demand increases, and that's, you know, I-- that's why I started out really low at DesignJoy, and it wasn't, it definitely wasn't hard to get clients at 450 bucks a month. Um, and now it's not hard to get f- clients at $5,000 a month 'cause I kind of proved myself along the way. But yeah, it's like, it's really as simple as setting up a website, s- constructing some sort of package around what it is you offer, attach some sort of time deliverable to that, and, uh, and that's pretty much it. Go to market, right? It's like, and then, um, ah, it's really, it's really, it's really that simple. It's just pick things that you're good and fast at, and that's, that's ultimately the key to it. And it's like a lot of people get hung up on the agency part, but it's really, it's, this is really just a way to freelance nowadays. It's, it's really like a new, just a new freelance model. You don't have to necessarily, like, look at it like you're building an agency. Uh, Gl- DesignJoy is just basically a glorified freelancing g- gig for me, if you wanna call it that.

Episode duration: 1:08:59