Growing a product part-time to $12k/mo as a solo founder. AMA!

This week I'm interviewing Carsten, the founder of Design Buffs, a productized service to hire pre-vetted designers. Design Buffs is currently making $12k/mo. What's interesting is that Carsten is the solo founder of this product and he's (still) focusing on it part-time.

Carsten also mentioned some really interesting growth tactics for how he got Design Buffs to where it is today. Let's get started!

Hello! What's your background, and what are you working on?

Hey, I’m Carsten - I’ve been in the startup growth and marketing space for over fifteen years, specifically focusing on B2B industries. I started my career in sales, where after five years of Enterprise software sales, I wanted to climb up higher in the “funnel” and opted for marketing. From there, I went into growth roles and learned everything I can about growing and scaling SaaS, and I love it. I built a couple of side projects with no-code tools and love the Indie Hackers community.

My private life revolves around being the daddy of a three-and-a-half years old Sidney-Kristian. I’m married to a wonderful wife and live in the Berkshire countryside here in the UK.

Today, I focus my time on building and growing DesignBuffs and working as a consultant for product-led SaaS companies. I love the constant learning and working with founders.

What motivated you to get started?

As a marketer myself, I know that design and creative bottlenecks are part of our job. You can either wait weeks for your in-house designer to come back to you (trust me, I’ve been there). Or, you have to hire an agency who can’t be bothered dealing with the small stuff (ie ad design, blog headers, social media graphics etc.) or are way too expensive.

The last option is to work with freelancers. These folks may be super talented but good ones are also in high demand. Sometimes, freelancers lack the processes and systems in order to serve clients best. Others are flakey or lack communication skills. Of course, others are great.

But we fit right in the middle here. If clients don’t want to deal with any of these, they come to Design Buffs. We’re a systemised service, powered by software, that helps B2B marketers get designs done at scale, without adding headcount or breaking the bank.

What went into building the initial product?

Initially, we had this massive stack of no-code tools stitched together. We used Trello for project management, Stripe for payments, Slack for real-time collaboration, some other tool for the client portal, HubSpot for marketing automation, TypeForm for surveys and a lot of elbow grease into making all of these integrations work seamlessly together. One year in, we decided to go with a dedicated service request platform which makes submitting design requests, communicating with designers, and leaving reviews much easier. The primary part of building a systemised service goes into building out systems and processes and that’s what we started early on.

How have you attracted users and grown Design Buffs?

The first phase of getting users was through cold emailing and pitching on LinkedIn. Once we got our first few clients, we had loads of Word of Mouth. We then started focusing on SEO (although, we still have so much more to do here) and created one super valuable article on LinkedIn Carousel Posts which ranks #1 on Google.

This article itself gives us loads of new leads each month, believe it or not. With the article about carousel posts, we really found an underserved keyword opportunity and none of our competitors was writing about this. We involved loads of LinkedIn experts and co-created the content so by the time it was ready for publication and distribution, everyone was sharing it on Linkedin and other channels which gave us immediate traction. It just shows that quality content matters and if you can help answer people’s questions in the best way, you never have to worry about optimising for Google in the first place.

Moving forward, we’ll be developing services subpages for our website and then feeding long-form content to these pages to create content silos. For example, one service page may be high-intent pages like “presentation design services” and then a blog post-feeding to this page could be “12 fonts you can use in your presentation design”. We’ll also be working on our off-page SEO, so building links on external sites.

We also built side projects within Design Buffs early on. For example, we built a Zoom background generator thanks to the awesome API by Bannerbear (I wrote an article on Indie Hackers about this a while ago). This generator gives us very “cold”, top of the funnel leads which we nurture further or reach out on LinkedIn when we think they fit our ideal customer profile.

We launched this side project on Product Hunt, and while we didn’t end up on page one, we’re still getting lots of traffic and are building awareness.

What's your business model, and how have you grown your revenue?

We’re on a monthly subscription model and have two different plans (Essential and Growth). Our clients, primarily B2B marketers in scale ups and creative agencies, get 2 hours or 4 hours per day for design services.We have a dedicated team of creatives, from illustrators to graphic designers, UI/UX designers and motion designers, so clients can be reassured they get the right person for their jobs to be done. Initially, we were super cheap (like 350 USD per month). We kept increasing our pricing and had no complaints. We further increased our pricing and had zero complaints. Today, our Essential plan starts at 849 USD per month and our Growth plan starts at $1,499 per month.

What are your goals for the future?

We want to launch new services and products targeted at the needs of B2B marketing & creative teams. We further want to develop our SOPs (standard operating procedures) and operational efficiencies and scale our marketing & sales.

If you had to start over, what would you do differently?

I’d focus on a much smaller niche within the large design market to get the initial traction faster. It’s really about hitting product-market fit and doing things differently or serving under met needs. I’d also focus more on customer development early on. It really is the single most important thing a startup can do.

Have you found anything particularly helpful or advantageous?

The more we niched down, the more successful and focused we became. The more focused we became, the more we could charge. Differentiation is key.

You can connect with me at any time either here on Indie Hackers or via LinkedIn. I suck on Twitter, but let’s connect there anyway. And then, obviously, if you wanted to learn more about Design Buffs, you can go to Designbuffs.com