Transcript

00:00 This guy makes 1.3 million dollars a year with a business model that's going to change the world. The productized service. He invited us into his house to show us exactly how it works how he runs it with zero employees and how he does it all from the comfort of his own home. Brad started building this idea while he was working in nine to five and the crazy part is. He didn't quit his job until he was making eighty thousand dollars a month. I did all my work during my zoom calls that I have with my team. So the secret behind his business is a pricing strategy that nobody is using and we're going to break down why this is making him one of the highest paid solopreneurs in the world. A lot of people say it's like the Netflix of design in this video. He shares everything how he lost in 24 hours how he got his first client and how anyone can build a life-changing business while still working your day.

00:49 Job I'm Pat walls and this is starter story all right. It's absolutely amazing what you've built can you tell me exactly what you do and how you make money yeah. So I sell basically design as a subscription uh. It's kind of called a productized service which basically means that I sell packages for clients to you know Pick. And subscribe to it's about five thousand dollars a month. They get you know certain number of things and I don't have any contractors. No employees never have had any sort of help whatsoever. So you tell me you run a 1.3 million dollar a year design agency all by yourself how exactly you set that up. It's really pretty Bare Bones so what I do is use your subscribe to my service. Basically every client gets a Trello board.They get immediate access to it which is a big selling point of a product service and they can begin in putting design requests into the queue and they're basically worked on one by one that work on a request for a client. Every couple days may take 30 minutes to an hour to complete. Send it to them go through the feedback stages and then rinse and repeat essentially so I do that for all 20 clients. I also don't have any meetings with clients so once you're on boarded. You know there's no Zoom calls. There's no even really any slack communication. Everything happens async which allows me to basically dedicate my entire day to just design work and that's it take me through the process of when you came up with the idea and then getting started with it.

02:11 You know I always kind of want to go into freelancing. When I started agency I knew I didn't want to work for someone else. I had done that my whole life wasn't that just wasn't for me and I happened to come across another agency doing something similar to what I'm doing today they were doing it for graphic design. But I was a web designer. I did landing pages and product design. I thought I could take what they do apply it to what I'm good at and just make it the the highest quality option out there. So it's basically just taking an idea that already existed in making it better and I built it in a day built it on a Saturday. It was essentially just a webflow one-page site that I stood up and set up a Trello board kind of structure. I launched it on product and which is you know a pretty cliche way of launching a product. But yeah it was. It was a pretty simple. It probably took me six seven hours to build and that was it and did you have a full-time job. At that time. I had a full-time job for three and a half years running as I enjoy. I quit when I was making 80 000. A month and um I joke because I did all my work during my zoom calls that I had with my team so but I did get all my work done. I just you know I I was more focused on design joy and it got to the point where I looked back. You know three and a half years later thought okay. Maybe this actually is something that I can sustain so I finally made the lead yeah all right.

03:24 Brett so most agencies charge by the hour. But you're doing something totally different a productized service. Can you tell me more about that yeah. I mean it's it's basically like instead of charging hourly or having to like quote individual projects and write up proposals for clients. I'd have off-the-shelf packages that people can choose from and all of them. You know include unlimited requests which means you know you're not charged per hour and you pick a plan. No matter how much or how little you use it you end up paying the same price. A lot of people say it's basically a retainer well. Not really a retainer could be anything in your still tracking time and you're technically paying by hour even though it's packaged up to a fixed price but the way that I work is you know. I have some clients that end up paying five thousand dollars an hour if they have one request or 300 if they have several so just the hourly rate depends on you know how many request clients have how can people like you were before in your nine to five job take their work and productize it and build a business.

04:17 Like this I would say like my advice to someone actually wanting to do what I've done is no matter what industry you're in so if you're in content writing if you're in video production or maybe you just create YouTube thumbnails or if you're in design find the things that you're good at and Niche down like for me. I'm a designer which means I could technically do a lot of things. But there's certain things that I'm good at and that's like you know branding product design landing page sign. I don't really really worry about the other stuff because I'm not fast at it so like find the things that you're fast at build a package around it like bundle. It up come up with pricing that that makes it attractive but also makes it worth your time and then just stand up a website as simple as that yeah. Let's talk about costs to run a productive service what kind of tools do you use what do you pay for and how much does it cost to run this business yeah. So it cost me precisely 176 dollars a month to run design Joy so I use figma for design webflow you know hosting Adobe and Shutterstock which is um 100 bucks a month by far my most expensive tool that I use so everything else that I use which is a number of tools including Trello and airtable. I use is basically the free versions of it yeah. You haven't spent a penny on marketing. How did you get clients when you first started and how do you get clients now yeah. So I took the route of you know for those unfamiliar with it. It's called Product hunt if you come off a new product you can post it on. There it has an uploading system tons of hits per day.So if you're if you're mildly successful. You'll get some interest in some clients right away. So I took that route and I eventually again started like building in public joining a bunch of communities. Today. My primary means of getting leads is like basically anytime I tweet so Twitter you know came on board for me. About a year ago. I was very late to the scene you know I built a mild following on the platform and you know that's basically where most of my leads are generated today.

05:59 You're a creative guy. You have lots of little side projects and you do more than just design. Joy. How do you come up with new ideas and test them quickly um. I basically do the bare minimum possible. So I I Know Myself quite well you know with design. Joy like I said it was a day just launched a website a one-page site with scribbles. It was like a six hour project right um with my course I just like winning my car recording some audio files and uploaded them and that was it so I'd rather do that than spend weeks months building something that may ultimately fail and waste a bunch of time. I'd rather just release something minimally viable out there and see if it bites and if it does then I can figure things out from. There all right real quick on the topic of winning ideas. I have to tell you about the business that I built it's called starter story and it's literally 4 000 ideas case studies and courses about how regular people built online businesses to millions in Revenue you can get a ton of inspiration from these days but we also show you how much money they're making how they came up with their idea and how they grew their businesses to Millions. It's only one dollar to try it out for seven days and yes you can cancel it. But if you're serious about surrounding yourself with successful. Founders who have been there before then definitely check it out at starterstory.com I put the link right below in the bio if you want to try it out back to the video with Brett.I hope you enjoy it. See ya how can other designers or people that want to get into design get good like you. Yeah. I think the big thing. It's not fun to hear but the big thing is just doing it. You know I did not go to school for design. I basically taught myself how to do it. And I was you know in design programs all day long basically mimicking good design that was already out there. So I got to understand the tool very well. I got to understand how to get get to that end result. I surround myself with good design. I'm constantly seeking it out. I'm constantly on like dribble and all these landing page inspo sites and following good designers to kind of stay on top of what's in I did fake projects like I would find a project and like Rebrand it or redesign as long as you're doing it as long as you're in figma like pushing pixels every day you'll eventually get there.

08:03 What's a typical day in the life for a solopreneur so for me. Uh it's it looks like this I mean I wake up about 7 30 in the morning my wife goes to the gym I usually watch the kids till about 10 30 which you could look at as like as a curse but like I look at his Blessing because that's the time I get to really like dedicate my time and spending with them. So I I don't start work until about 11 30 to 12 and then I work till about four to five o'clock in the afternoon and then spend time with the family and changing diapers and doing you know that sort of thing watching TV just pretty boring stuff. We don't really go out and do much you know it's hard to with a baby in little kids. So we pretty much stay inside um but yeah that's about it do you have any sort of routines or anything like that that you like to do routines. No like I'm not a good time manager like surprisingly like you would think that I would be doing this but my Escape so like one thing I like to do is every Friday night. I like to play video games with my friends back home like family like my uncle brother like a bunch of us get play video games but that's basically the only routine that I have other than watching the kids in the morning and working from that time period.And that's that's pretty much. It man all right our final question that we asked to all of uh the people that we talked to if you could go back sit on Brett's shoulder when you're first getting started what's the one piece of advice that you would give to him yeah.

09:23 I think for me. Uh I say this a lot I mean I'm a pretty insecure entrepreneur. I don't think I'm alone in that I'm I may come across as a confident person. But I'm really not like I I see myself below a lot of people. So when I when I when I create a design Joy I mean there's a reason why I kept a full-time job until I was making 80k a year like. That's how insecure I was at actually making this work and so that brought on a lot of stress like what if this doesn't last like what am I going to do what's my backup plan um. So it helped me it held me back for a long time and put a lot of like strain on my back um. So I I would probably tell them like to believe in yourself and like you're capable of doing this doing it and believing that you can as corny as that sounds is what I needed all along because I I was like I've almost picture design. Joys like I equate it to like a shooting star like it happened so quick and I felt like it could dissipate so quickly too so.They prevented me from making that leap and like and when you when I made that leap my recipe double the next month like when I left my job to take on design Joy full time it doubled next month like I wasted so much time like double efforts like keeping my main job and keeping that job that like if I just had confidence myself I could have like been where I was today like two years later or two years ago. So it was cliche as it sounds. It's what worked for me cool well thank you Brett do design work. You'll have a Porsche.