$1M+ Revneue | 2 employees | Nick and Alex Founder
This guy left his design job at Meta in Dec 2022 while having only 2 months of runway left. He had no money to burn, only money to be made. He released his first product moveVirtual but later shifted to subscription design agency, which he is more passionate about. He started with a $9 Design kit and pivoted his Idea multiple times and grew his subscription design agency to $1.2M per year.
With no idea, what to do and where to start. Nick started posting on X. During the process, he discovered the Indie hacking community and started engaging with everyone. This engagment, helped him to gain some confidence and was all set to earn his first dollar online on X.
Getting to stand out in million of designers on X was hard. So, he provided his design knowledge for free to the community. For instance- he started roasting designs on X as a way to make connections with the indie hacking community. Helped developers for FREE to make them understand the value of good design.
In the process, he made $250 through roasts and he was over the moon. Then he launched a mini design subscription called Dough for 15/m which failed, and he quickly moved onto $9 indie design Kit and it was an instant hit!
🔥 Roasting 2023
— Nick (@MrNick_Buzz) December 30, 2023
👨🎨 50+ Design Roasts
🤑 $350k+ direct revenue
👀 5+ Million Impressions
🎯 300+ organic leads
1 Final roast to end 2023!
Who will it be?
Leave a comment below and I will be picking “one” website to roast to end this year!
Knowing or unknowingly, I started… pic.twitter.com/C5HqeTWp6F
Around end of March he started to interact with Alex and he asked her if she was open to helping him out on the indie design Kit launch and She said yes. They quickly made the landing page through drag and drop builder and started selling pre-orders. They made $6k on pre-orders and it was amazing to seeing all the support from the community.
🧰 Indie Design Kit:
— Nick (@MrNick_Buzz) May 10, 2023
💳 186 pre-launch orders
💸 $1,674
📣 Indie Design is Launching on May 15th!
Support us on Product Hunt
👉 https://t.co/ceHHRgae6S
Since joining Twitter back on Feb 4th, I found myself sharing my design knowledge through re-designing indie apps & landing… pic.twitter.com/Sgnb2a3HZH
Now, Nick and Alex are a team. There focus was always to charge cheap and incrementally increase your offering.
They launched GetBaked, a one-time design service for indie hackers priced at $50 for a landing page. They slowly increased it to $75 > $100 > $150 and max $350 when they finally closed the shop in July.
This time around they launched a dirt cheap design subscription agency priced at $50/m and $150/m.
At its peak they made around $700/mm Same month they launched another mini project called “TinyUIs” because someone said they should in one of their roast design posts.
In July 2023, They launched a premium design agency with no portfolio, Stripe button and $4k pricing. No one bought it and they didn’t bother spending too much time on it. But Alex didn’t give up, she spent the next 2 weeks building baked website and shared the live website with him.
Nick never believed Baked would work, with so many other design subscriptions in the market. He even thought about hiring a lead generation company as they never charged beyond $150/m and now they are asking $3000/m.
They didn’t go in that direction, instead they focused on roasts and organic lead generation and it worked. They got their first lead on their calender but they never showed on call!
Our first lead never showed up on call, so Nick DM’ed and he was sorry! later, they went on the call and He ended paying $4,000/m and kickstarted the entire Baked journey.
There free roasts helped them generate some organic leads and they went from making $18k to $35k/m and things started to fall in place. Their focus has always been speed and quality, so they solely focused on it and worked towards it as a team.
This was a lightning moment for them. They scaled their agency from $35k to $80k/m and they were freaking out on the hyper growth they had. Constant flow of leads and they were closing every single lead, posts on X, MRR posts and roasts have helped us grow even further.
They both were working 16-18hrs a day and providing 24hrs support and taking calls (Thanks to Europe and American time zones). The next month they achieved $80k to $120k/m, this metric was unattainable for them when started tweeting on X back in February 2023.
Nick, was expecting the baby this month but he didn’t knew that it would be this unexpected. He was 15 minutes into a Spaces session by @RossHatton on X, his wife started having pains and was about to deliver about baby!
He rushed to the hospital and everything went well. He ended up taking a back seat, while Alex took over the work and communication with the clients.
This was the time he realized how important it was to have a partner whom you can trust!
He was still focusing on his wife and the baby, while they had a huge growth last month. They need a team to manage their clients and maintain the quality of their work. So, they started hiring designers and it was a challenging period. They had to hire and fire a lot of people as their portfolio and real work didn’t match.
They have started forming a good team that did good work. Sorting through emails, portfolio and design tests was not easy, but somehow they found amazing folks who are still with them to date.
On March 2024, it is their 5th month making $100k+ month over month. It isn’t easy and they are still learning every day on how to be a better designer, business owner and partner.