I started http://fairpixels.pro - ui design firm for startups, for less than $100. Before we had a website, we were profitable and quickly grew to $10k/mo in a few weeks. like mentioned in the article, cashflow is key here. It allows you to reinvest earned money and keep growing. Startups shouldnt raise IMHO before reaching product market fit. Ive made that mistake in the past myself. Having a lot of VC money in your bank that you can burn through while looking for a business model sounds fun, but isn't.
How do you feel about the budget players in your space, which have practically grown to apparently $50,000 monthly revenue, but have missed client files, gotten plenty of negative reviews on producthunt and churned out designs nothing like what they state on their site. Manypixels.co
Many of those I know very well because the founders contacted me with questions before launching a cheaper competitor. In all honesty I don't think about them at all. Our goal isn't to build a $1B company and have this complete monopoly position. The opposite is true. We deliberately stay small, work only with a few companies and basically do work that we really really love. The reason all the great companies have big in-house design teams is that design is about more than cheaply moving pixels from one person to the other. Because we go deep with each startup, we learn a lot about everything what works and what doesn't. In other words, we learn about how our design decisions impact business. How they increase conversion, profits, etc. And so this deeper level of involvement allows us to use that knowledge and expertise with the next startup. For many startups, just having something that looks ok is enough, and for those, the cheaper competitors are the way to go. For others who want to build a great product for their customers.. those who care about details and using design to grow their business, those are the only companies we work with.
Great reply. The pro version looks great for serious startups or agencies. Our personal experience with manypixels ended in a refund. So I just wanted to get your take on the cheaper end.
Every time that problem occurs, we hire new people. The model basically funds its own growth, so when scaling issues rattle the system, we can hire people with the cashflow that's already there.
Sure, these businesses were all built on $10K of capital. But what about time? How many months or years could have been spent working while building the business? That could put a lot of these businesses into six-figure territory when you factor in opportunity cost.
This is usually the big issue I've seen/experienced: funding $10k isn't as hard as 2-3 people deciding to quit their jobs and take no income for 1-2 years.
In many of these cases the founders were drawing salaries relatively early in the company's lifecycle. A couple had substantial early revenue so it wasn't much of a hardship.
For this kind of budget, we've regularly built works-like-looks-like prototypes of fairly complex consumer hardware devices.
For example, we built World's best FPV video goggles for roughly this budget (with custom optics design and prototyping). That's our internal project, though.
After building a prototype, you would typically need another 2x to 3x that for tooling (if plastics are involved) and some working capital to manufacture the first volume run of 100 - 1000 units.
It's a little disingenuous to suggest that most of theses companies were built with 10k though right? Maybe it took 10k to prove a market, but surely there was lots of funding following that.
Not necessarily. I know the founder of ButcherBox and he managed to get to tens of millions of revenue in pure bootstrap fashion. The PaintNite guys got to $25M in revenue before taking on $13M in VC. Shutterstock got to IPO without taking any capital. It's not easy, but it was more common than I expected!
Back when Google was easier to game with SEO it was pretty common to bootstrap nothing into a few thousand a month.
One common pattern was finding popular sites where you could find bugs that allowed you to post links in comments with a css style that made them not look like links. PageRank loved it.
I built Casting Call Club (https://castingcall.club) with $0, and only 1000s of hours of my time. No matter what you pay (time or money or lost opportunities), the price is always significant.
Author here, not sure how this comes off as confused? In the linked article, the founder of RXBar talks about how the brand positioning emerged from the sales process. By going account to account they refined the company's core story—the focus on ingredients—which came to dominate the visual touchpoints.
You can build most any software application with $0 invested and be cash flow positive before writing a line of code. There are lots of people (myself incljded) that take an idea to potential customers, turn them into actual customers and then get to work. For B2B it is not hard to say "I will solve this problem for x dollars per month. That will make you y more or save you y dollars per month. Sign here and I will provide the solution in # weeks." And that works just fine.
A working engine and less rusting bodywork for my VW van house. Oh seriously? Then something that uses almost all SaaS and has marginally-zero unit cost like a self-improvement videos site.
$6200 for an LS3 on eBay. Pull the heads and send them to advanced induction for their porting services. $1100 for that, then a matching cam from them.
