My Design Agency Navigated Challenges And Remained Profitable [Update]
This is a follow up story for MeetAnders. If you're interested in reading how they got started, published over 4 years ago, check it out here.
Hello again! Remind us who you are and what business you started.
Hi, I’m Marilyn, co-founder of a productized design services company called MeetAnders.
Here's my original Starter Story interview if you want to learn about our origins.
In case you don’t know what a productized design service is, it’s a service delivered like a product. You package up a set of fixed-scope services and give one price to it.
In our case, it’s a fixed fee per month. For example, for $590 a month, you get a designer to churn out as many designs as you want, no add on fees for changes and designs.
We’ve always been serving customers who do marketing and publications work. They are mostly marketing directors, business owners and events managers.
We work with them to produce ongoing graphic work. They are the brains with the strategy and branding directions. We are the hands and legs to do the work for them.
At last for more than 2 years, I’ve finally hands-off more than 98% of any tasks to be done in this business.
It was a new freedom found, because before 2022, I was all over the place with making sure quality checks were done properly, new designers coming in were trained right, all processes were updated regularly and followed to the “T”.
I was a perfectionist and overthink a lot, that led me to micro-manage too much. I lost sight of why I started this business in the first place for a while.
With all the tweaking and updating of processes and systems, my team got better with communication and making things work without me.
End of 2022, I went on a trip to Tasmania, leaving everything to the team and came back with the company still in one piece, phew!
This is a huge success for me and my husband at that time. We’ve never been so free at any hour of the day to do anything we wanted, whether it’s to be with our kids, network with other people, grow our business, create more products, or hit the beach for some windsurfing.
I used to trade hours for dollars and this, to me, is a great feat.
Revenue is always up and down due to churn and new sign-ups, but we are profitable to date, still bootstrapping and never borrowing or getting investors.
Tell us about what you’ve been up to. Has the business been growing?
We’ve acquired big customers from Twitter to Samsung. One fine day, Nov 2022, Elon Musk decided to acquire Twitter to call it X now.
Our revenue and growth went down like a falling rocket. It was devastating as they owed us almost half a year of the service we’ve already provided them.
We struggled to pay our employees, but we did by scraping from anywhere we could. We even had to fire all of them at one point.
Then, our past customers miraculously returned to support us in 2023. That’s when we revived from the dead, hired back our designers and business as usual once again.
Twitter didn’t work with us in 2023 as they were finding their own ground, getting lawsuits left, right and center.
I almost sent a tweet to Mr Musk but realized quickly that he wouldn’t give a damn. They paid us eventually towards the end of 2023, and in 2024, we are now working with X officially once again.
We also started a separate but related platform to help my clients and other creators, small business owners and marketers with graphic design tutorials.
The goal is to help them to DIY their digital assets. A lot of times they think they can’t do it themselves, but can’t find reliable help too, so they are stuck.
This website grew to more than 50000 sessions per month in organic traffic in less than a year with SEO, only to crash after the latest Google search update in March 2024. We’ve made a comeback from the September 2023 helpful content update, so will try to do the same again this time.
Back to MeetAnders, we’ve gone up and down since we last talked. The biggest milestone that I am willing to publicly mention is we got to work with a company that wants 5 designers from us. Most times, companies only engage 1 to 2 designers. So this is a big win.
Traffic and sales mostly come from referrals, communities or groups that I’m engaged with. I’ve also got some from SEO, although I didn’t work that much on the MeetAnders website. This is something I am currently working on.
I learned that it’s key to always maintain relationships with existing clients. Even if they don’t carry on working with you due to reasons like not enough budget, etc, they trust you enough to introduce you to their friends, network, colleagues to another department in their company.
I haven’t been big on social media. I was all in on only one channel, that is Linkedin back in 2018 to 2019. I’ve learned that producing content for social has to be not just consistent, relevant and useful, it has to be planned beforehand.
Currently, while ramping up marketing, I’m putting out work in progress or build in public content and sharing what I’m learning on every social media I can put my attention to. It’s social media on steroids.
I understand the idea of only being successful in one social media first before going to the next. But I’m doing this as a test to see how far I can go with all channels, that’s one. Second, after spending one year focusing on just SEO in 2023 to see it go down to almost zero tells me I can’t rely on just one.
Anyone interested to know how it goes, whether this will prevail or get burned can find my learnings on any social media. I’m showing my growth or no-growth results in public.
Once you’ve handed off more than 50% of your daily tasks and got the hang of one marketing channel, start learning the works of another channel, not to rely or beat the algorithm, but to understand the audience in the new channel.
What have been your biggest challenges in the last year?
I managed to hire excellent designers and managers who are able to replace my usual tasks. However, we get some feedback of errors in our designs, and tasks that were not to brief.
Yes, we are all humans, and we all make mistakes, but I am determined to have this resolved. Saving clients’ time and help them to be productive has always been our motto. This has been my biggest challenge for the past years.
Although we have processes in place to help resolve this, seems like it’s never enough to cover human errors. If 98% of my tasks have been out of my hands, 1% is having to relook this over and over.
In previous years I have had clients who were happy with our service once but walked out due to mistakes we made in some design work. The worst thing is, many of them don’t give any warnings and they just leave.
The fault is all mine and I have to find ways to mitigate this. But it can’t be done overnight because we are dealing with the nature of humans here.
We can’t control what our designers see, we can only try, fix and review and repeat. This is the downside of building a team in service businesses, but this is something I’ve been working deep on to come up with the best system.
The other 1% challenge is client acquisition. It’s easy to take anyone and everyone as a client, work with them and take on more. But it’s not easy if we are not the right fit for each other.
Getting leads and networking was hard for me before because as an introvert by nature, it’s not natural for me to just go up to others and say “hi” or just make friends.
Now this networking muscle is a bit more experienced, but I’m facing the hard part of so called “product market fit”, where I’m finetuning the process of knowing who can benefit most from our service and model.
I have to do this because if I’m not taking on the right client, most of them will churn after a month and stay with us only for a short period of time.
However, this can lead to overthinking, which also leads to me networking less and acquiring less due to trying to get the perfect clients.
I believe that anything can be a business and can grow, you just have to try different angles to promote or market it until it is profitable.
What have been your biggest lessons learned in the last year?
In the past, the biggest mistake I made was not to market and promote my business much earlier and faster.
I was knee-deep in all things like the design fulfillment work, delivering to clients, tinkering Adobe too much, on top of sales calls, meetings and anything that does not help strangers know about my service.
In the last year, my biggest mistake was to only focus on one marketing channel. If I was just starting out, one channel is fine and it’s what most experienced people will advise too.
When new to marketing on social media, with one channel, you are using it to learn the fundamentals of content creation and sales psychology. It’s also smarter to do this so that you only need to create a service product tailored to that specific audience.
But as we grew, we should have diversified way faster. I was on LinkedIn and getting comfortable, I should have then move on to another two more channels such as SEO and Instagram to connect with other audiences who don’t frequent on LinkedIn.
Lesson learned is, once you’ve handed off more than 50% of your daily tasks and got the hang of one marketing channel, start learning the works of another channel, not to rely or beat the algorithm, but to understand the audience in the new channel.
Every channel has different audiences with different thoughts and knowledge of what services are available out there.
It’s our responsibility as business owners or founders to understand that new group of people and share how they can benefit from our services. If they were not on LinkedIn, they would not have known.
One thing is to market our services, the other is to know what’s on trend, what works for them and how we should iterate or tweak our offerings to help them better.
Sticking to one channel forever would not have worked, and clearly didn’t work for us. So this year, we are going all out on other channels.
What’s in the plans for the upcoming year, and the next 5 years?
Long Term:
Growing to serve more than 50% of companies in Singapore that need graphic design help.
We are looking to expand our scope of “design”, it could be the area of metaverse. We are exploring to create more productized services in this area.
Short Term:
Reduce churn or improve retention. To date we have more than 50% of customers supporting us for at least 5 years and more. We are proud of that and appreciate them so much. If we are of great help, we want to keep doing this to 100% of our customers for the year.
What’s the best thing you read in the last year?
The Art of Impossible by Steven Kotler
10 years ago, I never would have thought I’d be here today, designing and building the freedom I’ve always wanted.
And today, I’m getting started to maintain this lifestyle, teach it to others and my kids. This one seems impossible now, even with so much fire and motivation to bring this to fruition.
Steven Kotler reveals how possible this is all with your own human biology, he goes deep on this. I’m now applying this.
Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order: Why Nations Succeed or Fail by Ray Dalio
Nobody can see the future, at least not accurately. Ray Dalio’s research dissects and extrapolates what he learned from history. Not something I can do myself, so this helps me go macro, zoom out of my day-to-day and adjust my directions if need be.
Advice for other entrepreneurs who might be struggling to grow their business?
Growing a business is possible only when you acquire the skills to do so. There are many ways to grow a business, which leads to many facets of skills to learn to get you there.
It all depends on what you want. Do you want to grow users, customers, clients, or do you want to increase in profit. What ways do you want to do that?
If you want to grow your customer-base by raising funds, you will have to learn the skills of persuading investors, earn their trust to give you the funds.
If you want to use social media to grow your audience to grow your business, you will have to learn the skills of persuading your social media audience that your service can help them.
The fundamental is learning the skills to get cash flow, persuasion and decide on the channels for people to know you exist.
I believe that anything can be a business and can grow, you just have to try different angles to promote or market it until it is profitable.
Some people say Twitter works, some say Pinterest is better, some go to groups, some do ads, some do cold email, some say everyone is on TikTok. Are they right? How do you know? Test them all, double down until you grow.
Are you looking to hire for certain positions right now?
We have a pool of creative talents such as graphic designers and illustrators. We are always looking for those with design skills, motion graphics, 3D, anyone in the graphics field who have an eye for detail, work fast, yet hungry for perfection in their work.
You can fill in a form here and we will be in touch.
Where can we go to learn more?
Just getting started on social media and substack.
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