In my opinion, one of the best feelings of entrepreneurship is looking back a few months and feeling like we’re looking back 2 years. This feels like one of those times.
In the last update, we were trying to find a better way to run our business and avoid the messy situations we found ourselves in during 2022. We desperately wanted to make a change so needed something radical. Short version: it worked pretty well.
Writing this from a much happier and focused place (and a sunnier place as I just arrived in Cape Town 🇿🇦). We’ve been able to work out a lot of kinks these months. Let’s get into it:
The studio model The past few months we decided to run a pilot for a new model. Short recap: instead of doing fixed scope projects, we’d assign the team we have to one set of clients on a monthly budget, pool that budget together and simply focus on shipping as much as we can within the time, using different disciplines to build things out.
This worked really well on so many levels - The team instantly had more of a rhythm, incentives were aligned with clients (everyone just wants to do the most valuable thing next) and we got a shitload of things done for 5 clients. Youssef nailed his role as technical lead, so over the months we gravitated to merging the PM role into his. In the end, we realised we need technical people making technical decisions across the board.
The model also gave us a sense of security and longevity within the agency business, which anyone running one knows is very very rare. This creates a lot more space for us to think strategically and build out other parts of the business as the day to day is less chaotic.
The team also got a lot more tight-knit and collaborated more aggressively. New people have been trained faster because of this dynamic & this has been a great foundation to really start seeing it as a team and not as a group of remote builders and designers. If you think long-term and build a product together, you raise a lot of good topics and discussions on how to approach new ideas.
Clients also gave us super positive feedback across the board and confirmed it feels like an extension of their team now, which was exactly what we pitched.  |
It’s not perfect yet - since we were in pilot, we’ve ‘overspent’ our budgets for clients and still need to work on making this model more profitable by introducing a bit more clients or upping budgets. We thought it was smarter to 1. figure out the value first (making sure we deliver a great service), then 2. figure out how to sell it and get the unit economics right. Not sure if that’s the smartest or dumbest way, but at least now we’re perfectly positioned to do #2. On that note:
Our propositions
I shifted back into sales so we could figure out how we should design our sales funnel now that we have a new end goal - getting clients into the product studio.
We knew that telling new leads ‘Hey, just give us $Xk/month and trust that we will do as much as we can with it’ was going to be difficult. However, as we saw that model working really well, so you do want to find a way to communicate that as a good solution. It just requires a certain amount of trust both ways.
So in the end we need to build trust. We always do a discovery project first (a refundable few days of work), which has always been a great way to showcase our skills and build trust. But realistically we need a bit more than that before people commit to a retainer.
To support that, we decided to bring back a form of fixed scope projects that aligns better with what we do. If we do a fixed scope project, it’s small (under $20k), it has a fixed amount of revisions & the timeline is stretched enough for us to underpromise and overdeliver. We plan a few meetings during the process but don’t go all-in with weekly meetings and the entire team being involved.
These projects are a revenue source but that’s not the primary reason for taking them on. We see those projects as a part of our funnel - showcasing our skills to excite people about the studio model, or to build on top of our foundation with a freelancer. We’ve mapped out the paths for new clients:  |
Our website is very overdue for a remake (WIP!), so in order to iterate quickly I resorted to creating PDFs with materials. It’s been a lot of fun changing the pitch and material slightly with every lead to communicate what we do in a better way and seeing which parts resonate.
The rest of the picture
With both our roles freeing up some more, we decided I would get started on spinning up the plugin side of our business - we’ve neglected this for too long but it’s always been part of the plan, and now that the studio is running smoothly and we have the right people on board, we were finally able to get started.
This looks very different than the agency business as it’s a slow burn and it’ll require us to invest some time to build up a good base of plugins. Our first efforts have been good though and we’re slowly building up some revenue here. It’s a bet on the future of Bubble but a bet we’re very excited to take.
Other things I have been neglecting have also finally taken some place in the schedule - creating case studies, starting work on the new website, making twitter content, etc.
I guess I’m just like everyone else when it comes to working on ‘Product’ vs. working on ‘Distribution’.  |
This season
When it comes to pushing things forward, Youssef and I might as well just start a boy band called ‘the bottlenecks’ at this point. I’m sick of telling team members that we’ll get around to it someday, especially when there’s so many good ideas. This season we want to give the team more responsibility and mandate to run parts of the studio by themselves.
Also, since we were so busy with figuring out short-term problems, I haven’t been sharing the vision with the team as much as I should. Even though we’ve always had it in our heads, we haven’t made it explicit. With our energy replenished, we’re ready to chase our OG goal again:
Become a world-class independent product studio.
We’ve built the basis of the product studio for now - what’s next is:
Becoming world-class - Yous will lead this with help of several members of the studio team. This season we’re getting better at conventions/documentation & leveling up our design process.
Becoming independent - This means profitability, a solid funnel & other sources of income. I’ll spend this season re-building the First Launch side of the biz, shipping plugins and training team members to take ownership of those topics.
The theme for this season is push it forward.
We’ll let you know how it goes. Cheers, Mike and the Minimum team. |