Adrian is the founder of Designmodo, a tool which helpful for developing websites and newsletters templates.
Before designmodo, Adrian was doing the day job and giving his most of his projects. In his country, the salary was very low so as soon as his projects started making amount as his day job he left his day job. At that time, Adrian tried many projects, and several failed some work.
He then stops selling design assets and web templates and works on designmodo with thousands of subscribers now.
Designmodo is competing with big players who have received investments and support. For making designmodo Adrian want a partner who was ready to work in a revenue share basis.
The initial product has minimal functionality. At the start, Adrian focused on design quality which makes them apart from competitors. And then in the product development phase, Adrian maintained the design quality and the back-end functionality with codes.
Adrian is running an indie company; the revenue comes from sales. And he invested all his money in business and closely analyzed all spending and release new feature before their competitor.
They take only one month for their product. But now every new product takes six to nine months for developing new MVP.
Learning: Dream big. Start small but most of all, start.
They started with WordPress and then integrated woocommerce (for billing and CRM).
Other than that Bootstrap, jQuery, Vue, React and other modern technology for designing apps and website design, they use Figma.
Also, they customized framework and plugins so they can provide flexibility. They make changes in this as creators of this technology, so their customization was compatible with the new release.
Business Model:
Designmodo is running on the SaaS business model where they offer monthly, quarterly and annual subscription.
For payment, they use Paypal and Stripe where Stripe processes their 60% of the revenue. They used a subscription model for the increase in income as they first offer a one-time payment option.
Adrian says with subscription model you can give you clearest estimation of future revenue, and the data you can plan future investment in your product.
Marketing Strategy:
For attracting users, a blog plays an essential role in designmodo currently the blog hold 1000+ blog.
Also, they create design assets that generate lots of links and generate good traffic from various popular resources.
These links contributed to making a high authority website domain which results in higher rankings in search engines.
He also tried paid ads, but that not result in profit.
Mistakes:
At a start, Adrian hired the too big team to get work done quickly.
He targeted an industry (WordPress) that they weren’t familiar with and started the project without expertise.
Money management poor without analysis of past and expected sales.
They acquired users not retained them over the long term.
Adrian’s Advice:
His advice to anyone starting out
Try to do something and don’t be afraid to fail.
You don’t fail if you try to do it. You fail if you don’t try it at all.
He suggests that if you have faith in your business, put your profits into it as well as your heart.
Also build a reliable team is the essential element of product development. You can start solo, but if you don’t grow, if you want your idea to become a reality quickly, you need a team with ambition and dedication.
Build a supportive community can pay higher evident than you couldn’t imagine.
