Comment by karaterobot | Hacker News Reader

Comment by karaterobot | Hacker News Reader

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If DesignJoy is making $1M a year selling $2500-$3000 month subscriptions, and there's only one person doing the work, then he's got around 30 clients for whom he is doing "unlimited" work every month.

As a contractor, I once had 9 ongoing projects for about 2 weeks, and that was an insane amount of work and context juggling. Handling 30 active clients for a year, let alone a career, seems impossible.

So either the clients aren't asking for much (which is most likely) or I'm missing something. I assume many bigger companies would happily replace a staff member, or a staff member's valuable time, with a ~30k/year contractor. Critically, these companies wouldn't feel the need to "get their money's worth" by keeping the guy busy every day. However, the smaller companies most freelancers see as their bread and butter are more cost sensitive, and will nickel and dime you as much as possible.

Are there enough big, monied companies to constitute a "storm", which I take to mean a shift in the business model for freelancers and boutique contractors? I dunno about that. I'd guess no, offhand.

Seems like DesignJoy has create a neat niche, which is awesome for him! I don't think it scales to the "disruption" level as this article implies.

Elsewhere on the web, he explains his business model:

"There seems to be some correlation between size of the company and the quantity of their needs. The smaller they are, the more needs they have. The opposite is true as well. So yes, many clients pay $2k+ per month and may use the service once or twice a month, equating to under an hour’s worth of work."

Source: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/designjoy-crosses-70k-mrr-...

The big companies are paying for on-demand access as insurance. They aren't stupid. They fully understand they're paying $2K+ per month and only using service for an hour or two each month.

What becomes challenging at those rates and client densities is managing a tail risk of a collision of multiple big clients suddenly wanting services at the same time. You're just playing chicken with that happening, until you can scale your offerings and revenue up to where you can reduce client density to where you can handle the crunch better when it happens.

Or in that moment you realize demand for your service exceeds supply and the correct response is to raise your rates until you have a reasonable workload. If they won’t pay $5k+ monthly retainer for someone who knows how to build their system, surely they have a cheaper alternative. Meanwhile the clients with budgets you really want to work for are happy to pay your fees because they’re cheaper than your comparable salary. If you’re selling a monthly retainer and hit that collision you describe, you’re in a fantastic position to negotiate rates. Better to be on a use it or lose it commitment than accruing unspent hours, otherwise yeah you can get screwed.

Sort of like keeping someone on retainer.

Until proven otherwise I'll assume any agency-of-1 will end up outsourcing to contractors at some point.

You mean, become a typical agency?

Which, if done right could be very profitable

DesignJoy is hiring, so you're not wrong!

Are you affiliated with them in some way?

I love the non-answer to this question on their FAQ:

> Who are the designers?

> Designjoy is a solo company, meaning that you'll be working directly with the founder.

Nah but Brett was talking about it on Twitter

https://twitter.com/BrettFromDJ

And goodby quality

Winner!

This is kinda brilliant. Every SaaS has some % of customers who pay month over month even though they rarely or never use the service. If you can just get a few of those customers at a price point that is extremely meaningful to you as an individual but the customer is big enough that it’s not meantinful to them, you can fire all the actual customers and coast.

IMO some people have an unhealthy need to find the best deal possible (usually the cheapest), even if it takes so much time it is not worth it.

The same way that some public contractors offer the cheapest rate knowing that it will be inflated, or that low-cost airlines sells you the cheapest ticket, later adding extra luggage, food, and healthy credit card processing fees, a strategy is to give these people what they want.

I could believe after they have their unlimited service, a lot of the customers do not make use of it. In many of these cases the decision making at the client might even be the bottleneck.

if you look at the security space, this is exactly what cloudtrike is, or at least is aiming for. They want to do your SIRT, your red teaming, your malware collection, etc etc.

Then you got microsoft with teams, office, and such trying to be the agency of one for your collaboration needs.

Google is fighting to be your one stop shop for advertising.

I do agree we are moving towards agencies of one.

The "one" in the article means one person doing all the work. Not a big org providing SAAS or such like MS/Google.

I don't think it would work for something like software, where the last 10% takes 90% of the time. Maybe you could do it for prototypes, but do any companies really need a "constant prototype" contractor?

One person doing all the work and needs of a project does happen, but its rare. I would just be cheaper to hire someone full time, so this usually happens in specialty software where its hard to keep hiring head count to do it.

> I don't think it would work for something like software

Except that it happens all the time. its fairly prevalent.

> Maybe you could do it for prototypes, but do any companies really need a "constant prototype"

Absolutely.

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