This is like Netflix for design. I worked a couple of months and released my subscription-based website pentaclay.com
But I'm not sure if that's going to see some light in 2024. Please share your honest opinion about this.
Setting that aside, this is totally a valid business model - design joy (https://www.designjoy.co/) has been doing this for years now.
We're in a risk free subscription based economy.
Imagine if you want to hire someone from the USA, UK, or other top-tier economic countries how much do you need to pay an 11+ years experienced designer?
At Pentaclay I started with $2500 a month which is almost half of what I'm getting paid as remote designer, so same quality with lesser price with no month-to-month commitment from the client side.
I hope you get the point.
Yes I was inspired by design joy, hopefully I can make this subscription model work. Thankd buddy.
If you are careful with the clients you bring on it can be lucrative. But it didn't seem like it would be easy to begin delegating the coding work quickly. My wife and like to take nice vacations and that would be a big conflict. Additionally at a personal level I believe it would have taken me a long time to build the staff and actually free my time up as I don't have recruiting or management experience. At the start it would take up a considerable chunk of the day. Considering all this we agreed this was not worth it.
Maybe it will work for you, especially if you have the prior management experience or timeline to begin delegating.
So I do have some extra time as I don't have to commute anywhere. Plus, at some point after 3-4 clients it won't be feasible to work alone, hiring and delegating tasks will be better.
I'm also thinking about how many clients can I take if I work full-time on Pentaclay. Maybe time and experience will say.
I guess one question I have is that it seems like there will need to be a linear relationship between the number of subscriptions sold and the number of designers working? Even if a design takes an hour and the turnaround guarantee is two business days, then that designer can only manage up to 16 subscriptions.
Given your pricing, that example may work out ok but then you'd have to pause new subscriptions until you can hire a new designer. Curious to hear what you think
With $2500 a month it's not likely you'll get 50 clients a month within a year. Unless you spend some crazy amount of money on marketing and influencers.
So the math is simple you grow with your client list and designer list parallely. So when there are 5 clients you might need only 2 senior designers to handle the workload.
Plus, I'm also a designer, I'll be working alongside until business goes into a certain position.
I'm developing something similar to sell my service as a software engineer. Something like Service-as-a-software, the opposite of software-as-a-service.
I already launched my beta website pentaclay.com
As here in this community we do have talented founders, it's always better to have some suggestion or different angles from the fellow entrepreneurs.