Year two of running a subscription-based service business
Ditching Hourly · September 24, 2024 · 48 min
Transcript63 sections · auto-generated, so expect the odd wrong word
hello and welcome to ditching hourly I'm Jonathan Stark today I am joined by repeat offender Zack Stevens Zack welcome to the show hey Jonathan super stoked to be back I love the title to repeat offender yes I should say welcome back to the show right so about almost exactly a year ago you came on and told us about your new subscription well I'll let you tell it but a subscription service in the design space and you suggested coming back on to kind of give people an update on how it's gone in the last 12 months but first could you remind folks in case they didn't hear the first episode who you are and what you do sure so it would have actually been two years ago um uh from September 11th this week so we're almost oh my
gosh sorry sorry sorry one year one year um within two days like we're we're two days short of one year on the dot I was going to say I know my maap is bad I didn't think it was that bad well it's definitely better than mine I'm just the designer uh as Jonathan mentioned I uh I am a designer by trade I actually run a product marketing agency on a subscription basis and design is a integral part of that called conversion Factory it's me and two other co-founders one who is the marketing leg of things so handling copywriting customer research positioning um lots of fun stuff that marketers get to do to make sure that people actually want the things that our clients are coming to us for there's me who runs the design set
of things I make things look pretty and make sure that they are differentiated within the marketplace and then our third leg is Nick who is our web flow developer who comes and makes all the things that I put together live and actionable and actually driving those uh those conversions for our clients yeah so last time I was on we had we had just launched we launched shortly after July 4th of 2023 I think that I think that July 11th was our exact date and within a month we were doing 3 6K Mr and now we are at 66 so almost double yeah was it two people back then or three it was always three we had yeah it was Cory and I were um Nick was still leaving his full-time job at the very onset but um he was always a part of
conversion Factory got it wow well congratulations that sounds great so do you think the growth was just word getting out or did you do anything different to continue to attract people or is just the kind of thing that had to snowball over time so I think having one work to show was a big component of it being able to demonstrate here's what we've done for ex-client and things like that are really provocative and easy to share easy for people to get more interest in we still have uh Corey who has a phenomenal newsletter that has 20,000 plus subscribers on it that we can also use as a really impactful channel uh we've gone to quite a few events within our target audience of space so all around software as a
service that's our main clientele going to events to meet people uh actually Corey's gone to two events or gone to three events from a company called microm they're part of the um yeah if you're familiar with them start for the rest of us Rob Walling exactly and both of those have come he's come back and we've landed a client from just him connecting with people at those events so super profitable um as far as actually going and shaking hands and then meeting people and I think those have been the primary channels cool and then what does the sales process look like you know because you've got people people might not realize but you have like a um like a sases sales page where you've got different tiers of service and you know
is it uh what happens next when when people you meet someone they you you press the flesh you they come back they're like you know what we're interested is there like a contracted sales conversation or is it more like they click a button and boom let's go so we've only ever had one person it was our first client that uh bought a subscription without meeting us and he told us that the reason he did that was because we were we were very limited I spoke about this um in depth on the last podcast but we only wanted to take on five for the very beginning of the onset of this because it was an experiment so he saw that and he was like well shoot man I don't want to be you know coming at number six and find out I can't work
with you guys so he was the only one that did that but then we ended up having a more formalized sales call with him after uh so typically what will happen is people will schedule a call with us they last about half an hour and within that call or within the them booking that call we send an automated video to them that gives an overview of here's how our workflow works it's an overview of our dashboard that we have in notion uh here's a breakdown of the different tiers we we Chang that a little bit and I'm sure we could probably talk about the changes in pricing that we've made as well uh but breaking down that at tier one you get to work with one skill set at a time tier two you get two skill sets at a
time so that could be combination of design and marketing or design and web flow um working in Tandem and then tier three is you get the whole kitten Kaboodle so all three of us working in tandem on projects and it's you get the most out of conversion Factory if you're having all three Smoke Stacks FL firing up I like the metaphor all right cool so what of those what has been is there a clear winner is there one that's the most popular does it go do people change up and down they definitely vary between the Middle tier and the uh low tier so and we also price them to be that way so like the middle tier sorry the beginning tier first which we call the first floor first floor of the factory is is six
grand a month you get one task at a time the middle tier is $9,000 a month you get two tasks at a time and then the third tier which is three tasks at a time is 15,000 so we have had people on every single one of those uh and if you'll note like there's there's a disparity in the cost per request between the two of them so it's $66,000 per skill set that you're working with on the first floor it drops to 4500 per skill set on the middle floor and then goes back up to 5,000 per skill set on the third floor so that middle one is the that's your Bullseye offer of hey this is it's the best deal you get to work with two of us and uh most people will cycle between the Middle tier and the first tier so people
are going to wonder if they look at your website which I suggest they do maybe you can follow along at home by going to conversion factory. and the when you say two skill sets at a time are they do they decide what the two are going to be during the lifetime of the engagement or is it just two at a time like any two but only two any two but only two it's one of the things that I was noticing with a lot of the subscription models um one a lot of them are just one person so we have a competitive advantage in that there's actually a team of us and that each one of us has a core skill set that we bring to the table cuz I can say like as if I was just doing this by myself yeah you get two requests at a time but can I
actually work on two requests at a time for you no because I only have two hands and one brain um whereas with us you can actually like I can work on one thing like the next page in a website design while my other co-founder Nick is building out the last page that I designed so we can actually work real time in tandem whereas other one person shops might only be able to do like they can physically only do one thing at a time right yeah they can't work in parallel it it sounds like already you've uncovered some nuances in the way that people want to work with you and the nature of the work in a model like this which is very novel so what are some things that you would maybe warn people about or just give a
heads up if if someone was thinking of maybe starting something like this um I would say this it's still work like I think that there's you know it's getting you have people you have people who are like oh it's like you know owning a gym where you have people sign up for subscriptions and then uh it's amazing because you only have to work with them for January and then they never show up for six months um but if you're working with clients that are going to have you do impactful high yield work that they are really proud of that you really proud of you're going to still do stuff it's it's almost like that you know I get like the freelance from the beach and bring your laptop and while you're at the at the waves which
is has its own can of worbs attached to it but it's still you're still going to be doing a lot of work and a lot of really good work I think that the difference is that you're going to be a lot happier with the less amount of headaches that you have trying to do things like scope enforcement or trying to figure out like what a project is going to look like where you can instead just do the work and when things change you don't have to have that really annoying conversation of like oh that wasn't in scope sorry we're not going to be able to do that even though it's highly beneficial for the project to for it to Pivot in that way so say that's one big Nuance that I I hope everybody else understands that is you're still
going to have to do things for people yeah it's not 40 bucks a month so people are going to really probably want to use it not going to just like let the machine sit there doing nothing exactly what what happens or does it happen that people want to bury you in requests you know what I mean like like yes you don't have to talk about you know you don't have to have scope com this is inside or outside a scope or they wonder you know is this hourly and how much is this going to end up costing but people when they hear about this model they are always assume that it's kind of like a buffet and people are sidling up to the shrimp and just jamming their pockets full and kind of abusing your time what
do what can you tell people about that is is it true is it a myth is it something you have to wrestle with somewhere in between I found that 95% of people are extremely respectful of the amount of time and effort it takes to do good work and as long as you're giving routine updates and showing things like I my goal is every 48 Hours here is an update on the thing that we're working on most things are done within two three days but some things take a little bit longer especially if it's a I'm doing an entire homepage redesign that has 10 different custom graphics on it that need to be created and I'm revamping a lot of their design foundations like typography color Etc um they're they're cool with it because they can see the
before and after of wow we were here at Point a and Zach took us all the way to we'll say to to y not fully to Z because um there's always room for improvement at the end uh so I'm I found that most people are very very respectful but then you get the occasional people that you know want to say like can we just do like the the copywriting and the design at the same time and it's like no we can't because Zach has to base the things that he designs off of the words that Corey makes and we found that this is the best workflow for us to make things fast and to keep the iterations to a minimum so how speaking of Communications like what is your what are your systems around communicating back and forth with the clients is it
all asynchronous do you have meetings with people if you do have meetings what are they what are they reserved for so this was a thing that we we changed um I think we changed it in early spring of this year or no we changed it before the end of last year our middle tier used to include a call every two weeks with us but we were finding that they ended up just becoming a standing meeting that we're wasting a lot of people's time because it didn't make sense for us to to keep doing it the only thing that you got was you got to ask us like spur the- moment questions and there was a lot of chitchat about like you know how are you how's you know how are things going with your with your business but all things
that could be done instead um over our client communication tool and our dashboard in notion and with like a quick loom video instead so we put a hard Line in the Sand that said we only do meetings for four things we do for our internal sales calls so that half an hour where people jump in to get to know us and ask us questions before they start working with us the brand strategy workshops that I head up the positioning workshops that Corey runs and then customer research where we are interviewing customers of our on behalf of our clients to ask them questions about uh about their work with our client so those are the four areas where we do it and are those included in the monthly price or are those separate things they so we we
call them synchronous workshops so and those synchronous workshops are only on the middle tier and the uh the third floor you can so it is possible 100% to do our brand strategy workshops and the positioning workshops asynchronously it just goes a lot faster and it's easier if we get to jump into that call but cany this is also something that we're thinking is like well well we were actually just talking about this really recently um where we think that it's actually going to be more beneficial to open those up regardless because our pricing now is more based on who how many people you get to work with at one time not so much on whether you get those calls or not because we're finding that wasn't something that
people that customers really valued more than being able to get more work done um and plus it's at Max like an hourong call between either one of us and we only have to do it once may like for The Branding hopefully you only have to do it once for every like 10 years or so the positioning positioning you'd have to do maybe once every every year or so to at least try and go really deep on it but you can always touch base and send Loom videos make comments change it alter it um because your positioning changes especially when you're a grow stage SAS company where you're going to have to make alterations to it right yeah refinements and stuff so when you are selling anything on a subscription model all of a sudden churn becomes a
word in your Lexicon so what happens with these clients in terms of you know customer lifetime value how long do they stay with you how much do they move up and down in the tiers and is that a manual process is that a phone call or can they just click a button just curious about those things so they can everything is selfs serve like we we technically don't have to do anything um and we can uh like we will jump in if they ask things like hey can we pause the subscription um can we do can we move up in a tier and we we're happy to do it for them but we don't have to I think that some people just they don't fully understand they they can actually be in control of that element themselves um so it is possible for them
to do but we're happy to do if they want to uh move up in tears or move down or pause you know we can do all of it from from stripe uh as far as how long people stick with us we have let's see so we have two two people that have been with us from your since day one like on launch uh our first client that one that I told you who really wanted to uh work with us he is still with us and he's been there since day one we had another one that we picked up about two weeks later that is also still with us and we've also had people come back so we've had a client that was with us from I think June no not like August of last year they took a break for the holidays until about May and then reached back out to us again
and then they became a client again last month so people come back and I think that's the cool part is that they can actually um move off uh jump back on and then if they need to like if the if it just doesn't necessitate having us on retainer then they don't have to use us and that's the beauty of the the model so yeah you do have to get used to churn but it's also comes with the territory of it's as easy to sign up you have to make it that easy to pause and I think Ron Baker even mentions that in his book times up where if you put up annoying barriers to prevent people from pausing when they don't need you then that's aad practice and you're going to probably lose clients at at a minimum lose a
referral if you do something like that yeah I I recently talked to Matt kerbis who's a subscription law firm and he said that some people do kind of like toggle that pause button on and off quite a bit but he's like I don't care you know he's like if they want to spend their time doing that then that's fine but he said most people don't do that no I think that most people will stick around for a while the I think the shortest amount we've seen people come around is 3 months um I'd say that's that's at the low end but then high end is 12 plus months sticking with you so I don't know what our averages that actually be something interesting to look at and see total how what's our average lifetime value for people um we
would only know it definitively as far as months go but even with months you get a really good understanding of how long they've been with you and what you could expect to get from one one client on average who's your ideal buyer like what's the sit I mean I know industry-wise but like what's the situation they're in when they when they come to you so we've been finding like our favorite people to work with are they they circle around that microcom space like uh the um Tiny Seed is the company that does small amounts of funding for Founders in similar situations um the Comm fund would be a a similar vein or Indie Indie VC would be another area of that or bootstrappers so people that have moved a company from zero to
like well over half a million dollars in AR maybe as one person with little Little Help from the outside definitely not someone who they could keep on retainer and help to or get to help them build out marketing assets for their company and did you say like a solo bootstrap ER or like it's someone who hasn't really hired we do have quite a few solo um bootstrappers that work with us uh or I'd say solo up until I think that the people that I include in that category if actually we've only had a couple clients that were had massive massive teams um like excess of 20 people I think I think most of them hover between one and 10 full-time employees and I think 10 in many of those cases would be would be a stretch
it's usually one like under eight MH the amount of people they have working with them but they're just killing it you know like they they have a really Niche product that they found an audience with that resonates with it and um it's something super useful but they haven't been able to communicate the usefulness of it or put in tactics to help them fix the Leaky bucket that's on their that is their website or their other uh product marketing efforts so where's where's their head at it's like they're like oh we've got a tiger by the tail but but we're leaving money on the table because of our janky website or something sometimes yeah I think that a lot of times especially if they're working with
me they have this kind of like a time to grow up moment you know where yeah they um like we know we haven't paid a lot of attention to the way that you know things are designed um and design is becoming more and more prevalent on how people perceive the value of your company and being able to court those Court those customers that we we want I I'm pretty sure if specifically they're working with me that's the big thing it's a I wouldn't say it's vanity but it's more of a they are now to the point where they feel like they're lacking confidence in the way that they look and then that Cascades into other areas as well like oh there's a lot of a lot of small things we could be doing that we know we should have like our onboarding
email sequence is terrible our retention email sequence is Terri terrible our copyrighting on our website is terrible and we could do all these things a little bit better and that would help move that needle it's almost like they were they started going to the gym and they were able to exercise a lot and um have a lot of improvement really really fast go from like a zero to 60 but now they're trying to work incrementally from 60% up to as high as they can go mhm yeah so they they figured out one magic trick and they know that they are really lacking in a bunch of other areas so they're like oh we're plateauing a little bit it seems like we've got all the juice out of this lemon so you know or or as much as we can and there's but
there's a lot more that we can there a lot more lemons yeah exactly so what about capacity so imagine someone someone's thinking about this they've got some skill they're really good at it maybe they're designer developer copywriter some kind of marketer whatever SEO and this is it feels like a stupid question asked because I know the answer but why not just get a job that's kind of like a subscription design Arrangement other than the equity and doing your own thing and not having a boss breathing down your neck like what is the difference dayto day in your mind between just having a single employer and doing something like a subscription especially as a soloist that's a really good question because so we're at the
point now where we're actually I'm playing more of the leverage game and like you know I have small smaller Junior designers that can help with or I have a junior designer that can help with the implementation of things that I've already laid the groundwork for so I don't get caught doing a bunch of like smaller let like impactful but not difficult for me to do just tedious um and I can then focus on other things as can my other co-founders but if I was a soloist the the difference I think would be that you you'd probably get a lot more reps with other companies and you might find that the the company that you're working for maybe isn't doing things as good as they could or you'll start to see a lot
more pattern and find ways to expedite your own workflows uh because I know that this is something that I've had to get really good at which is efficiency and especially in design like that's a you know it's creative work but being being able to deliver it really fast is an important item I think that what you'll gain working for yourself with more load than you would have expected I think that you'll find that your upper limits get pushed and that you become a far better crafts person one one that could probably develop systems around this and then build out a team a lot more effectively and it makes it easier to do something like that because you are aware of what your expected monthly revenue is going to be and you can hedge
that against well I can afford to bring on somebody for you know part-time for less than half of what one of my subscriptions costs and then I then automatically gain back half of my my workday or half of my half my time yeah so if I was going to summarize that for the dear listener you've got more options for creating leverage or at least that are acceptable you obviously you've got Equity I mean you like it's a business that you could theoretically sell um and also there's sort of a security in the diversification across having multiple clients instead of just one employer and as you pointed out you get more reps in in different places so you're probably going to get better at what you do on top of it so lot lots of
lots of differences definitely speaking of Leverage I am curious if you are using AI in your workflows at all and know a perfectly good answer but I'm just curious if you explored anything like that believe me the day that AI is good enough to replace me and do things that I can do I will happily take it the problem is that I I'm I'm trying and the it's not good enough like it's not there to meet the standards of the the brain identity work that I need to do it's not good enough to meet the standards of the copywriting that we need to do it's not good enough to meet the standards of the the even like the website layouts and stuff that we need to do there are very few exceptions where some things will work for example
if I need like an abstract graphic to just represent like a blog post or something it could do those and I will use it in instances like that but the the AI models aren't good at taking something like a user interface and then abstracting it and pulling things away from it like iive amounts of text like and subheadings to that would just be distracting if you were looking at it if like making it no different than a screenshot um so it's already hard for the AI to create something that currently exists but then to extract it a like which is a level further it just can't do it or at least not yet uh so I've been working with it and trying to see what it can do we use a tool called reloom um which is a a webflow website
component library and they have a AI sitemap Builder but even then though we find ourselves going going and U replacing the components that it suggests because it's not following the workflows that and layout patterns that we know work best for conversion rate optimization so I I try and make try and make the most of it because I'm all for if a robot can help me do things then please robot come help me um it just has to be able to do them well and to the point where I'm not going to spend more time correcting the mistakes that it's made than if I had just done it myself yeah any is there anything behind the scenes though administrative grunt work that kind of stuff where it's not client facing and
it's not it's not the kind of thing where it's your expertise on display where you found it useful you know like for me I write a lot I I never have it write my stuff but I use grammarly on absolutely everything yeah so we'll do I mean I'm not the copywriter um Corey Cory is and I know that he will use chat GPT to do more to use for some deliverables um but then also for things like grammarly and his spellchecking and you know things like that which are really helpful but apart from that we actually use a we have a VA that we hired from Mexico who goes through our notion dashboard and does things like hey here the the test that we're completed this week um go ahead and like hey X XYZ team here's
what was in progress here's what got completed and the reason we do that is because Notions AI won't keep up with it or it doesn't have the necessary Integrations and plugins to communicate that via email uh so we've looked for AI Solutions but the specific needs that we were actually trying to fulfill don't exist yet at least not with the tools that we're using that we found um that are currently embedded into our workflow so what other Outsourcing of done or are thinking about doing in the near term like you mentioned a sort of I don't know is Junior designer the right term but like or a VA are there any other things that where you're like geez it just totally makes sense to Outsource our payroll and accounting and legal and
but but but some things closer to the client like account management or something like that the only things that we that we Outsource primarily are um miniature versions of ourselves so Corey Nick and myself all have a um a second helping hand second set of Helping Hands um that are not they're they're good work and they're they're fantastic workers but they're not quite playing from the Strategic level so like I still have to give guidance on like this is what this graphic should communicate um not just look nice but this is what it actually needs to to say and how it needs to help support the copy that is to the left or right of it uh Corey has a copywriter who helps him with fulfillment of tasks and we
have a VA that helps us do things like when Corey goes to these conferences she's helping him do things like book travel and accommodations so right using leverage in that capacity I think man if if we couldn't do that we would we'd be up in our necks like it's the administrative stuff that it's Tru the most timec consuming and annoying because it's the stuff that you hate to do like it's a freaking slog having to look for a hotel that's next to this conference and especially when it's like this is the most like low impact low value work that I could be doing but for a client but it's super impactful for us so that's why we we made it more high high impact by taking somebody who has uh where the main value that they bring
is the ability to do that and take that off of our Plate at a rate that we we know is Far and Away better than what we would like if we were to have to do our do it ourselves it'd be like the equivalent of $300 because it would take two hours for us to get all that stuff ready and like $150 an hour it's just not worth it right right all right well I'm curious about when someone comes to you and they say oh can you know one request can you just redo our homepage and is there a is there a you know T-shirt size small medium large kind of mechanism involved or do you go back and forth fourth of them and say well this is actually 40 requests and you know so you can kind of help them prioritize what they want you to work on next based
on how much time it's going to eat up out of their month normally I use a four-letter word in the sentence but I will I'll refrain um we my it's still going to be a four-letter word just one that's acceptable for children's years if you have kids um it's don't be a jerk about it uh if you have a request and you know that it can be fulfilled in one and if you're just going to be nitpicking like the things that go into it like I could in theory break it out like section by section by section of a website but that's going to be really annoying so what I will do is I'll communicate to the client um specifically they're coming for an overhaul and this might not have been discussed but you know there might be
some things that are sacred within their brand so I'll just get a bunch of clarifying information up front like hey what's sacred like am I allowed to change your color palette am I allowed to change typography am I allowed to change um are there is there anything I'm not allowed to change within your current design makeup um and most sometimes you'll say they'll say things like yeah like we we love our colors please don't change those but we're not happy with how like volumous they're used within our our website like it just looks like a clown threw up on it or something um and then I have a goal of like okay I can okay minimize the color palette great um some other things might be hey are are you do you want me to
just rearrange it from a design perspective because there's some also some other sections in here that we think you should add that would be more beneficial for your conversion optimization and if that's the case maybe we should have Corey take a look at the copywriting and maybe do a A variation of the web page copy before I come in and start designing things because then we're going to have to go back like if I design it then Cory rewrites it I'm gonna have to go back and redesign pieces of it right so I do based on experience I will let them know this is the expected workflow how much creative Liberty do I have with this particular task and also I suggest doing these things if something if this is
something on your mind where you really want this to be if we need to bring in another one of the another member of the team before me and I think that would be beneficial I let them know and then that's it they'll let me know no we're good we don't need that or yeah that would be super helpful please do so and more often than not the ladder happens right okay so with with a name like conversion Factory the you know it's the the probably everyone's goal is for them to get more conversions right like so do you ever find yourself them asking for a particular thing and you believing or someone there believing that like wow that's gonna that's G to be really bad for their conversions and pushing back
is basically what I'm getting at like do you push back on the clients who request things that you think are going to negatively impact your overall goal absolutely with the caveat that it's still their like their company at the end of the day and all you can do is say we've seen this before and we think that this option that we presented first is better we will move forward with your suggestion if you really really want to right and it never hurts to just speak your mind on on those things because some clients will listen like I had a um I did a a facelift on a homepage last year for a an events company client they do events for um it's a software that helps do event management for medical company events
academic events and business events so think everything but Coachella that that's what they they help create um event apps for um they even say that on their website like we don't do dce dance f Although our team loves them so anyway I I redid their entire homepage and uh then they pushed back on some of the design and wanted to do some other stuff and I said no this I think that this is why it should be this way because the constraints were we still wanted to use your your colors but we can only use blue so much before the entire thing um looks like a Smurf so we got to make sure that we balance this out properly and we want to draw attention to key things like you have some very strong accolades up at the very top portion of
your website that we want to draw attention to um we want to use photography because that was something that was lacking from the last version of your site it wasn't conveying the humanity of your product so explaining my rationale over loom video and they came back and said Zack after watching your loom video we've decided that what you put forth is actually a better direction we had at the beginning so it never hurts to give that push back especially because it's in the genuine interest of the client you know like that's that's the kind the kind thing to do is tell them the truth what about photography does that come up much you guys don't do that like how could you even do that oh well I mean I'm not going to fly somewhere yeah
exactly it's like and take pictures of them but for um in that case it was things like just finding really good stock photography that I could manipulate the colors to that felt like it didn't deviate from the the visual makeup of their brand um you know so I'll go Scout things for clients and you know well that's actually one of the areas where the AI is getting decent like I could use something like free pick has a uh an AI photo generator that I've used on client projects or visual electric is another really good tool that I'll use for that um like photography is I think one of the few areas where that AI can be used it's more I'm more doing UI abstractions for the most part like photography comes up
a little bit less than the stuff that I primarily do yeah for your Market it makes sense that that would be true yeah cool all right so what what would you say to somebody who is currently billing by the hour or doing these sort of oneoff client engagements where you know maybe they're giving fixed prices maybe they value prices but they don't feel super good about the sales process they you know they don't really want to get better at it they don't like doing sales um a lot I know a lot of people consider this kind of subscription model as as it's a product di service but it's a specific kind these all you can eat subscription models where uh I know it's very attractive to people per perhaps
for the reasons you said earlier about like oh no one will use the gym membership but what would you what would you tell them what would you tell your younger self your your year and a half ago self about this idea I'd say you were right this like younger Zach um and you should have done it in 2018 when your Mentor told you to you go it's a good model like the I I've done value based fees before I've done fix based I've done hourly billing and the subscription based fees and value based fees and fixed priced produze engagements I think they all sit on an equal tier and that there is very good reason to use each one of those uh but if you are somebody who doesn't want to get really really good at having
those value conversations or you're finding that's difficult for you to do like it's difficult for somebody in my position to try and track the metrics of branding you know like that's that's a really hard thing to quantify and to put numbers against it's really more of like a do you value it or do you not you're clearly by coming to speak to me there's some kind of value here um and if you want me to track metrics on that I can but know that they're going to be something that's extremely Downstream from the efforts that I'm going to put in right um so what I've liked about the subscription model is that ease of pivot like cool we're going to work on this I can help you build out a backlog of all
the other things that we want to tackle and get done and if um when we're done with one thing we just move on to the next and it's going to be this NeverEnding cycle of work that is going to help Propel that company further and having the having the consistent income is something that I think is overlooked as well like because I'm still the thing is I just don't like being told what to do like at at work by um by higher reps because I've I felt like I'm I'm capable of doing the same things and I it was in my nature to just not be told what to do like and sometimes I think you have to maybe Parry the the non-monetary benefits you get from working for yourself which is like I don't like having to clock in I don't like having
to track hours I don't like having to commute I don't like having to go to meetings that I don't want to go to and I have the ability to dictate what like the things in my time I think are a lot more things that I'm a lot more concerned about the money is going to come in you know if you want to do fix based fees and productized offers and you price it right and you know there's a market for it you're probably going to make a good amount of money as well I think that this was a it was an experiment that ended up playing up very well and now I'm trying to grow it and see how far I can go because it is a big like I feel like your end goal changes when you have a subscription model and it should be growth which is how can I
expand this further to make the machine bigger and more effective and more profitable that might be a good place to wrap up on so like what do you see as the next steps I obviously you just started to lay it out but could you go into a little bit more detail there yeah well I think that the um for us it's it's going to be growing the machine and the engine that is conversion Factory you like having multiple versions or multiple teams of you know me Cory and Nick how can we duplicate that and be able to take on more clients and how can we make sure that we're then getting into more effective client management and marketing and sales and all the other like working on the business elements that are necessary because we
developed the systems for creating really good work for our Skillets now it's a matter of how do we grow and scale that so that we're eventually not like we're jumping into the pure entrepreneurship realm which you know Seth go say like a freelancer somebody who works with their hands an entrepreneur is somebody who tells other people what to work on to grow a business right and I think that that's the unless you significantly bump your rates up which is kind of hard to do because one of the major selling points of a subscription model like this is that you are comparable if not um way more effective per dollar than a in like full full-time inhouse employee that somebody has to somebody has to manage right so I
mean you could do that that's like that's it's one of the harder things to wrestle with you know that's you guys you and relle had Paul Jarvis on many years ago and one of his most profound quotes was well instead of taking on more clients why don't you just increase your rate and you can do that to an extent you should also keep in mind that if you're a soloist and you're charging 6K per client you have five clients and you're continually booked up you're going to be making over a quarter million dollars a year and ually like that is an amazing living there are definitely people like Brett from design joy that make you know $ 1.2 million how he being in his position and also being a designer I don't know how
it's physically possible but yeah I my eyebrows are a little bit up in the air around those numbers and but yeah so it's it's the question of like do you want to continue to be a designer or do you want to go full entrepreneur I'm not asking you I'm just saying to The Listener you feel if feels it sounds a little bit like you're at that point where you're like oh you know do we want to do I want to be designing this machine like that's pretty fun too like that's a different you know for a systems thinker uh and having created a working model it's like well like why don't we dup the model how would we do that it's a it's a for for a certain person that's a very fun set of challenges yeah and one that I found
like there's always the the Nuance of risk but like you you you've talked before about like you know having the thought of having payroll over your head while you're trying to sleep at night is really annoying but now I feel like there's different ways where you could do that with um outsourced uh like managing of offshore Dev teams managing of offshore designers um you know there's a lot Shepherd is a really or I think now they're called Somewhere um that's actually their name somewhere not are you not familiar with are you not familiar with support Shephard or no Shephard the so they are like a like one of the first offshore um recruitment firms where you have like the need for a VA or you have the need for a sales team
and they will go Scout people in the Philippines or Latin America that are capable of doing that it's like you know RVA is like a recruiter for up work like recruiter for upwork but their vetting standards are far higher um there's another company like we worked with a company called remote growth Partners shout out shout out Jason um who got me my designer who's in Brazil and he's fantastic like his English is phenomenal he shows up every Monday and Wednesday to speak with me about the projects that we have going on and they are okay and understand that this is a part-time gig that could be that could also be full-time hours if it necessitates and they're far more flexible than like taking on a um a full-time employee that
is maybe like a fresh college grad or something like that yeah the expectations are completely different exactly yeah wow great okay well we've been gez I'm looking at the clock we've been chatting for a while so I hope this was super helpful to anybody who has been you know is considering a move like this I think it's very attractive and I know from talking to a number of people that clients totally get it like they this is not weird to them at all and they uh and lots of clients just jump right at it they they prefer this much more than hourly so where can people go if they want to sort of follow up with you or see what you're doing where's the best place I actually have an ask around that if you don't mind sure uh so I'm
looking to try and build out a bench of complimentary skill sets that we don't do for example top of funnel marketing like if you do social media ad management or if you do email campaign management if you build on WordPress or framer or um other Frameworks apart from web flow which is what we specialize in I would love to talk to you especially if you're on a similar model because we're we want to have people that we can refer out to like you know we have there's a company called um video deck that does explainer videos for some of our clients and I'm looking for those ancillary skill sets that are just as valuable so or content writing would be another one as well if you're specialize in highly technical
content writing that'd be fantastic and if you are interested you can find conversion Factory at conversion factory. you can find me on Twitter I am Zack Stevens the brand Thief at zst VNS um and uh my email is Zack conversion factory. just please don't take advantage of it of knowing of knowing it Zack with an H right that's right the common spelling great the correct spelling all right Zack well thanks so much for reaching out and setting this up I'm sure people are gonna love it awesome hope they do thank you Jonathan all right folks that's it for this week I'm Jonathan Stark and I hope you join me next time on ditching hourly bye
Two years into the all-you-can-eat subscription, an honest update to Jonathan Stark on what held up and what had to change.