TL;DR - 21-year-old entrepreneur, ran semi-successful business, faced burnout, got diagnosed with ADHD, seeking advice on a 'service as a product' design business, and need to validate it so I don't waste money that my father wants to lend me to run ads.
I’m 21yo entrepreneur with a bit of an unusual journey and I need advice.Long story short, traditional education system didn’t suit me, so I was always learning stuff on my own. Even thought I come from lower working class, I was always into entrepreneurship, literally selling YouTube banners for 0.5$ when I was 12.
After huge success with my Discord development agency last year, my journey took a turn for worse is when I experienced severe burnout, leading to a year of inactivity. There wasn’t a single day where I didn’t think about how I’m wasting time. Few days ago, I got diagnosed with ADHD. I decided to take meds and it was like putting glasses on for the first time, so without missing a beat I jumped right back.
Now I’m at a crossroad. I have an idea for a “service as a product” design business, I made the MVP on the freelancing site I ran my last business on, since I have a bit of past clients to try to contact there. Problem is, all the money I’ve earned is gone and I literally had to ask my dad to lend me some money to run ads from his saving budget. He agreed to lend me a bit to get started, but I need to validate my idea to him. I definitely feel bad asking him for money and would feel even worse if I at least can't get assurance this is something that could work.
This is where I need your opinion and advice if this is something viable (of course any advice in general would make my day):
- General idea is that a client can make unlimited design requests for a flat monthly fee, instead of having to work with multiple freelancers or pay in-house designer (which can be costly, especially at times when they don't have work for them)
- Do you think this is something viable?
- Do you think there is a market out there for this?
- What would be the best way to promote this?
- What would we the best way to communicate the value to potential clients?
I always try my best to give advice to people when they need it, so I really hope you guys can give me guidance this time 🫶
This service exists. Especially in my industry of apparel printing. You will have two types of clients- one that does basically over pay and needs a few designs a month tops- ideal. And the other will demand dozens to hundreds of designs with unlimited revisions. In my business we can take on 40+ orders a week. If your business then handled my art you would be doing potentially 160 jobs with revisions for a flat rate. So you will need to know who you will staff and how you will charge proportionally.
I definitely noticed phrased my sentences wrong 😅 I didn't mean to say this is some kind of a new idea in general, but rather a new idea to my dad.
What I made sure to say is "Hey, you can request unlimited designs, but put them in a queue based on importance and we'll do them 1by1 with x hours average delivery time". I'm aiming for quality and not quantity, but that doesn't mean we can reuse designs and styles that we created to make up for quantity when it's needed. The goal is to make designs that actually gets results.
Whilst average delivery time is, let's say 24-48h, if a client requests a website design and marks that as the most important it will take longer. In practice, client can always say hey I know I've request a web design, but can you pause that today and design x.
Of course, if I a business needs more than that I could definitely come up with an offer, staff up and charge accordingly.