JunaidBhai

Would love to add https://draftss.com & https://abun.com to the list.

Thank you for pointing that out. I will update the communication on the website so it is better understood.

It is only recent that I have started talking about Abun. There are alot of things that I'd like the product to have before boasting about it's features. If you want to checkout everything Abun has to offer, I'd be happy to upgrade you to a paid plan. I'd appreciate if you could provide some constructive criticism on it.

That's correct. It has been less than a month since I have started publishing blog articles on Abun. It would take a few months for blogs to start ranking on Google which will gradually improve in ranking over the course of time.

The idea is not to write just any articles, but rather the ones that suit your industry targeting your ideal customer profile. This ensures that whatever users come to your website were searching for that specific term & would find relevant content on your blog. This is currently even possible using ChatGPT. The user will have to use the generated article & manually add parameters of E-E-A-T which will also start ranking on Google. I am just trying to automate it so that you do not have to invest time doing that manually.

At present one can just submit a topic to ChatGPT and generate an entire article on their own. But that's not sufficient enough to fit the parameters of E-E-A-T which helps rank your page/post on Google.

In the above example, you are correct it would not be as relevant as it should be. But in cases like How to achieve X, it would be more relevant or maybe where a visitor is just trying to understand a subject that has nothing to do with listing brand names. I am trying to tap into long-tail keywords that can help rank quickly rather than the Listicle articles. Apart from that I'm also trying to customize different types of articles based on our current users who are sharing feedbacks.

May I ask if you have created blog posts which drives traffic? Do you realistically feel that as a founder have invest time into writing articles all by yourself consistently everyday for your website? In my experience, you really do not get that amount of time to dedicate for Blog generation & SEO. This has been the same problem with me as well. So if AI could help you achieve some part of it, why not leverage it to start driving organic traffic.

I'm working on https://abun.com, a tool that would get you ranked on Google without lifting a finger. It's still not right there where I'd want it to be. Trying to push those features as fast as I can.

I'm working on something similar to build more case studies around it.

Trying to get some performance stats too so it can be better justified.

Running a business gets easier when you have reliable people working for you. Automating Draftss helped me buy more time to decide the forthcoming steps. In 2021, I only had to spend 1 hour a day on average to manage Draftss as we totally automated and productized our service. I started delegating my responsibilities to people which helped me in thinking about new strategies for my business. It assisted me in making the business process more efficient & is also less risky.

I achieved automation by hiring great managers and setting up proper SOP’s. I introduced good incentive programs for the employees, so there is constant motivation to achieve the required goals.

I also create a private knowledge base for the entire team divided into departments. I add all the questions that our team would have while working on the projects + added different scenarios along with the next steps/decisions that they need to take in such instances. Inculcated a new habit of updating the knowledge base with whatever questions our team comes up with.

Assigning my work to my superheroes helped us improve our efficiency & productivity. On the other hand, I had more time to focus on high level tasks. Certainly, the best decision for Draftss to pave the way for success in 2021.

Our email marketing campaigns were a success. Almost each campaign had a 50%+ open rate. The overall email conversion increased & we bagged in quite a lot of customers using this classic marketing technique.

I did try a few experiments with discounting offers, I started the 1+1 FREE offer for our subscription plans. Users get one month of free service on signing up for a 1 month plan. We received a great response from the offer but it was a headache to manage it. We had to manually cancel the plan after the first payment & track one more month of usage in Google Sheets. Since we had to cancel their subscription the churn rate blew like crazy and then we had to get behind the customer to re-subscribe for the services again at the end of 2 months to continue with their subscription.

Soon after that, I planned to give 40% discounts to lure in customers but I realized that many of our competitors copied our style. So to be a step ahead of my competitors I increased my discount to 50%. Being honest here, that was certainly one of the best decisions of this year. It always works if you have good ARPU along with a good percent of LTV for your company. In 2022, I’m planning to integrate different discount strategies for Draftss.

With the improvement in the quality of designs, turnaround time & customer service, our refund ratio went drastically down to 0.5% in 2021.

It was also a year of more interaction than ever. Our customer service team was always up for solving problems. We gained a lot of traffic from various platforms such as Facebook Groups & Slack.

What’s next?

The future is exhilarating as we are going to launch a new version of Draftss soon. Learning from our past experience & experiments we have upgraded our services to come in full force for this year. Draftss 3.0 will be more advanced & have the best user experience.

We are planning to launch new services in 2022:

- Motion Graphics

- Angular JS Development

- React JS Development

- Shopify Development

- Video Editing

In 2022, I am aiming for Draftss to reach $700-$800k ARR on automation. Increase the team size, increase the pricing, launch a new website for Draftss. Setting a dedicated Marketing team to handle content, SEO, Ads, experimenting with different pricing ideas and more!

TLDR: Here is some crazy stuff that happened with us in 2021: We almost doubled our revenue from $100k to $180k ARR. Automated my productized services, Created more than 10,000 designs & worked with loads of new brands. Lost a lot of SEO traffic but still grew. En route for a more happening & productive 2022.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask me anything.

Hit nearly $15k MRR in the month of September for https://draftss.com

This has been the highest MRR we have ever achieved till date.

The most simplest way to get started is to start with publishing product specific content. Gradually move towards industry specific content. Consistency and valuable content is the key to better ranking.

We did a mistake earlier at https://draftss.com where we built the website using Python/Django and then setup WordPress for blog on 'domain-name/blog'. All the articles that we uploaded would appear nested after blog. It would end up something like 'domain-name/blog/article-name'. This hurt our SEO as compared to 'domain-name/article-name'. We are now shifting the complete site to WordPress so we can have achieve a better ranking with the latter. The closer the article is to the domain, the better chances of it to rank higher compared to others.

Does it help to have posts link between each other?

- Yes, interlinking post is very important. Both internal linking and external linking is important. However, you should not worry about this at the current stage.

Are there a list of meta tags I need to take into account?

- Yes, fill all meta tags of all pages describing the contents of each page that you would like to rank. Use header tags to highlight important keywords that you would like to rank for.

Dayum. Almost every designer in my team at https://draftss.com has a Wacom tablet.

I guess I'll have to send a company-wide emailer along with the above instructions. Thank you very much for your writeup.

This can be replicated for Telegram, Facebook or any other IMs too.

Back in the day, we primarily showcased our productized service on IndieHackers and ProductHunt. I have covered majority of the activities we did during our launch here: https://draftss.com/blog/zero-to-3325-mrr-in-30-days/

Interesting article with excellent advice. I would've loved to read some content around communities where you can validate your MVP, get feedback, and even prospective customers.

When we started https://draftss.com we got our initial 10+ customers with showcasing our product on these communities that landed us with $3000+ in revenues within the first month itself.

This is literally a gold mine. Despite being a founder of a Design company, coming across such collection of compiled resources has always been a painful task.

I have tried using https://startupstash.com and https://startupresources.io earlier which had good resources too.

What's the best way to add more products to the list? Any idea if I could add the following products: Product 1: http://draftss.com Product 2: http://draftss.com/getfeedback

Binge browsing for hunting some prospective leads. Right upto 4 am almost everyday.

In my experience, I think the problem with side projects is that it starts with a certain timeline. But eventually, due to unforeseen circumstances or improvising over a period of time makes the project even more time-consuming.

The whole purpose of the side project is on-the-go learning and therefore you get this feeling inside that the side project is not optimal, or the project is not what it should be or that something is lacking. Whatever the reason, but somehow the side project is delayed on the timeline. Once the project is delayed;

a) Try to finish the side project ASAP by removing some of the important parts of the project and now it doesn't turn out to be the way you initially imagined it

b) Since the assigned timeline has passed, the project gets delayed forever as new priorities kick in

c) You finish it for the sake of completing the project because you have invested far too much time in building it

As a founder of http://draftss.com; I get to interact with alot of other founders who are struggling with completing and making their side projects beautiful. They want us to undertake the complete project for designing being Apps UI design or creating landing pages. Some founders ask us to handle complete projects as we think right, while others provide inputs for every minor inclusions and deletion. Conclusively, I'd say that it totally depends how dedicated you would be to your project from start to end. And that would define how your project is going to turn out in the end.

We are not a SaaS product but a productized service - http://draftss.com where we crossed $50,000+ in revenue till date.

We started 11 months ago as a side project and validated if there was a requirement for such a service. We got our initial customers by launching ourselves on different communities. We launched ourselves on Reddit, IH, HackerNews where we got our first 10 customers. Some of these initial customers wanted to try a smaller package before moving on with the superior ones. Till date we are still retaining some of these customers.

Initially, we assumed it was the price point that let the customers subscribe for our product. But after speaking to our customers, we came to an understanding that most of our customers were founders who did not have the resources to hire a full-time graphic designer. The best part they liked about our service was designing on the go and video conferencing discussions.

Well written content. However, I am not sure if thoroughly complete. The whole article covers areas of shortcomings related to understanding the problem, designing the structure and building it. But fails to address "upgrading current solution" or "optimizing the current solutions" that suits the current market needs.

Bios

Design-oriented: http://draftss.com/portfolio

We tested Draftss (http://draftss.com) back in April 2018, and here we are today where we have successfully achieved $8,000 MRR by serving 100+ customers with 0 refunds till date. Draftss provides Graphic design & Landing Page UI/UX with code on a monthly subscription.

Initially, we built a minimal landing page with a decent portfolio (We had been running a design shop for more than 10 years and we had a good portfolio to show). We pushed the prototype website live within a week. To validate the idea we first published a Show IH post on IndieHackers and hurray! We received our first 4 customers. We had added the Experiment Plan at $29/per task thinking that our customer would want to try our services first and then opt for other superior plans although we didn’t saw any such behavior from our first few customers.

By then we were pretty sure that our productized service was filling a market gap. We tried reaching out to customers for feedback on our services who had previously tried design platforms like 99designs, Upwork, Fiverr, and were unhappy with the designer services. Each platform had their own issues. This was an important point where we considered adding many services and carved a path for future updates. We improvised our landing page, edited out our FAQ’s, added more designs to our portfolio, optimized images for faster load time, and many other UI changes to make the landing page more beautiful and crisp. We re-launched our services on several listing websites and blogs. The traffic picked up and we were consistently getting users who were interested in our services.

While the visitors to our landing page were flowing in, we were eventually hunted on ProductHunt. Within a few minutes, we were bombarded with visitors on our website. We were sitting handling live chat for more than 18 hours straight, trying to initiate a conversation with as many visitors as possible. We believe live chat with visitors on the website is the most effective medium for getting quick and actionable feedback on your product. For a span of 3 days, We got around 1500+ visits out of which we were able to convert 11 paying customers.

We received tons of feedback from our visitors and customers. Using this feedback we keep on improving our services. Within the course of 10 months, we tried connecting with many communities to find a product-market fit. We helped these communities with our experience and made some good connections. We eventually created a product where we started providing FREE landing page UI/UX feedbacks to founders (http://draftss.com/getfeedback). We have helped hundreds of founders in improvising their landing pages and are now inclined to create more open source projects that shall help the community.

I think money back guarantee has proved out to be one of the most important feature that converts fence sitters and eliminates free trial of our service.

I am a co-founder at Draftss (http://draftss.com) which is a productized graphic design, Web & App UI/UX with code service on monthly subscription. We offer a 7-day 100% money back guarantee if the customer is unhappy with the designs we create for them. Offering a money-back guarantee builds confidence for customer to sign up for our services.

We started 9 months ago and served 100+ customers and received 0 refund requests till date.

I'm not sure what you've been looking for, but would definitely help you resolve over the email. Connect with me on jd@draftss.com

Also, we have a 100% money back guarantee if you do not like the designs we create for you.

We are still in process of setting up the SSL certificate. Meanwhile, try using http://draftss.com

We have not uploaded the codes yet. If you would like to see some of our projects, I shall send it to you via email.

Definitely not something that can be subscribed and not used.

It's more like an all you can eat buffet in a month's time eliminates the lengthy decision time taken on customer's end.

Thanks for sharing. I shall have it fixed.

We are still in process of setting up things. Would provide you with the required details. Here is my email: jd@draftss.com

We are launching all our products under the Draftss brand.

Mostly founders look for consistent design requirements for their startups.

Apart from founders, other design agencies white-label our services and forward them to their clients.