We Doubled our Revenue to $100k in the pandemic, Reveals Amin Memon of Draftss

How Amin Memon is using Draftss.com to provide unlimited branding, graphic design and more.

First of all, how are you and your family doing in these COVID-19 times? 

Amin Memon: A year back, when the pandemic started, like everyone else, we too were confused and were panicked about how things would unfold. I am glad everything turned out well for us. I am doing good, and so is my family. I am happy to say the same for our entire team at Draftss.com.

Tell us about you, your career, how you founded Draftss.com.

Amin Memon: I had been running an agency business for years and was looking to innovate the graphic design & web development space. I wanted everyone as an individual or a company to have access to great design without hiring a designer and contracting expensive agencies. I, with my co-founder Junaid Ansari, came up with a model of having graphic design on a subscription. We launched in April 2018, and it was an instant success. In 30 days, we went from $0 to $3300 MRR.

How does Draftss.com innovate?

Amin Memon: Draftss.com provides Unlimited Branding, Graphic Design, Landing Page, WordPress, and HTML on Subscription. Bad design sucks. Finding designers suck hard & too time-consuming, and it is expensive like crazy. With Draftss.com, we solve that! We are like an Uber for Design & WordPress Team. You simply pay a flat fee every month, and you can request any number of design/code tasks.

How the coronavirus pandemic affects your business, and how are you coping?

Amin Memon: The pandemic kind of affected us in a positive way; our team has grown, the number of clients has increased, and our entire team is now 100% remote. We were stressed out at the start when the pandemic broke out, but eventually, we learned and kept growing while accepting the new challenges and new normal.

We adopted a lot of new tools in our company to help us process better, right from having an internal wiki for our team to marketing apps for our website to give out promotional offers.

We doubled our revenue in 2020 and grew our business to $100k ARR. Instead of firing away our team, we hired new people to the team. 

Did you have to make difficult choices, and what are the lessons learned?

Amin Memon: Running a startup is all about making difficult decisions where there is no simple right or wrong. Since we have scaled our team, hired lots of great people and even fired the ones who weren’t a match for us. Difficult decisions of firing clients which weren’t a match to changing pricing strategy, I think there were loads of difficult decisions that Junaid and I had to go through. I am glad of the synergy that I have with my co-founder Junaid, where we always seem to have a different thought and perspective to each of our problems, and we end up solving it in the most brilliant way.

Few pieces of advice for everyone who is running a startup

– Hire great people. A great team will take you to great places.

– Running Day to Day Tasks of a startup will stop you from growing. Everything can be delegated. Delegate your tasks, so you can focus on the most important things that you are missing out on.

– Automate as much as possible. Look out for whatever takes most of your time, or whatever task keeps occurring every now and then, and figure out a way to automate it.

– Invest in the right tools. Tools have helped us grow a lot. In the start, as a bootstrapped founder, I always tried to avoid using 3rd party tools to keep our costs low. I so regret doing this. 

– Do. Do. Do!

What specific tools, software and management skills are you using to navigate this crisis?

Amin Memon: We have been using a lot of apps and products for Managing & Growing Draftss.com

We thought to share all the products that we are currently using and plan to use. We had spent a great time trying a lot of products and experimenting with them out.

Here is the list:

Stripe & 2Checkout – For Payments

ProfitWell – Subscription Analytics

GitLab – Code Repository

FirstPromoter – Affiliate Management

TawkTo – Free Live Chat

HelloBar – Exit Intent Popup

Grammarly – Better English

UberSuggest Chrome Extension – Keyword Stats directly on Google!

OpalStack – Best Python/Django Hosting

Snov Mail Tracker – Nice & Free Email Tracking

Google Meet – Video Calling

Bubbles Chrome Extension – Providing Feedback on Website

Google Analytics – Website Analytics

Hotjar – Session Replays & Heat Map Analytics

Google Forms – Using it to survey & collect important details when hiring

Loom – Video Recording. Majorly for explaining tasks.

Edit This Chrome Extension – To quickly edit the text & see how a certain copy would look/feel.

Web Whatsapp – Communication

Voxer – Better IM Like Voice Communication

Unsplash / Pexels – Free Stock

IPData – Check Geo Location of the user to set pricing & timezone

Amazon SES – Transactional Emails

MailJet – Promotional Emails

DownNotifier – Website Downtime Alert

PorkBun – Domain

Ngrok – Local Host Tunneling

Postaga – Outreach / Link Building

SEMRush – SEO Analytics and Link Building Outreach

Growth Runner Daily Google Analytics Report on Whatsapp

Products we are looking to try/use:

GrowSurf – Referral Marketing

PhantomBuster / Integromat – Automation

QuickBooks – Accounting & Management

LeadBites – Lead Gen

Sonotel – For US-based phone number

Who are your competitors? And how do you plan to stay in the game?

Amin Memon: Our biggest competitor is DesignPickle, which is an industry leader in the productized graphic design space. To be honest, we love all our competitors. Instead of competing with them, we try to learn from them. We constantly receive new clients who were previous users of our competitors like DesignPickle, Penji, Kimp, ManyPixels, etc. 

To stay in the game, we make sure we do the job right. As simple as that sounds, that is the biggest and most important thing that we try to resolve or keep innovating on. All customers in our space are looking for great designs, and we make sure we do that instead of providing fancy features, false promises and bad designs. Junaid at Draftss takes this very seriously, and there is a constant cycle of hiring & firing designers so that we give the best to our customers.

Your final thoughts?

Amin Memon: I am sad for all the people who have lost their loved ones in this pandemic and the ones who had shut down due to the pandemic. I hope you all will be able to restart your lives for a brighter future.

My plan is to reach $300k ARR this year with Draftss.com and continue to help businesses with great designs. 

To everyone out there, constantly learn new things, experiment and don’t forget to grow.

Challenges = Opportunity, so take more challenges.

Your website?

http://Draftss.com