How Revolution Design CEO Kerim Al-Lami grew to $303.6K revenue and 4 customers in 2024.

revolution.design is trying to help you get design done faster and more affordably in a more reliable way they've got four customers say paying five grand a month launch just eight months ago already doing twenty thousand a month in Revenue again this is sort of that blend between a design agency plus recurring SAS fee hoping to keep these customers sticky we usually see a lot of churn they haven't lost any customers so far only four they haven't lost any of them which is good we'll see what happens next hey folks my guest today is Korea malalami he helps Tech startups avoid complicated in-house hiring overpriced design agencies and unreal unreliable Freelancers with his company it's called Revolution design that can hire top one percent senior design talent in one day for 49.90 per month that's almost five thousand a month and pause or cancel at any time cream are you ready to take us to the top yes let's go all right this is cool so so I've interviewed a bunch of folks that do this sort of thing and the issue is always churn it's keeping someone paying five grand a month for more than a couple months how do you address this yeah basically I think the main thing to address here is to hire the best designers really like you know prove your point because when the client is happy with you and all of the designs they get them quickly they are happy with them I think they will stay you know we've been in the business for quite as not very long time people in business for eight months and you know some of our clients are still with us after eight months so yeah I think that's like the main point to address always and that's great okay so you launched eight months so you launched basically January of 2020 this year yep yes yes yes yes very cool okay and can you give me an example of a customer paying you today yes so usually there are they are Tech startups who just raised a series a or you know seat or anything like that and they are looking for you know designers usually the founder is quite technical or like the the marketing person is quite you know marketing and they are not skilled in looking for designers looking at portfolios and stuff like that and you know they have all like three options you know higher agency full-time or freelancer and you know they are all like kind of fundamentally flawed in our review so how many designers have have I mean do you hire them full-time or do you is it a Marketplace you just sit in between yeah basically we're still in between and we are like the creative directors I have also a co-founder we've been freelancing and helping Tech startups for almost combined period of 15 years so you know you know like we know how it goes especially in this industry and we kind of seen in between as creative directors and you know uh direct the designers and communicate with client and stuff like that and so how many how many paying customers then do you have today yeah right now we have four uh okay yeah one and how many freelance designers do you need to support those four paying customers so actually one designer can take up to three clients and you know like the main thing why we kind of found it Revolution design is because here in Chicago are probably in Slovakia where we are from you know we have like a really great design talent for really affordable prices and you know that's the reason why one of the biggest agencies design agency is called strv is basically located in Prague because you know you have a really great talent here that you know can take two three thousand Euros a month and they are you know happy as you know I don't know what and you know for two to three thousand dollars uh I mean Euros a month we can sell them to you know three clients okay so you have three or four designers you're working with consistently right now yes okay interesting um got it and so I guess walk me through I mean are you guys profitable today can you is the business model work is it sustainable yeah it's it's totally profitable actually so yeah so how much profits in June this year yeah we've done about counting like 15 000 Euros yeah okay and bro that's pretty good I mean look I'm doing the math for customers five grand a month you're doing 20 000 a month Top Line after you pay designers you pay your salaries you pay your software expenses you're profiting 10 15 000 a month yes yes like we don't really pay ourselves salaries you know and stuff like that but you know that's so you guys split the profits of 15K between the both of you yeah like we reinvest them to the company and you know hiring and stuff like that so yeah that's awesome are you guys thinking about launching your own internal software product yeah we were really thinking about it but I think and I believe that our clients really value the Simplicity because right now we work on Trello but you know in the future it's I don't think it's quite sustainable with 2013 you know 40 clients so this is something that we are really kind of like thinking about and even like planning so yeah oh what's going on there YouTube good to see you guys now imagine this you love watching these interviews with SAS Founders but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2807 interviews I've done manually saves you a lot of time well we've done this we've built it into the beautiful interface inside of founder path check this out I'll show you how you can access this in a second but you log in you connect your stripe account you see your valuation real time you can see what it changed over the past 88 days and even set goals for evaluation this year now the secret valuation is there's many different ways to value a SAS business so the reason you're going to see three or four different valuations inside of your frownerpath dashboard this is all free by the way is because depending on who's doing the buying of your SAS company you're going to get a different valuation a VC is going to pay a different 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what percent that they sold there's never been a larger data set of SAS valuation than what you can get now inside of founder path and we're thrilled to bring it to you all right we're gonna go back to the YouTube video here in a second but if you want to check this tool out if you want to jump in and sign up you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link this link founderpath.com forward slash products forward slash valuations or if you go to founderpath.com and hover over products click on get your valuation here and go ahead and sign up to give it a whirl again all that valuation data live right inside the platform I hope to see you there all right let's jump back into the interview that makes sense how did you get the first four customers talking with me about the sales process yeah absolutely basically they were all inbound clients uh or Elites is we didn't do any called out treats or anything like that they usually are our past clients we have worked with before or no new clients that you know just saw what we are doing and we haven't like really you know doing any any Marketing sales Outreach or anything like that so far since we are in such a early stage but yeah um that all of them are inbound and yeah well I mean how people say all them are inbound but inbound doesn't just happen right if you want to cite in the middle of a forest and make no noise find it so you must have done something to get people to find you although absolutely yeah we just you know put out one LinkedIn uh positive you know we are launching this new business uh me and my co-founder have worked with hundreds of clients before you know we have all them all of them in our collections we emailed some of them um and yeah basically you know some of them convert it some of them you know are still hesitating and we have plenty of calls and stuff like that but yeah uh I think it's about you know proving that that you know what you are doing and having a great portfolio and you know doing what kinds of work are you are they paying you five grand a month for is it mainly sort of website design or what are you paying for so basically pride ourselves on having these full stack designers which means that it's someone who knows how to do brand website and product so whether you need you know like a new brand a new website new product or anything in between we can you know provide that um right now the most work we have is for website web design and webflow however in the past um it was mostly product design so you are ux and stuff like that interesting and I love how you structured your pricing page take me to that you have Revolution design and you have senior designer agency and freelancer how are you winning deals so basically there are three I think the core fundamental problem with all three of them is that you know they are paid by the hour and you know like many people don't realize that you know when designers are paid by the hour they intentionally delay projects um I'm kind of guilty guilty of that many of my friends are as well because you know when you are fast well basically a tech startup needs someone who can deliver fast in critical results you get paid the least you know and when you are slow you could pay more so I think that's like the core fundamental problem with all of them however like these three uh Solutions the agency freelancer and the full-time uh designer they all so for example hiring a full-time designer usually takes up to 41 days and usually costs between 100 and 20 160 000 a year in you know New York's San Francisco basically where my clients are from and you get the benefit of you know working with them they on a day-to-day basis they get to know your brand and stuff like that you know agency usually costs between fifty two hundred thousand dollars a project and usually that's not very feasible at the start and you know finding a greater one is you know quite hard also but not that not as hard as you know hiring high or finding a really great freelancer because hiring a great freelancer which is like the gold middle between agency and you know full-time designer is like you know searching for a needle in a haystack because you never know the way we found the way we found our design agency is we started off on dribble and behance and we hired for one project and then we realized the person that we were using is part of an agency and then before you know it we grew to the agency program are you you guys using dribble on the hands for your top of funnel will you do one-off projects on those sites to land a larger customer actually my co-founder he has been designing for almost 11 years or 10 years and he had all of his projects from triple you know I you know never got on Triple or be hands or anything like that so have you gotten a customer from dribble or no no no no no actually it's not working for you actually yeah we had one actually it was this you know what freak web free uh poet called callable what I'm trying to pull lessons for the audience if you're trying to do the same thing get on dribble the hands the second thing you do on your website is you offer a website audit for 4.95 at your top of funnel I imagine it's a late you know a tripwire product here how many of these have you done yeah if you've done about like two three of them so far um yeah like one of them converted so it was like 33 but yeah uh nolina scaling we are not scaling right now so yeah what's your goal for the end of the year how much revenue are you open for this year oh we definitely want to hit the 20 clients uh hundred thousand dollars a month that would be all over in the first that's a lot of growth that's like 5x growth from where you're at today yeah I mean we are in the not in not at the end of the even like the first year and we haven't even done any Outreach and stuff like that so yeah quite exciting all right we'll see what happens we'll see what happens okay in the meantime here let's wrap up with the famous five number one your favorite book yeah that has to be the great Co between by Matt mockery number two is there a CEO you're following or studying um Elon Musk probably number four number three what's your favorite online tool for building Revolution design um figma and webflow yeah number four how many hours of sleep do you get every night oh like six five and what's your what's your situation married single kid yeah I have a girlfriend long-term girlfriend yeah okay so no kids yeah fortunately and how old are you Kareem I'm 22 22. last question something you wish you knew two years ago when you were 20. I mean you know be more ambitious probably uh take on more risks I would say yeah guys there we have it revolution.design is trying to help you get design done faster and more affordably in a more reliable way they've got four customers say paying five grand a month launch just eight months ago already doing 20 000 a month in Revenue again this is sort of that blend between a design agency plus recurring SAS fee hoping to keep these customers sticky we usually see a lot of churn they haven't lost any customers so far only four they haven't lost any of them which is good we'll see what happens next Kareem thanks for taking us to the top yeah thanks one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every Thursday at 1 pm Central it's called Shark Tank for SAS we call it deal or bust one founder comes on three hungry buyers they try and do a deal live and the founder shares back-end dashboards their expenses their revenue arpu CAC LTV you name it they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live it is fun to watch every Thursday 1 pm Central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on YouTube every day at 2PM Central to make sure you don't miss any of that make sure you click the Subscribe button below here on YouTube the big red button and then click the little bell notification to make sure you get notifications when we do go live I wouldn't want you to miss breaking news in the SAS World whether it's an acquisition a big fundraise a big sale a big profitability statement or something else I don't want you to miss it additionally if you want to take this conversation deeper and further we have by far the largest private slack Community for B2B SAS Founders you want to get in there we've probably talked about your tool if you're running a company or your firm if you're investing you can go in there and quickly search and see what people are saying sign up for that at nathanlacka.com forward slash slack in the meantime I'm hanging out with you here on YouTube I'll be in the comments for the next 30 minutes feel free to let me know what you thought about this episode and if you enjoyed it click the thumbs up we get a lot of haters that are mad at how aggressive I am on these shows but I do it so that we can all learn we have to counter those people we got to push them away click the thumbs up below to counter them and know that I appreciate your guys's support all right I'll be in the comments see ya