The Most Profitable Solo Business You've Never Heard Of⏐Ep. #293

Brett Williams (0:00)

On a Friday, I had the idea. On a Saturday, I built the thing. On a Sunday, I launched Non-Product Time. And on Monday, my life was not ever the same.

Chris Koerner (0:08)

Did you have an audience then?

Brett Williams (0:09)

No, no audience.

Chris Koerner (0:10)

Nothing?

Brett Williams (0:11)

I was completely anonymous. Nope. I think it was about $10,000 the first day. It was side income for me. I held my full-time job until I was making $80,000 a month, and then I quit. $80,000 a month? Yeah, and I was making $75,000 a year at the other job.

I kept the full-time job for four years while running DesignJoy.

Chris Koerner (0:31)

So you were making more per month in profit than you were per year from your full-time job? That you had at the same time?

Brett Williams (0:37)

Yes, I was.

Chris Koerner (0:39)

Oh my gosh. What is your net profit per month?

Brett Williams (0:42)

The peak was $200,000 a month, but it usually averages somewhere in the $60,000 to $80,000 a month. It's probably about $1,000 a month in expenses.

Chris Koerner (0:50)

Oh my gosh, that's wild.

Brett Williams (0:52)

These are low effort, low cost, low risk startups. You could just spin up a website tomorrow and then you're set, which is a huge opportunity right now because AI is so dang good, that you could take something like that and scale it to the moon and back. Everyone needs it. Usually, you get instant clients, instant customers with it, and it's totally free.

Chris Koerner (1:13)

What productized agencies right now you see out there in the world that are very successful that other people could copy?

Brett Williams (1:19)

Yeah, is it okay if I get two?

Chris Koerner (1:21)

I want as many as you got.

Brett Williams (1:22)

I think there's two primary ones right now. The biggest prompting hack that I can give to people.

Chris Koerner (1:32)

Meet Brett. He's making about 80 grand a month in net profit, all by himself, no team, no contractors. This guy launched an agency on a Sunday and had 10 grand in recurring revenue by Monday. No audience, no followers, nothing. He was a nobody in a town of 500 in the Midwest. Not just that, but he kept his day job for four years while running the business, making more per month in his business than he was making per year in his day job. And today he works 30 hours a week and his clients pay him six grand a month before they ever talk to him. So we're going to talk about this thing called productized services and not just his, but other productized services that you guys can launch in all kinds of different industries. Enjoy. Hey, and if you're brand new to the podcast or you've been here a while and you're enjoying it, do me a quick favor and just hit follow or subscribe and Apple or Spotify. That'll help ensure that I show up in your feed.

Brett Williams (2:19)

One of the important things like noting like who might be watching this is like, I don't want this conversation to totally be focused around just design. These principles and like what I've done here can really be applied to any sort of like mainly digital skill, whether it's marketing, copywriting, you know, maybe you're running social media for a brand or something like that. And it's small like any of this stuff can be technically what I call productized, which just basically means selling it off the shelf, right? So instead of filling out a form on a website, getting a quote, jumping on a call, having, you know, three or four meetings to discuss pricing and proposals and estimates and that sort of stuff, it's just you go to the website, you buy the service, you pay for it then, and then you can consume it. So it's really, I like to call it like lowering the TTV, which is time to value. So when you purchase, getting that thing back as quickly as you possibly can, in my case, it's design work and somebody else's case, maybe it's a blog post copy or something like that. And I think it's the model that serves that best in terms of lowering that TTV, which I think is key more now than ever. You know, a lot of companies value speed over quality, as weird as that is to say. So that's where DesignJoy comes in, and this whole model really, I think, flourishes. So I run what is now called a productized design agency. So basically selling design services via subscription.

I guess one of the more notable things is I do it all by myself. So I've been running it since 2017 I do about a million dollars a year via that, just myself. So there's very little cost involved other than the time that I invest in the startup. But it's what I do. I do design work for software product, branding, like, you name it, I do it. I keep a certain number of clients at a time on basically a retainer, and that's that.