The lessons I learnt from running a productised service for one year
Back in October of 2021, I started roflow.co as a way to build a second business and facilitate clients with retainers. It really all started when I saw DesignJoy's business modal and saw that no one was doing it in Asia for Webflow and so I dove in head first to see how it would pan out.
The start (October 2021 to March 2022)
The hardest thing to do was to actually get started and build up another Webflow agency. It was a challenging road but one of the most challenging aspects of it was running it while I was still in college. I couldn't find a balance that would allow me to do both at the same.
In November 2021 we got our first client, and they stayed with us until March 2021. They were a conglomerate of med-tech startups based in Asia. Amazing, at least now I had a proof of concept and things were going well. However, the one thing that wasn't going so well was the amount I was getting paid.
I was getting paid pennies to the dollar for what I should've been charging and that was a tough lesson as I told this client that I would be increasing my prices and they decided to cancel. Fine, no problem.
By March 2022, we had 4 or 5 paying clients on both the Webflow and the Design + Webflow plan. Things were going well, to say the least.
The maturity/decline (March to September 2022)
This was about the time I said I need to focus on one or the other and chose to focus on roflow.co and rohan-malhotra.com and came back home to build them up in an environment that I was comfortable in. Things were going well for the first couple of months. No clients left, we secured one-off projects and I became competent (I'll come back to this later). We also introduced a lot during this time:
- By the week plan: Clients and agencies can sign up to take us on only for one week.
- Switched from offering both design and Webflow to only Webflow: I was never a designer, I don't like it so I chose to transition into Webflow only.
- Specialising in helping agencies: I noticed a lot of the signs up for actually agencies looking for a trusted partner so I capitalised on it and built a page designated for them and changed the whole user flow.
Here is where thing's get a bit hard, we lost our first clinet in April. Then our second client left us a couple of weeks after that. By August, we had only one client on a monthly plan and low and behold they left too. These were all quite long-term clients (5 months+ ). The main reason, I got too competent (told you we would get back to this) and didn't do as many sales and suffered the consequences for it. Then in September, we had one by-the-week signup and that was it. Officially, the first month in 10 months with no MRR.
The future (October 2022 and onwards)
Now with all that being said, what am I going to do to improve it? A few steps I already took was reaching out to clients we did one-off projects for and pitch them RoFlow at a 10% off discounted rate. No bites yet.
I hired a new sales lead to help me find new opportunities for companies looking for retainers. That's going alright and we booked 2 calls within 2 weeks. Definitely better than what I could do since I'm more on the dev side. I brought RoFlow so far but to grow it further it's time to build out a whole team.
I think within the first year the growth was a steep incline and then an equally steep decline. Now it's time to build it up again.
