Christian Cardenas@Diverge
I didn’t think this day would come for at least another year, but April was my first $100K month for my lil design operation…
Part of me is definitely starstruck by the growth I’ve had over the last 6-12 months, another part of me is saying "about damn time" cause I’ve been at this for like 10 years now. TEN.
My favorite part? Going against all odds and doing this as a highschool dropout who taught himself how to design through YouTube and the COD community. Scrappily picking pieces up as I go, applying them to my business as if it were a video game.
Look, I’m not the world’s best designer. I don't follow all the golden processes and rules. I don’t use auto-layout in Figma (sue me).
I didn’t get a degree for this. And although I have a team behind me, I’m also not an agency that can charge enterprise-level numbers. I don’t even have a website and I literally SELL websites. But there are 3 things that I think have really helped pave the way to this point:
1) A sicko work ethic
2) Investing in my team
3) Treating every client like royalty no matter how big or small
I’ll start with #1:
I used to be really proud about being the hardest worker in any room, but I learned real quick that hard work can only take you so far. It only got me to about year 8 where I started to hit a ceiling at $30Kish/mo. That’s about all my personal bandwidth/sanity/health could handle but for the longest time I thought I could do it all and more. 8 years of 12-16hr days, 7 days a week, multiple burnouts, you know the drill. But without the 8-year trench work, I would never have found the appreciation I have now for working smarter.
That leads me to #2:
Learning the power of delegation and investing into building a team. The lightbulb switched when I hired my first designer to help me with small mundane tasks like removing backgrounds on logos or making illustrations for a website. Those extra 1-2 hours it gave me back each day was euphoric. I immediately got into the lens of identifying what my weaknesses were and what areas of design I needed to focus on to move the needle the most for my and my client’s businesses.
Since then, I’ve built a team of almost a dozen rockstars (across designers, developers, and project managers) that fit like a puzzle around me and my strengths/weaknesses. The goal wasn't to replace myself because my clients want to work with me and my brain directly, but I've basically added 12 arms to my body that all operate through my design thinking and how I approach solving visual problems for brands. I really couldn’t do this without my team.
Lastly, #3)
Even before the team, I think what’s really helped this blow up is the compound effect of just really taking care of my clients ever since I started at 15yo. Q1 was my biggest quarter yet and I made maybe 3 or 4 case study threads here on Twitter (aka I wasn’t focused on marketing/acquisition at all, I’ll speak on that in a sec). Most of it has been word of mouth/referrals from previous clients, which is something you can’t buy or put adspend behind. That’s just a decade of taking care of my people, and I’ll continue to do that even better with my team.
As for what's next:
Continue to focus on Retention. 2023 was an insane scaling year so I wanted Q1 & Q2 of this year to be where I patched leaks and really strengthened my foundation and processes. Build the team out to cater to my current retainers better and faster. Once I feel like we’ve done that, we’ll turn the engine on again and continue building out the team and expanding our offerings.
Crazy how things begin to really align when you start making decisions around one question: How do I provide more value to my existing clients?
Net New Acquisition will come swiftly after I’ve mastered that question.
I’ve also been really grateful to have good friends like @tclarkmedia by my side. We both took the leap on our solo pushes around the same time and we’ve been jumping on quarterly calls to just talk about our learnings, shortcomings, hiring, stress management, goals, etc. We both realized what got us from $X MRR won't get us to $Y MRR, and what got us to $Y won’t get us to $Z. Growth requires constant change and adaptation which can be scary, but it's awesome doing that in parallel with another master at their craft.
For any freelancers in any field beating themselves up for not having insane @BrettFromDJ numbers in under a year or even 5 years, I want to show you how long it took me to get to these numbers:
$0 -> 10K/mo: 4 Years
$10 -> 20K/mo: Another 4 Years
$20 -> 30K/mo: 1 year
$30 -> 50K/mo: 1 year
$50 -> 100K/mo: 6mo
2014-2024. This shit takes time, but it will compound.
Anyway, thanks for reading if you made it all the way. I’ll probably start a semi building-in-public thing here to share my lessons and failures along the way and try to help other freelancers achieve their goals.
So if you start seeing me sling some “here are 10 things 👇” threads, mind your business, I’m building here. 😂
Also the expenses in the screenshot aren't the real team expenses obv. Just platform transaction fees.
-chef
