Brett Williams — Turning One Designer's Work Into a Monthly Subscription at Designjoy

Designjoy is a productized design service built around one designer's work and sold as a monthly subscription. It is run by Brett Williams, and in an Indie Bites interview published on March 14, 2022, it was presented as having more than 40 clients and more than $130,000 in monthly recurring revenue (MRR). Brett personally produces and delivers the designs; those figures represent the company's disclosed revenue scale at that time.

Starting a Design Business Alongside a Job

Brett taught himself design. He started by making images to post online in Photoshop, then in 2011 got his first design agency job, and later broadened his work into website and user experience design. Before starting Designjoy, he had already built experience handling design for real clients and companies.

The starting point for the business model was Design Pickle, a flat-fee graphic design service. Brett applied the same sales approach to the work he excelled at, such as branding, product screens, and landing pages. Instead of building a large team of designers, he chose to do the work himself.

Over a weekend in 2017, he settled on the product structure and copy and built the website. Initially, he offered basic design for $449 a month and app and website design for $849 a month. He later launched on Product Hunt, and acquired his first customers there too.

The speed of launch and the speed of business growth were different. According to the Indie Bites interview, it took about three years to reach $10,000 in monthly recurring revenue. In his course introduction, Brett also explains that he did not quit his job entirely until four years after starting Designjoy.

In 2020, he expanded the offer by combining design with Webflow website builds. He raised the popular existing plan from $849 to $1,149 a month and introduced a $1,699 monthly plan that included Webflow work; the most expensive offering quickly became the most frequently chosen plan. Brett disclosed $300,000 in annual revenue for 2020, and in June 2021 announced that monthly recurring revenue had surpassed $70,000.

How the Flat-Rate Subscription Actually Works

At Designjoy, 'unlimited' means requests can be queued, but work is handled one request at a time per client. According to official guidance reviewed in October 2026, most requests are delivered in about two business days on average, and larger website or app designs are divided into parts and delivered sequentially. This structure manages workload by limiting the number of concurrent jobs rather than the number of requests.

There are boundaries to the scope as well. The official site presents web and app screens, logos, ad creative, and more as deliverables, while excluding 3D modeling, video, complex packaging, and large-scale print editing. Clients can request a variety of designs, but the service stays within the areas Brett Williams can execute quickly.

No separate large software platform was developed for operations, either. The tool stack he disclosed in 2021 consisted of Figma for design, Webflow for website building, Trello for request management, Memberstack for payment management, and Airtable for daily task management. The approach was to connect existing tools and spend his own time producing the output.

Communication with clients was also organized so that it would not interfere with the work. In a 2022 interview, he explained that a short introductory call before signup is allowed, but after signup communication happens through Trello. Rather than scheduling meetings and explaining progress verbally, requests and feedback were kept as work records.

Subscriptions can be paused when less work is needed. The official guidance gives the example of using 21 days of a 31-day period and then pausing, with the remaining 10 days available to use later. This is a mechanism that makes it easier for clients whose design demand varies from month to month to come back and use the service again.

Customer Acquisition and Price Increases

Customer acquisition channels were divided among referrals, communities, and design showcase sites. In 2021, Brett Williams said that an affiliate program involving existing clients and community operators accounted for a substantial share, and he managed it with Rewardful. When his landing page was featured on a design reference site, it also had the effect of bringing in clients who wanted a site of a similar caliber.

He also used the method of distributing small design resources. Scribbbles, a collection of doodle-style vector images made in 24 hours, recorded more than 20,000 downloads in 2020 and became a channel that sent clients to Designjoy. Brett Williams explained that the value of visitors drawn into his main business was greater than the revenue from selling the resource itself.

Disclosing revenue and how the business was run also helped with promotion. In a 2023 The Futur interview, Brett Williams recalled that demand surged after Dan Rowden introduced his business on Twitter. The very story of a solo-run design subscription business became a way to tell potential customers about the service.

The price increase also changed the customer mix. In a 2020 retrospective, Brett said that after he raised prices, larger agencies and companies began entering what had been a customer base centered on individual founders. They had the budget to maintain a subscription, and in his experience they also had a better understanding of how the work was done. Per-client pricing featured in a 2022 interview had risen to as much as $5,000 per month.

The Conditions That Enabled Solo Operation and the Cost of Growth

There was a difference between the number of clients and the number of new tasks that had to be handled each day. In a 2023 interview, Brett gave the example that if there were 20 clients, only about 10 might have actual requests on a given day, and half of those could be revisions to existing work. He explained that work was spread out because each client had a different request cycle and feedback pace.

Even so, his personal production speed was an important condition. In a Q&A he took part in, Brett explained that he chooses only the work he does well and can handle quickly. What supported solo operation was not only the ability to take on many clients but also the ability to choose requests that fit his way of working.

Growth was not always comfortable. In The Futur interview, Brett revealed that he worked 12 to 13 hours a day for about two to two and a half years and experienced severe burnout. During the period when he was handling many clients alone, high revenue came with long hours of work.

Afterward, he reduced new consultations, raised prices, and ended relationships with clients that placed a heavy workload on him. At the time of the 2023 interview, he explained that he had reduced clients to about 20 to 25 and worked about six hours a day. The adjustment he chose was to change his client mix and capacity rather than hire employees.

His operating experience also led to a separate educational product. Through a course called Productize Yourself, Brett teaches offer structuring, pricing, acquiring first customers, choosing tools, and running without meetings. In addition to companies buying design, he secured people trying to productize their own professional services as a new customer base.

The structural challenge that remains for this business is whether the founder can be replaced. The official website states that Brett does the work himself without hiring other designers or outsourcing. This structure reduces the burden of managing staff, but preparing for an extended break or transferring the business would require solving whether someone else can deliver at the same quality and speed.