Running a business gets easier when you have reliable people working for you. Automating Draftss helped me buy more time to decide the forthcoming steps. In 2021, I only had to spend 1 hour a day on average to manage Draftss as we totally automated and productized our service. I started delegating my responsibilities to people which helped me in thinking about new strategies for my business. It assisted me in making the business process more efficient & is also less risky.

I achieved automation by hiring great managers and setting up proper SOP’s. I introduced good incentive programs for the employees, so there is constant motivation to achieve the required goals.

I also create a private knowledge base for the entire team divided into departments. I add all the questions that our team would have while working on the projects + added different scenarios along with the next steps/decisions that they need to take in such instances. Inculcated a new habit of updating the knowledge base with whatever questions our team comes up with.

Assigning my work to my superheroes helped us improve our efficiency & productivity. On the other hand, I had more time to focus on high level tasks. Certainly, the best decision for Draftss to pave the way for success in 2021.

Our email marketing campaigns were a success. Almost each campaign had a 50%+ open rate. The overall email conversion increased & we bagged in quite a lot of customers using this classic marketing technique.

I did try a few experiments with discounting offers, I started the 1+1 FREE offer for our subscription plans. Users get one month of free service on signing up for a 1 month plan. We received a great response from the offer but it was a headache to manage it. We had to manually cancel the plan after the first payment & track one more month of usage in Google Sheets. Since we had to cancel their subscription the churn rate blew like crazy and then we had to get behind the customer to re-subscribe for the services again at the end of 2 months to continue with their subscription.

Soon after that, I planned to give 40% discounts to lure in customers but I realized that many of our competitors copied our style. So to be a step ahead of my competitors I increased my discount to 50%. Being honest here, that was certainly one of the best decisions of this year. It always works if you have good ARPU along with a good percent of LTV for your company. In 2022, I’m planning to integrate different discount strategies for Draftss.

With the improvement in the quality of designs, turnaround time & customer service, our refund ratio went drastically down to 0.5% in 2021.

It was also a year of more interaction than ever. Our customer service team was always up for solving problems. We gained a lot of traffic from various platforms such as Facebook Groups & Slack.

What’s next?

The future is exhilarating as we are going to launch a new version of Draftss soon. Learning from our past experience & experiments we have upgraded our services to come in full force for this year. Draftss 3.0 will be more advanced & have the best user experience.

We are planning to launch new services in 2022:

- Motion Graphics

- Angular JS Development

- React JS Development

- Shopify Development

- Video Editing

In 2022, I am aiming for Draftss to reach $700-$800k ARR on automation. Increase the team size, increase the pricing, launch a new website for Draftss. Setting a dedicated Marketing team to handle content, SEO, Ads, experimenting with different pricing ideas and more!

TLDR: Here is some crazy stuff that happened with us in 2021: We almost doubled our revenue from $100k to $180k ARR. Automated my productized services, Created more than 10,000 designs & worked with loads of new brands. Lost a lot of SEO traffic but still grew. En route for a more happening & productive 2022.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask me anything.