GE 154: From Zero to a Million Dollar Run Rate in 17 Months: How Russ Perry Scaled Design Pickle By Going Niche (podcast)

Hey everyone, today our guest is Russ Perry, founder of Design Pickle, a service that offers unlimited designs for a monthly fee.

Today we’re talking about how Russ grew Design Pickle from a one-man show to a six-figure business, how he scaled the company by going niche, the genius guest blogging strategy that got them their first 1,200 customers, and how a popsicle cart, a human pickle, and free pickles turned Design Pickle into a household name.

Download podcast transcript [PDF] here: From Zero to a Million Dollar Run Rate in 17 Months – How Russ Perry Scaled Design Pickle By Going Niche TRANSCRIPT

Episode highlights:

• [2:16] – After reading 7-Day Startup by Dan Norris, Russ decided to put his graphic design experience into overdrive and started Design Pickle
• [2:46] – The current price is $370 a month for unlimited design
• [3:08] – Russ was great at selling creative ideas, but they became more and more complex. As his company grew things became really complicated and Russ wasn’t prepared to deal with all of this.
• [4:21] – After some soul searching, Russ realized an agency wasn’t for him. They had no niche or specialty, being a generalist is too complicated to implement
• [5:32] – This month Design Pickle made $89,000 MRR, sales and churn are at 1 to 1, they are at 350 clients
• [6:02] – They will have done 10,000 design requests in the first four months of this year, completely blowing away the numbers for last year
• [6:20] – The pain of churn is that they have so many happy clients, but their function is not integrated in the client’s business, they are a productized service
• [7:44] – Turnaround time is the biggest throttle, 1000s of requests won’t get done for eight months
• [8:48] – When it comes to deadlines, clients need to give their input and information, they are usually the bottleneck
• [9:19] – There are several steps a request goes through, and one of the advantages of this is that it helps to test the patience and fit of the potential client
• [10:05] – Russ contacted people and implemented a guest blogging strategy to introduce his business
• [10:38] – This raised cash for bigger things like the Infusionsoft conference where Russ dressed like a giant pickle and handed out pickles
• [11:30] – Russ thinks the pickle costume helped them get about 100 customers
• [12:45] – Digital Marketer was a client and started recommending Design Pickle
• [13:31] – Being at events and trade shows works well for Russ and Design Pickle
• [13:56] – Weekly demos and webinars for customer acquisition have been offering great conversions
• [14:59] – They probably average spending about 5K a month in facebook ads, the cost of a lead is under $3
• [16:11] – They have persistent retargeting campaigns
• [17:11] – The biggest trouble is matching the number of designers to the number of clients
• [18:11] – Work hard, party less. Be confident and niche down.

Resources from this interview:

• Design Pickle
• Digital Marketer
• 7 Day Startup by Dan Norris
• Deep Work by Cal Newport
• Growth Everywhere interview with Cal Newport
• Snapchat – @DesignPickle
• Twitter – @RussPerry
• Twitter – @designpickle
• Instagram – @designpickle
• Facebook.com/designpickle

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