Business:

We rebranded to Beond from Web Workshop. We rebranded the name to something that reflects the overall vision of where I want to take the business, which is beyond the traditional form of building a services-based business. There are many things other than just providing design and marketing services that we would like to pursue with time, thus the name Beond. It will only make sense to announce those as we work on these verticals, so allow me to reserve them for now. More importantly, I am a big believer in doing a few things, but doing them with utter focus and the current focus is on scaling design and marketing.

Past :

The years started with me starting to make content to reach more people, and I spent a good 4 months figuring out every nut and bolt that goes into making short-form content to showcase expertise and our work and that worked. Instagram reached 50k followers, around 10M-11M people watched the videos, and it brought in a chance to work one some of the coolest brands. We had the chance to work with brands from around the world- the US, Australia, UAE, India and many others and the best part was that there were many moments that needed me to stretch my skillsets and grow. Whether that is understanding sales, creating content, building systems, bringing speed and efficiency without compromising on quality, bringing a team of A talent together and more ( Still learning majority of these things ), and Location freedom- the second best thing that came out of it was the ability to work from anywhere, since the pipeline was not just local but global.

Earlier, we were only focused on design services, branding and web, but with content a natural niche got carved out in DTC and naturally, the next step was to add advertising in the mix on things so that we can take ownership of our design work in the real world and provide even bigger impact to brands that we work with

Team:

My goal is never to have a huge team of 100s of ordinary people; I would be much happier with 10 really, really great people who are better than I am. Unfortunately, this piece of the puzzle is yet to be figured out. I am still learning how to build a great team. How to align incentives enough for people. Especially when the barrier to entry or building a business is now so low with social media. Building a solid team of A players is the goal for next year.

Present:

I still haven’t figured out how to scale this business. However, I do have way more knowledge of how to do it, this should be sorted in 2026. Here are some of the things that I learnt:

-The only way to escape the feast-famine cycle of service-based business and to have some sort of predictability is to have predictability in your efforts. The scaling of a business should be thought of like levers. You should be able to scale the lever up and down based on demand and need; you should not have to build the lever when the need arises, otherwise, the whole machinery will break.

For example, you can only predict your revenue in the next quarter if you have conviction and consistency in your marketing efforts this month. Let’s say I make 3 videos a week, send 25 emails, and this gets me $1 of revenue. Now, if this math is clear, I know that if I make 6 videos and send 50 emails, we would make $2. This means that I need to have consistency and predictability in my input to have some consistency in my result or output.

-Content is by far the biggest leverage point for me right now. I need to make as much of it as possible. This has not been possible because the rush those 4 months brought, took every second of my time in fulfillment, and I have posted like 6 videos in the last 4 months. I dropped the ball and killed the momentum.

• Currently, I am working on building systems for marketing- both inbound and outbound. For inbound, I will ramp up my short form content, start YouTube content, and place a better system for referrals to come in. For outbound, we are planning on sending dream-100 like emails every week.

Future:

The goal for 2026 is again the same- CREATE AND CREATE MORE. I want to have 200k on Instagram and 100k on YouTube by year end. Also, I don’t like to talk about numbers for business but I do have a monetary number in mind as well, and I will only publish about it if it is achieved.

All of these are going to be herculean tasks, but now I have figured out enough uncertain things in my life that I have good enough mental models and confidence to do it again for these things.

This newsletter:

I promise to write this every week, but this year (2026), it won’t be about just the progress in building the business. I am consuming a lot about everything that is happening in the design, branding, marketing and content world in order to produce the content that I make, and I want to share it all with you for free.

Every week, I will send you this newsletter with insights from the very frontline of the industry so that you can use that to grow and scale your brands.

This is just the beginning, and there is a lot to create.

Thank you for being a part of 2025 and coming along the journey. Happy New Year

-Anurag

Overview- We as a design studio have some momentum and the next focus is to build a team, network and leverage this traction.

Point 1 - I think it is important to make retainers work before making Youtube work. Because Youtube would require more effort and also a full time editor or person, If I want to also run a company alongside. For all of that to happen I need a consistent and more importantly predictable cashflow.

Point 2- I have realised that as things scale, I would be moved to doing everything but design. Which means sales, admin and other things. I would have to focus on everything else, which means I need people who are better designers than I am to work with me, The quality of work is everything.

I want to build the most highly talent dense creative company and the services that this company provides would be “whatever the fuck we find interesting to do” which is basically my philosophy of life and work. Money- sure. but more important is finding it fun and interesting. From Branding to websites to marketing campaigns and ad films to short stories and our own media channel, as I said basically whatever we find interesting.

I have a solid portfolio of work and some social media presence as well which means that I can show it to design and advertising agencies here in Canada and US via outreach. The retainers are the most important goal right now, because I don’t want to be haggling on 14 sales calls a day, I would much rather haggle with 3 valuable clients

There are 4 things that would be the focus of next quarter starting July

• Design Network- When the first video hit I had more enquiries than I could handle and I converted less than ideal but thats because I was bad at sales, this would not be the case anymore because I am working of learning sales which means that I would hopefully be able to close more work. I need people with me so that I can fulfil that work while keeping my content going.
  ACTIONABLE- Reach out to 5 great designers and try to make a private community of them on Slack or Whatsapp. For the community to be useful, try to have a rate card sheet template for everyone to fill so that I can use help and they can also help out each other. The bar would be kept really really high because the quality of work should not go down in any case. Ideally this would only have 10-15 people. The Community will be called the Creative Co

• There would be designers in the creative co but I need to train people to help me with content as well because I need AI visual designers. This is something for which I am willing to train new people. I have to figure out the logistics of this somehow. ( I am seeing things from my vantage point where I believe video form is going to be much much bigger and I will be betting huge on it. More on this later)

• Hiring- Something that I do not want to train someone completely is Outbound sales. This outbound person need to be great hire. They need to be able to take on a lot of responsibility and understand some aspect of the business in general. I would ideally be hiring an Intern with really high potential and then give them the task.
  ACTIONABLE- COPYRIGHTER/ SALES AND MARKETING HIRE. Dilemma is that I know what needs to be done step by step but for that to happen this person needs to be committed to the company almost as much as I am which is going to be very hard to find. The other side of the thought is that I hired editing help too soon in the beginning which was a waste because I hadn’t figured out the process and my voice and content in general. Now that I have each step figured out, I can easily train someone to do it or add a team member but I needed to figure it out myself first which might end up happening with outbound too. It would make more sense to not repeat the mistake and figure it out myself first and then add a team member and get them scale what works.

• Media Channel- I understand that content is possible and every company will need to be a media company in the future and I want to double down on it. Once I hit 25K on IG, I would start my Youtube journey as well. Starting with 2 videos a week. I need to plan how will I be able to do all of this, especially if I would be travelling too.

Last thought, my vision is very crystal clear on the creative company. The goal of the company would be to have the most creative people- writers, designers, motion artists, filmmakers, storytellers and to do what we find most interesting and fun. If you a creative of any kind reading this, you have it in you to work really really hard and if you have it in you to give a few years alongside me on building. I want you to take a bet on me. I will make it work. We will make it work. You will have to work a lot- don’t be mistaken, but you will have the time of your life, produce your greatest work and I will make sure you make a lot of money.

Get in touch.

This Edition is called Ray of Light. The names always have some sort of philosophical reference and they are up for your own interpretation.

In the last real update I posted, I was looking to create a global lead flow instead of local leads and I needed to focus more on creating videos consistently, and in order to do that I had to reduce my workload of local or unaligned work coming my way, which I did.

The risk paid off. Even though I am still very inconsistent with my videos, a few of them hit the spot in the algorithm's belly, reached close to a million people in the last month, brought appreciation for the work, 10k people to the community, and many leads.

Now another benefit of this was, in a very long time I was challenged to expand my skill set, which is the best outcome out of all this. I have been a designer for more than 4 years now in various capacities and the majority of the work came from referrals or from people I already knew. These prospects are warmest; they have seen your work, they know you second hand, and they don't need a lot of convincing, but this is not the case with social inbound.

I can create great work, I know a thing or 2 about design, but I am not a salesman. I found myself to be very sloppy in closing projects even when I knew I would really provide great value to this person and his company, but I somehow don't know how to communicate that to the prospect, which is now setting me on a path of learning how to actually close sales along with other things like building and growing a team of in-house members.

Again, like with content, I have no idea how to do it, but guess we'll figure it out. Secondly, I will also need to do a better job of striking a balance between creating these videos and working on my work. I should not be doing a lot of one thing and nothing of the other. Another thing to focus on in the next month is to put out volume. We have the initial social traction and now it is a matter of numbers, which is why I have taken out my focus from other platforms and creating separately for LinkedIn and X.

I am not an influencer. I have actual work to do as well.

This personal brand concept was cringe at first but it seems to have its benefits and now I do enjoy the art of creation as well.

This is also the reason my next choice of platform would be YouTube because any platform needs your 100 percent focus to be cracked and luckily I don't half-ass things anymore, which is why if I can create really valuable long-form content it will automatically translate into more traction on business platforms like X and LinkedIn, but it will not be the other way around. It is only possible to crack one channel at a time because you need to consistently sit inside the analytics, improve, and put out enough quantity to have the slightest idea of what works. But this would only be picked up when I have enough people on Instagram because I do not want to take the pedal off the gas.

Lastly, one solution to this is team building. If I have people who know about my business as much as I do, I can focus on figuring out other things. My vision and bet for the long term is that visual storytelling is going to be very valuable and I want to build the most talent dense creative company.

Why this?

This is happening at the forefront of everything,

As building software products is becoming easier- A great product intro video with beautiful motion can help you raise enough money to last 2 generations. Take Cluely for example.

Top of the funnel for any business will be organic content and if you know how to crack it- you are valuable. The person needed for this is someone who is not only an editor or design but a visual storyteller. Someone who knows not only scripting but also the business side of the video.

Early stage startups are more and more hiring for these 3 roles. Founding Engineer, Founding Designer and Founding Content person. The whole of marketing department in now content and videos is the biggest pillar of it.

We humans have the tendency to think whatever worked in the past will keep on working but the reality is the most amount of gains are made when you bet on things that do not yet exist but will exist. The millions of previous century were made with Oil and Land, millions of the last decades were made with Software, millions of the next decades will be made with….

If you are a creative person with a work ethic of an accountant- this is your time.

Thanks for reading, see you next Sunday

.

(Regular updates and behind the scenes of building a design studio will resume from next week.)

• Introduction: Teaching vs. doing; perspective on learning and experience

• Creativity can't be taught still how to learn to be creative

• Autodidact vs. institutional learning

• Example of notable autodidacts that are artists & Designers

• Ingredients for creating great work

• Concept of creation through rigour and exposure to reorganise information

• Art & Design mirrors nature: Golden Ratio examples

• Process steps: Exposure, hardship, synthesis

• Polishing through practice or apprenticeship

• Be a self curiosity driven student of your field
  

Adobe partnered General Assembly and Uptut hosted me for a design workshop where I shared my work philosophy. Here is the complete piece

Let me start by saying that I absolutely do not believe in teaching

By the end of this you will either hate what I have to say or love it. There is no in between.

In about 80% of the cases a professional only becomes a teacher if they are not good at doing the actual thing

You must have heard the saying- those who cannot go to the sea, make fishnets.

It basically means that if you are not a good enough sailor to go into the sea but you want to be in the profession, you start making fishnets or start teaching about sailing.

Its the same thing- If you were actually any good you would be doing it not teaching.

I take most of my heuristic from ancients. If you were a great warrior you would be fighting the war, not teaching about the war. Granted that warriors do retire and train the next generation in apprenticeship model of learning not institutional

When it comes to things that are created, when you are required to connect dots. Nobody can teach you those things, they can only come by doing.

But lucky for you I will give you all the ingredients of the recipe of making something great but you will have to figure out the recipe yourself.

There are two ways of learning anything either you are like being taught-in a university or an institution and can only learn when someone else is teaching you or you are an autodidact where you like learning things yourself, driven by things that you are interested in and your curiosity.

Now if you are someone who is constantly need to be taught then you are not creative.

All the creative professions need you to be an autodidact and all the greats and legends that have been here on this earth were autodidacts- do you think Beethoven created symphony because his teacher told him how to do it?

Do you think Ramanujan wrote those formulas of mathematics because G.H. Hardy told him how to do it? NO!

Now by this time some of you might have lost me and some of you must have related so hard with this.

Now how can you be Ramanujan of your creative field, how can you be great at your thing?

As I told you earlier I cannot give you the recipe I can only give you the ingredients and here are ingredients of making great art- and by art I mean everything that is creative from painting to mathematics.

You are just a vessel- for the information that you have consumed.

You consume things- in the form of visuals, hearing, emotions and feelings and then you organize them in some or the other way in your brain and when they are organized or even disorganized you spit them out the other side in your preferred format and that is art.

And now the more cracked your brain chemistry is, the better you will organize that data in your mind, the better it will align with things that god and nature has already created- like emotions, natural patterns and better your art will be.

Any design or art- is just trying to replicate what nature has already done for years and any great piece of art is great because it resembles the design of nature.

Let me give you some examples- The Mona Lisa- Do you know why it is so famous, apple logo, Parthenon in Greece and your crush, or the person you like. It is because of the golden ratio. Anyone's face is more attractive because it closely assembles.

Now, you brain chemistry can only be altered to produce great work by a selected few things- Pain, Misery, Hunger, Loss and trauma. I am sorry but I only spit facts.

So the process is this- Expose yourself to wide and different types of information- through all senses- this could mean travel, books, fiction, architecture, music and then if you are lucky your destiny will give you pain, misery, hunger and trauma and when you will sit to combine both what will come out from the other side will be what you call a piece of art.

Last thought- then if you want to polish your art, you will need to do it enough times and be the student of the field and like everything about it.

Changing world- Leverage- The loud drum

I started making content a few months ago because last year I had a realisation that the bazaars/market of the modern world have moved online. The buyers and sellers don't meet on the road to buy the services they need because most of their time and attention is spent online, and since humans are very transactional creatures, all of the market is online as well. Social media became a sales platform to market, and if you are not doing for yourself then you are lagging behind in the evolutions of commerce, and you cannot be successful in business if you are not keeping up with its evolution.

But this week I realised that I was dead late to this realisation and also heavily underestimating the wrath of this change.

I highly recommend reading Varun Maya’s blog on how they have leveraged content and now they start channels for government entities and big corporations to create an online asset for them. Very inspiring work.

The shape and type of financial assets has changed in the modern world. Rockefellers of yesterday used to buy factories, Rockefellers of tomorrow will be buying digital assets, audience, and distribution.

Which made me realise that the highest leveraged thing I can do at this moment is actually making content work, which is why I will be posting for the next 100 days consistently. Both video and design work. I will keep myself accountable here.

Leverage – while we are talking about leverage, the new ChatGPT-4o model had a great moment where it was creating creative like a proper designer.

My thoughts on whenever something like this comes up were that people would still need specialisation. Canva and YouTube have existed for years. Yet businesses still need design help. Similar with any other field. It's not that business owners would wake up and think “I can design with AI, why not I learn the intricacies of design and do it myself instead of paying someone else.”

No, however, the difference will be that there would be way fewer people doing it for everyone. Now you do not need 4 people on a product photoshoot, you would possibly need one person who can prompt well, use correct reference, and can then take the final design into a software and make any changes to detail wherever required.

Which takes me to the next point on who these people would be, and one thing I have realised with making content and designing for years is that the louder the drum, the better the money – even if your skills are below par as a designer, you would get the best work because you are loud and visible. It is just a raw fact which is why I should really really focus on packaging my work better.

Studio Update-

Local Work- Working on referral work for local clients, more coming up this week and next. A very custom project is also in the works ( to be closed). This is ultra custom work, I have a love/hate relation will custom work. I love working on them because it pushes me, pushes me to improve myself, get people on board to deliver better value, pushed me to learn new things and hate because the complexity of something so custom is difficult to communicate to the client, difficult to price correctly and very time consuming and can last a few months.

Global work- ( I think I like this new nomenclature for local and global work)- This is the work that I want coming from social media to make be free of my location. No meaningful ROI on content so far. Inbound is dry/low quality most of the times. I had a video hit 70K views which is positive feedback, I have a theory of what was good about that video that made it work because my average is 2k but honestly it is just a theory until I can recreate this result again.

I also learned that results from social comes from the outbound on social when paired with content. I understand the point because now you are a real person and you are showing your creditability with content but I find cold-DMing to be very cringe, a cringefest. One option could be to hire a VA and let them do it but I will resort to that option if this sales channel is still dry after 100 days.

In the coming week I am focusing on creating 7 videos, 7 design posts for socials, and then regular work of meeting people and doing my local work goes on, SEO yada yada. End goal after these 100 days is to get more work from global clients than from local clients.

If you need help with Logo/Branding or Website design- anurag@webworkshop.ca || www.webworkshop.ca

In the last edition, I talked about the future of a small design agency/studio and what are the paths of growth that lay ahead and my dilemma regarding working with local clients or taking a jump with content to attract clients from different niches.

The answer for me was actually very simple — What is the North Star? The North Star of all of my work is freedom — of creativity, from money, of location, from people, and of ideas. Thats the title of this edition as well.

And this would only be possible if I am able to grow my content, reach more people, create better work — not by being a marketing agency for local clients in my city. This would be great for business but would tie me down geographically, and that's why I have reduced my workload and have started declining work that does not align with it. (It's hard.)

Next step — I made the mistake of outsourcing early in content. I should not have done that. I should have mastered everything myself first, then outsourced if necessary, because it's my ideas and work, and I should be the one packing them into stories on video. This also reduced the burn rate, which made me more comfortable with any content not doing well, because now I am controlling and doing it end to end, and I can keep doing it because it does not cost me a thing. The time horizon of making it work and figuring it out is till death.

Networking — I am going to local events to meet people working on interesting things and also looking to host something myself in summer. I live in Ottawa, Canada, and most of the great events happen either in Toronto or in Montreal, which is not ideal. I want to build a community of like-minded people who can work and collaborate locally. I have something in plan, but they are in idea stage and not in reality as of now. This leads to thinking about a very interesting question about decision-making — What do you consider as a distraction, and what should you categorize as an opportunity?

If I get into the space of building a community, then am I diluting my focus from design work, or is this an opportunity where I can then collaborate with other people working on interesting works? Time will tell but the question is to do it or not to do ?

Lastly, I have realised that I started this blog to write about design, but this actually helps me write about growing the business of design, and writing these helps me make decisions better. And that's why I will be writing other ideas as well that could use some clarity provided by writing — on Branding, Ecom/DTC, business, tech, AI, etc. I will not send them on the email list, but they will be available to read on Substack. Email list and Sundays will be only for design case studies, studio updates, and growing design business.

Thanks for reading. See you next week.

I will give a little bit of background—The generalist vs. specialist debate feels as big as the free will vs. determinism debate. However, here are my 2 cents from selling to both kinds of clients.

If you are a small agency/studio, there are 2 paths that lay ahead of you. If you have a great network of people (maybe because you worked in big tech, etc.) and you live in a place like SF or NY, you can 100% start and be known for one thing only—let’s say you do Webflow websites, and this would work just fine. Because then people would know you for that one specific thing, and you can rinse and repeat it. However, if you do not have a big network,

your option is to start small and possibly build your portfolio, your reputation, and then eventually, since you have been in the game for long, you can approach those fat projects that actually have the budget to be creative on them because they understand the value.

Now, the problem is when you start small, your ICP is SMB and local businesses, and they don’t know the difference between one field and another. They don’t care if it is Webflow or WordPress or if your branding includes marketing collateral or not because they want a “GUY”—someone who can get the job done in the digital or tech realm. So you have to be a generalist, and the only path for growth then for your agency or studio is to slowly turn into a marketing agency. That’s the harsh truth because this ICP wants more customers now, not in 2 years because of great branding—now. And that’s the job of marketing. That’s why you see all the local agencies turn into marketing agencies offering Google Ads, SEO, etc. And I have no problem finding those clients, but the cost that you pay from your end is that this is only scalable with people. You pay for this growth with your time, which is what I have been avoiding all this while.

but this is the price that you have to pay for niche-ing down in design and not having a large enough network.

And this is the reason I started posting content where I could attract the type of clients that actually use and understand that value, which in turn would mean more creative freedom and the ability to get bigger projects.

So the decision that lies ahead of me is: Should I reduce my load of local clients and take the risk of a few months to focus 100% on content, or should I do what is already working?

Will let you know next week.

Now, the work—I was working on a really interesting project for a marketing company, and this is the kind of work I would like to attract, with both budget and creative freedom to produce sheer quality. Since its wrapped up(almost), I can share it now.

Whenever I create a direction/Moodboard. I have a very clear, crystal clear image of how that brand would look like at the end of the project, which I almost all the time convey to the client in a meeting or with an explanation of each direction.

which is to say I should improve on presentation of my work and creating the ability to present it well. My directions should just be clear from visuals/without words.

For the next week I am working on wrapping some work, shooting 4-5 videos and getting in touch with few prospects that wanted some work around summer beginning. After this I would have to pick my direction and adjust my overall strategy accordingly.

Gracias for reading. See you next week. Hopefully on a Sunday.

Last week, I talked about the dilemma of growing a service-based business and finding ways to become more leveraged. There were three options I was exploring—selling a productized service, increasing pricing, and standardizing the process for every project.

Here are a few things that I am doing:

Productized Service – Good part: I have created a new offer to sell a productized service in a way that will not take a toll on my time but will add some revenue. Challenge: I have found ways to source leads for it, and it's not social media. It’s more traditional mediums like cold calling, networking, and ads. Good part: I called, and I have a few businesses interested. This could be a good way to generate ongoing revenue without being buried in projects. I will share all of it once I have a few paying businesses for it.

Premium Projects – Well, to think about it, this has been the whole point of posting on social media—to attract interesting projects. So, creating a standardized, factory-style process for everything is not the path I am taking. I will keep posting content that provides leverage to attract premium and interesting projects. Although I go off track sometimes, I need to remind myself that my horizon for this is in years. Thinking long-term is a great healer for short-term failures.

Leads and Content Strategy – A few weeks ago, I started posting written content as well, which I am discontinuing for a few reasons:

1. My work is visual, so writing about it is not making sense. Especially in the beginning when there are only a few reading. Building credibility first by posting design, work, and progress makes more sense. I am moving towards a show-don’t-tell approach, which means posting actual and experimental designs.

2. It takes a lot of time—I am already yapping on videos, and then converting those scripts into an article or thread is just a time hole.

3. Videos will keep running—Although it becomes more and more difficult to come up with ideas for content, now I know I need to get up from my chair and shoot proper storytelling. But it’s all part of the game, I guess.

Work- New project is in the works. Really interesting concept. Aim for now is straight and simple- Consistency has been conquered. I see no problem in working 7 days of the week creating, working and producing content around it. Next would be conquering laser like focus on a moments notice which I am seeing as becoming the most rare commodity in our modern world. Reducing the time taken by things like shooting, writing, creating visual directions and designing would be necessary and it is possible by avoid distractions like phone and mental dissociation. ( Working on some actionable things and will update if they make a significant difference)

Goals for now – Create more content, create more designs, attract high-quality projects, and add more leverage to the business.

Bloomly is a direct-to-consumer (DTC) plant subscription service that delivers hand-selected, seasonal plants straight to customers' doors every month. They needed a fresh, modern and organic Visual Identity with earthly feel. We were tasked to create the Art direction, Logo and Visual Identity for the brand. Required for logo was to include some form of flower or leaf.

Other requirement was to create a playful identity yet not too playful to look immature.

Approved Moodboard

Discarded Ideation-

Final Concept and Work

I’d be delighted to hear your thoughts, reach out to me at anurag@webworkshop.ca

If you are looking for help with branding or website design, same mail gets the jobs done.

What is in this letter:

• A little math/Dilemma

• Upcoming case study

In the last letter, I talked about creating a few Framer assets for the studio. I have a fair grasp of Framer now, but when I thought about it, it is too big a time commitment when put side by side with the leverage it can provide. I want to work on things with the most leverage first.

Secondly, tutorial hell is a real thing. I could convince myself that I need to master Framer in order to move ahead and avoid the actual work. I heard Tucker Carlson on the All-In podcast or Lex Fridman a few years ago, where he was telling a story about how he would start organizing his closet when a deadline was approaching to submit a new article. The point he was making was about the tricks our brain plays on us. We want to feel the satisfaction of getting something done, so we pick small random tasks to create that feeling, all while avoiding the actual work that needs to be done. That story has somehow stuck with me.

I might be oversharing here, but it is a very real phenomenon that needs to be avoided with active thought—by checking my actions and seeing if they actually move the needle in growing my work/audience.

The little math that I was talking about is that the growth of every service provider is basically a very simple equation:
More money → High-quality leads → More leads → More people in your network and social circles.

Social is what I am working on right now, but I need to work on networking and direct outreach as well. Here’s an inversion analysis on this:

Let’s say you want to make $1 million a year. This would be about $80K per month. Let’s assume your per-service charge is $5K on average—you would need to do about 16 projects a month, which sounds ridiculous. Because you would then require a team of at least 3-4 assassins commited full time. (leaving aside the problem of finding them).

So, to solve this problem, you have two choices—actually, three.

1. Increase your prices – Fewer projects but higher quality. You get to pick the work you want to do and double the prices, but this will also cut the number of projects coming in.( Not there yet)

2. Productize your service – This is the model that has spread like wildfire in the industry, but I am not sure how to approach it right now. The average price per month seems to be around $5K in the market, which is confusing to me because I have seen agencies that are actually hired on retainer charge $15K–$20K. And that’s not because they are premium—it’s because that’s the amount of work required by the companies hiring them. So, I have a hard time understanding who the actual target audience is for these $2K, $3K, $4K retainers. My guess is other project-based agencies.

3. Develop a standardized process for your projects – This allows you to churn them out quickly. At this point, it's no longer a service—it becomes a product because you have clear steps: first goes the bolt, then three turns, then five hammers, then goes the screw... It limits your creativity because you have a set process, but it’s good for business. For this solution, you would need standard projects that don’t require custom work. To get those, you’d need to expand your network, because high-ticket projects depend on two things:

   • How custom the work needs to be.

   • If there is a specific Hormozi-style offer.
     For standard projects, the most important factor is how many people know that you do this specific type of work.

4. Bonus – You develop your own things with more leverage (software, platform, DTC) while providing your service. But this seems like a distraction and a way to avoid the challenge of scaling and growing.

These are the things I am deciding on behind the scenes, and I want to choose the one with the highest leverage. I’ll update on this in the coming weeks.

I am also writing and creating a new case study. I will get it done by Wednesday and post it on all platforms. Keep an eye out.

If you have thoughts on this or want to work on a website or branding project- email me at anurag@webworkshop.ca. I would love to hear from you.

Merci for reading, and I will see you next Sunday.

I started with X and LinkedIn content as well. My aim is to produce content and design work every single day, but I have not found a great system yet to do this along with actual projects. Growth on these two platforms has the highest ROI potential, and I want to take them really seriously. The only problem is that these platforms require you to be active on them like a junkie to engage and let people know about you, but I have found it to be very damaging to the actual power to do creative work.

These are primarily written-format-focused, so I have divided my content into two categories: case studies and actual design work. Case studies are just in-depth explorations of the material that I make videos about, and then designs are from our recent projects or work in progress.

Talking about recent projects, we worked on an eCommerce brand looking for a visual identity this week. At this point, I am fairly confident in my ability to figure out a great creative direction for a project in less than 48 hours. My goal for the upcoming week is to finish my own website/landing page that I can use on social links and then use our work to do personalized, targeted outreach to interesting prospects.

Content might take a few years to take off and start bringing in work, but we need a constant stream of projects coming in the meantime, and I unfortunately only have 24 hours in a day, so the outreach needs to be really targeted with an unbeatable offer.

This is a time in tech when shiny object syndrome is at its peak. The speed of progress is so fast that every new shiny idea or launch either looks like a missed opportunity from your end or a threat to the relevance of your existing skill set. My thinking has probably been shaped by Nassim Taleb’s work more than anyone else’s, which makes me believe in adapting and changing to be anti-fragile despite the changes in my environment. That’s why I have committed myself to providing two hours every day to work on our own products that have the possibility of bringing in constant revenue. I will be building 6–8 templates to be sold on our own website and the Framer marketplace to leverage the growth of the platform in our favor.

That's it for today. Thank you for reading, and I will see you next Sunday.

I am a branding and web designer building my design studio. I went to school for Interactive Media Design, which made me jack of all and master of none. Starting from coding, Illustrations, Web and UX design, Ecommerce, Photo and Videography, Film making, motion graphics, and even JavaScript. (Yes, I told you jack of all, since these are all part of Interactive media.)

Anyways, I really enjoyed Web UX and Branding, which I went in-depth myself and worked on projects of various sizes with tech companies to media shops and agencies locally in Ottawa, Canada.

I love building stuff myself. Over the past few years, I have built a few things as passion projects, and the one that stands out is, I created this Digital Signage app that allows restaurants to show menus on screens without paying $40-50 per month. I liked the challenge, and most of my clients in the beginning years were local restaurants and they needed it. (I taught myself how to make APIs, CDN, Backend programming and all that jazz to make this work.) It was a lot of fun. Never thought of scaling it because I already had my plate full with design work. I still get monthly subscriptions from local restaurants from this.

Then when ChatGPT came in 2022, I became curious with AI, and at the time I had to appear for this IELTS exam, that is required by Canadian Government for foreign nationals, so I created an IELTS prep app that used OpenAI's API to evaluate my exam according to the official standards. I taught myself no-code tool Bubble in the process, and I already had knowledge of database and APIs. Turns out this was a solid product that improved my writing for IELTS to 8.5/9, which is godly, and this indirectly allowed me to become a permanent resident of Canada.

I joined a few groups on Facebook to see if I could give it to other people to use for free, but marketing and sales was not my priority.

I always wanted to create my design studio because freedom is my paramount value; nothing is more important. I could have started some AI startup or some DTC brand, but the hammer of marketing is missing in my toolbox, and it is better to start something around my core competence - Design.

So I quit my work and I am building my studio, Web-Workshop focusing on designing for Startups and Ecommerce brands. Design is something that feels like art to me. I see it as my craft, and I want to produce great work, something that can last decades, and this can only be done with right people and right clients, and for that I need to understand distribution, sales, marketing, content and scaling a business.

And here I am creating content everyday as part of mastering distribution for my design studio to attract better clients who value the creative work and talent who has the creative capacity to create great work along with me. This blog and newsletter is part of my content that I would be sharing every Sunday as "Sunday Letters," documenting the progress.

I started with Instagram videos even though they have the least ROI. Instagram does not have the intellectual audience with the capital to buy my services but thats where my friends and family members are, and I needed to use the social pressure psychology on myself. I could start posted on X and quite after 2 months because I don’t see those people in real life but not when everyone knows about your videos and look at me now, I had never posted anything on Instagram for 3 years and now I post a video everyday. I love tricking my stupid brain. What’s the point of reading so much philosophy and psychology for fun if I cannot use it as social experiments.

I consider myself to be an aspiring polymath, and learning comes very easy to me, so my content is around sharing my learnings, design work, behind the scenes of building this business and design and branding case studies.

Consider following and coming along the journey because this is just the beginning and there is a lot to create.

Gracias for reading. See you next sunday.