I built a $80K/month business in 1 year

I built one of the biggest design agencies in Silicon Valley, and we make around 80,000 a month. This is Mark, a 19-year-old from Kazakhstan who built a million-dollar business in just 10 months. And he did it with a brilliant strategy. *** can actually work, and *** can actually bring you more customers. Mark repeated this formula and went viral every time, and this grew his business fast. So I brought Mark onto the channel to break down his entire playbook, and in this video, we'll dive into his step-by-step free work-in-public formula that gets clients overnight, his exact playbook on how to go from zero to 10,000 followers fast, and why following this playbook is the fastest way to build a million-dollar business. All right, I think you guys are going to like this one. I'm Pat Walls, and this is Starter Story. All right, Mark, welcome to the channel. Tell me about who you are, what you built, and what's your story? Yeah, so I'm 19. I'm from Kazakhstan. I built one of the biggest design agencies in Silicon Valley, scaled the team to 20 people, and doing around $80,000 a month. All right, well, before we get into how you built this, can you just explain what your business does and what it is? Sure. So it's a design agency, and we do everything from the websites to launch videos and the times for billboards. We work with one of the biggest names in the AI niche, such as Bolt.new, Korea AI. We partner with Premier, with Vogue, with Contra. So the idea behind our agency is we help you to get noticed. We usually don't focus on conversions or little tweaks on the landing page. We help to make something that will go viral. Cool. Before we get into how you grew, how you built this thing, I mean, I look at your website right now. The design is amazing. How do you get into this design world and then build a pretty big company out of it? More than five years ago, I opened a FEMA for the first time, and I switched from frontend as a developer to design at the time. At the time, I was just working with some local clients in Kazakhstan. I got a couple of small clients on local websites. I was just slightly, slightly getting more experience and slightly growing, right? Then in January of 2024, I decided to open my ex-account for the first time and started posting consistently. A few months passed by, I got like five to six K followers, and in November of 2024, I opened my agency. So on average, I think we juggle between six to seven clients a month. Some of them are one-off products, some of them are retainers, and I would say our average price for retainers is about 20K a month. Okay, cool. Well, I mean, I think what's amazing about your business is that you don't have like a million clients. You just have a few really, really solid clients that pay you a lot of money per month. Can you break down how you got your first big client? Yeah, sure. So for the whole summer, like 2024, I was applying for all the UX, UI, web design role I could find. And eventually, all of them rejected me. So I decided to make like a new campaign where I would do the free redesigns for these big brands. And WAP was the first one that I did. I took the Atlantic page, redesigned the hero section, and made a post about that. And the post blew up to like 110K views, I think, like overnight, even though WAP itself didn't notice me. But at this time, I got around 10 to 12 call bookings overnight, and the close majority of them. So it basically was my first month of running an agency and making this new campaign. And it turned out super good. Okay, cool. I mean, I love this. So could you just show me actually, right now, a post that you did free work that led to clients? Basically, this day, I had a flight from Kazakhstan to San Francisco. Because I was going to the boat event. I also met with the boat team, and I show it to them. And they reached out to me, maybe like in a week. And we started working together. And here's another example of the free work we've done. We did a redesign for the homepage of aquadition.com. And then Alex Hermosi himself, he noticed this, right? And he actually responded to this tweet. And this post, I would say it's probably the highest converging post of my life. Maybe brought me like 15, 16 call bookings overnight. Cool. I think the next thing that some people watching this are probably wondering is, okay, I don't have an audience. So if I do free work, and I share it publicly, nobody's gonna see it. I'd love if you shared your playbook for getting that early audience, getting those first few thousand followers, if you're doing anything in design, or really anything in marketing online. So step one, to start using this free work strategy, you first of all need to have an ex account. So you need to get some followers. Spend a lot of time engaging with other people in your niche. I was just leaving like 50 comments a day on other design response. Step two, you go from little amount of followers, like a few hundred followers to a few thousand followers by doing giveaways. The three things you can give away is usually the knowledge, the product, or the service. So the thing is, you basically say like, to get these, you need to follow me, you need to leave a comment, you need to repost, right? And then I will send it to you like in a DMs. And basically, because of the giveaways, I was able to go maybe like from 500 followers to 5k followers in a couple of months by doing maybe like three giveaways in total. Step three, I would say would be to download the TweetHunter extension. You need it to see the most viral content of people in your niche. So then you can replicate that. Step four would be to experiment as much with the content as you can. Because the thing is, three to 5k followers is actually the best range of followers you can have. Why? Because you are big enough to make some of your content blow up, right? And you're not big enough for people to care about you enough. So you can like make like a bunch of posts and just like test new ideas, test everything you have in mind. And let's say if it's not good enough, then people just will not notice that. It doesn't matter, right? You will not hurt your reputation. And if it's good enough, then it will blow up. And step five would be to make something cool for these big-ass brands. How it works is that you find the most viral brands people talk about right now. So right now it may be unclear. So every month, every couple of months, people have something new to talk about. And your idea is to spend as much time to make the highest quality of work for this Okay, I want to point out something important here. With Mark's agency, he had to deliver amazing designs fast. He didn't waste weeks tweaking buttons or second-guessing every layout. He had a system for creating stunning designs quickly, which is the same idea behind the app Mobbin, our sponsor of today's video. Mobbin is one of my favorite tools for finding amazing design inspiration. It's a giant vault of real product designs from the best apps in the world. Actual apps and screens broken down by features and styles. So instead of guessing how to design your app, you can just find proven templates and build from that 10 times faster. This app has saved me hours and it makes designing fun again. So if you're interested, check out Mobbin at the first link in the description. Huge thanks to Mobbin for supporting this video and sponsoring the channel. All right, let's get back to the story. Okay, thank you for sharing that playbook. I think it's awesome. Can you share some more numbers behind the business and how it's doing just 10 months after starting? Yeah, we'll make 80k revenue a month on average. Next month we're looking to break 100k. If you see it, our dashboard, we actually double every two months in terms of the revenue. So we start with the 10k a month, then two months, to 20k, 40k, 80k, and so on. Right now I have 25k followers on X. I recently took a look at the statistics. I have more than 25 million views throughout this year on apps. Cool. Let me change the subject. I do want to understand a little bit more about how you built this business. What is the tech stack and the tools that you use to build this business to $80,000 a month in 10 months? I would say design agencies, they use the same bundle of tools at the zero level and the maximum level. It's always Figma, Blender, After Effects, Cinema 4D. We use it for 3D motions. We use Slack for communication. We use Notion, obviously X. And we have the highest level of X-verified organization subscription for the brand-average purposes. For anyone watching this that wants to get started right now, what are the actual tools you need to get started? You actually don't need that much. Figma is free. You can pay like $30 a month for premise subscription just to host your own website, but it's also not necessary. I have a bunch of friends who make like $30,000 to $40,000 MRR without the website. So I would say if you just start out, everything is free. Thanks for sharing all those tools. If you could go back in time and stand on Mark's shoulder before you had any clients, what would be your number one piece of advice or advice for anyone who's watching this that wants to get started and build something like you? People usually underestimate the amount of work you actually need to put in, right? So I always ask myself, what's the number of times you need to repeat this specific task that the chances of you not getting a client or a lead will be close to zero? How many times I need to do the call DMs? How many times I need to post the content for the chances of me not getting something from that will be close to zero. Cool. Well, thanks for coming onto the channel, Mark. What you built is awesome. 19 years old, building an amazing company, working with the coolest companies. So thanks for coming on and sharing everything. It was awesome. Yeah. Thank you too, Pat. Thank you. It was exciting. All right. Big thanks to Mark for coming onto the channel. I loved his story, how he built all this in public and how he grew to a million dollar business in under a year. That's just insane. But remember it all started with a simple idea and today that's really all you need. And that's why we launched Starter Story Build. In Starter Story Build, we will help you turn a simple idea into a real working app and you'll do it all without writing a single line of code. If you're interested in checking it out, then just head to the link in the description and check out Starter Story Build. All right. That's it for this episode. Thank you guys for watching. I hope you enjoyed it. We'll see you in the next one. Peace.