Meet the new Off/Menu. Designed entirely in Claude Code 😘. Sorry, Figma! We tore apart the entire studio and rebuilt it around AI to do more of the work we love. Not less. And business is booming. Founders building at the frontier of AI turn to us to reach new heights. 👇 Enjoy the new site

WIP

This Week in Design | Friday November 8 2024 xitter.cf/i/broadcasts/1RDxlynOg…

Hoodie season is coming soon.

Time to get real about productized services... Here's Off Menu's latest numbers. Let's look at it annualized: Revenue: $2.2m OpEx: $1.09m Gross Income: $1.1m Capacity: 90% (Lots of ups and downs. Largely all my fault for not staying consistent with content & storytelling.) To break this down simply: It costs me $1 million to make $1 million. You've probably seen a few people brag about high revenues, zero employees, and near $0 expenses. I'm not going to dissect how misleading that is (👋🏻 self-employment taxes), but I do want to talk about solo vs. scale. I don't have anything to do with the day-to-day operations at Off Menu. Nada. I have two Off Menu meetings on my calendar each week—that's it. Luckily, I have two amazing co-founders who serve as COO and Head of Design. They run the business. I play the "Visionary" role. I work on top of funnel, finances, positioning, partnerships, and most importantly, how the business runs without me. It's built to scale. Jobs get created. Profits get shared. Guess what also works just like this? Bomb drop... A traditional agency. All we've done differently is shorten the sales cycle, make our pricing easier to swallow, and introduce more flexible retainer models. Know what's new about design subscriptions? Nothing. You've removed the safety net of a duration-based contract and leveraged a high-fee payment processor like Stripe to collect payments. Most importantly, you've removed the relationship. And that's a net negative. I know it might seem sexy to charge $5k/mo and run things through a Kanban board, but that leads to low LTV, high churn, and upset customers. That doesn't mean it's wrong. In some cases, it might work for you, but you need to understand the tradeoffs. People successful with this model are the exception, not the rule.