He Turned $100 Into A $20,000 Monthly Design Business
How this guy bet on himself, left his job and built a 6-figure design firm with just $100
🎉🎉🎉 Want to reach 35,000 readers every month for just $66? Find out more here.
Hello! Can you introduce yourself and tell us about your business?
My name is Dexter Washington Jr., and I’m the Owner & Operator at Crafted Studios.
Born and raised in Long Beach, CA, I’ve had the opportunity to live in various parts of Los Angeles and its surrounding cities, but I’ve recently made my way back to Long Beach.
At 31 years old, I come from a diverse background in creative entrepreneurship and currently work as Design Lead at Juniper Networks, so my time is dispersed right now but I still very much work on Crafted Studios.
I began my journey as a product and portrait photographer, which eventually led me into marketing, where I worked at several agencies.
Around 2017-2018, I pivoted to design and have been dedicated to it ever since. Crafted Studios is a global design and development partner, focused on creating web experiences that leverage technology and design to help teams across industries reach their full digital potential.
We’re a team of cool and passionate people with diverse backgrounds, collaborating to deliver work our clients love.
How did you start this business? Take us through the process.
The idea for Crafted Studios came to me while I was sitting in my living room, working from home as a Facebook Ad Manager at an agency.
It was a solid job that gave me valuable experience, but the environment was unbearable. Unfortunately, this wasn’t an isolated incident. Many of the marketing related jobs at agencies I’d had followed the same pattern.
The story always played out the same way: decent pay and good experience, but poor management and toxic leadership created a negative atmosphere for everyone involved. I’d witnessed too many colleagues venting about the leadership and CEOs in Zoom calls.
It happened too often, and enough was enough. I knew it was time to bet on myself, so I walked away with just $3,000 left in my account.
On the upside, I learned how to run an agency from these spaces and took what I learned to make the environment better and produce results actually worth the clients' money.
This is the root of Crafted Studios, doing things better because we care. I don’t come from money nor was any startup money given to me to start this business, so I’m not going to play with people’s hard-earned cash.
I started all of this with $100 from my $3,000 I quit with and now we’re a multiple six-figure design firm trusted by dozens of reputable brands. The business took around 2 months from idea to launch. I remember it took time to design and develop the site at the time, put together our starting offer, and to me business didn't start until we got our first client signed and ready to go.
My idea was validated through our first few successful clients. We realized that there’s a space for creative studios like ours to leverage no-code tools to thrive and develop business.
Although we still use code and leverage it as well, most of our clients come to us for no-code solutions. I was new to the world of this at the same time I was building so I didn’t get to look from a birds-eye view but looking back, the space has grown a lot and with the tools developing quicker everyday it's an exciting space to be in.
How did you get your first initial customers?
Partnerships was a great way for us to get our first clients since they not only gave us steady work to get off the ground but also allowed us to get different experiences with a vast range of clients and industries.
We cross promoted with agencies like Cohere and Pact as well software platforms like Greenhouse and Lever. It was transparent, so we were often brought along in the process of client communications and sometimes, even put up in websites as a partner. It was motivating and helped push our momentum into becoming a Webflow Partner.
To get there, I would send out cold emails and DMs on Instagram. I made a video or just pointed out some flaws on the website and explained how we use Webflow to help teams gain autonomy, creative freedom, and slim their web operations.
Even with no previous real work, we made mock-projects and showcased those. It was a time where we did everything to make ourselves look legit and serious about our craft. It felt like a "right place, right time" moment - but really, it was compounding efforts.
Since launch, what are your marketing strategies or channels to get new customers?
Like I mentioned, partnerships was a good one and still is (we have 5 agency partners), and referrals programs.
Posting the work we've done across social media will always be the baseline, but I've even tried out LinkedIn ads. That wasn't very successful for us but it was worth a try. I'm a believer of compounding efforts, so posting work to get more inbound leads, reaching out to people/companies you'd like to work with, and following up with consistency is a great method that can scale.
I'll stick to what's been working, I won't break it if it isn't broken, but this year I'm motivated to try new methods of client acquisition out.
I got started on my newsletter and YouTube channel again this year after a long hiatus, so I'm looking forward to seeing what opportunities that may create.
How does your business make money?
Currently, our business model offers clients two distinct routes based on their needs.
The first option is a $15,000 project start for design and development, with a fixed scope, timeline, and unlimited meetings.
The second option is a retainer model, priced at $5,000 per month, providing a perpetual contract that allows clients to cancel at any time.
I previously offered coaching services, which may or may not be something I revisit in the future.
In the long term, I’m interested in monetizing content specifically for designers - if that’s a direction I decide to pursue. For now, anything outside of our two core offerings is still in a "beta" phase.
The business is currently making between $15,000 and $20,000 a month, which I'm really happy and blessed to still be relevant with a full time job and very little input from me.
It costs me $380 to run, and I spend about 15 hours a week on the business, with the majority of that time dedicated to content creation. If I focus solely on client-related and operational tasks for Crafted Studios, it’s closer to 8 hours a week.
Where can we go to learn more about you and your business?
Yea so you can learn more about my story in general by checking out my article for Shoutout LA. I like that one a lot, it dives into my story quite a bit.
Other than that - I'm active on Twitter(X), YouTube, as well as my own newsletter which is The Designers Desk.