Finding Kuberanix
It was August 2023 and my itch for entrepreneurship was at it's peak. While scratching my head, I made a list of 25 ideas which I can experiment with. I wanted to build multiple products under one roof while solving problems at global level. I had to build a team that could help me with building these products and scale them. This requires capital. Therefore, I thought about leveraging my product management background and started a design and development agency to make some cash flow.
Thus, on August 15th 2023, Kuberanix was born. I defined the processes, proposal and contract structures, pricing and then finally deployed a quick Framer no-code website. I worked alone for a month and delivered 3 projects in content writing and no-code web development. On September 18th 2023, I welcomed a team of 6 people to further scale the business. We started working in parallel on the client projects and on also on our own ideas.
We helped startups and businesses with high quality brand design and user experience designs and have delivered 8 projects in industries like fashion, education, wellness, media and technology. We also released two of our in-house products - Pearmock and Boldprop - which cater to users from more than ten countries.
Notion documentation created for Kuberanix
Kuberanix Logo Design Explorations on Figma. Final logo by Midjourney.
No-Code website built under 12 hours. Tools: Framer, Crisp Chat, Calendly
Key challenges in design agency business
Without a distribution, it is difficult to get high quality clients. Directly reaching out to USA based clients is also not feasible. Whenever I approached clients in Facebook groups, I noted a resistance towards local Indian businesses offering value to local USA based businesses.
When a potential client reaches out to you, it takes at least 8-12 days to convert them for a brand design or a user experience design project. Within this period, there is a high possibility that the client stops responding and drops off even if you present them with a tailored and custom made proposal.
Brand identity design and user experience design projects in zero-to-one stage generally do not have a very tight deadline. Due to this, the clients often delay the communication during the project resulting in delays as high as a few weeks to a month. For a small agency, this means not getting a big chunk of capital on time.
The Speed Breaker
Low capital and multiple client drop offs in the sales journey started to create problems. Before our internal ideas could start to generate a revenue, we went out of balance. We raised an investment interest from a couple of angel investors but that didn't end up working out.
Today we are a team of 5 and are actively working on our internal product ideas. The team consists of three contract partners and one engineering intern along with myself. I am able to keep the team up float with some help from my father on the capital front.
Working on Kuberanix has been a fantastic learning experience so far. I will continue to work on this but until the cashflow problem is solved, we have decided as a team to run things in a part-time mode. I am now seeking full time roles in product management while the company runs on maintenance mode. We hope to come back even stronger with more experience and continue to serve our existing users who are using our products.