| Readwise URL | https://read.readwise.io/read/01kt2ksxe7w4dq376dm9wemdpz |
|---|---|
| Readwise ID | 01kt2ksxe7w4dq376dm9wemdpz |
| Date | 2025-10-14 |
| Author | youtube.com |
| Category | video |
\n\nSource: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtyJ4reSQY0
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-doll 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, scale 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 uh it’s a design agency and we do everything from the websites to launch videos and the times square billboards. We work with one of the biggest names in AI niche such as Bnew Korea AI. We partner up with Premier with W with the Contra. So the idea
behind our agency is we help you to get noticed. Uh we usually don’t focus on conversions or little tweaks in landing page. We help to make something that will go viral. Cool. Before we get into, you know, 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 built a pretty big company out of it? More than five years ago, I opened the FIMA for the first time and I switched from front end. I was a developer to design. 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 slightly slightly getting more experience and slightly growing. Right. Then in the January of 2024, I decided to open my ex account for the first time and uh started posting consistently. A few months passed by. I get like five to 6K followers and in November of 2024, I open 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
retailers 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 like campaign where I would do the free
redesigns for these big brands. And was the first one that I did. I to the Atlantic page, resigned the hero section and made a post about that. And the post blew up to like 110k views, I think, like overnight. Even though itself didn’t notice me, but at this time I got around 10 to 12 call bookings uh overnight and closed the 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 up with the boat team and I show it to them and they reach 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. Did a redesign for the homepage of aquedition.com. And then Alex Hermosi himself, he noticed this, right? And he actually responded
to uh this tweet. And this post, I would say it’s probably the highest conversion post of my life. Uh maybe broke maybe like 15 16 uh call bookings every night. 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 going to 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 uh engaging with other people in your niche. I was just leaving like 50 comments a day on other designers post. 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 thing is you basically say like to get this you need to follow me, you need to leave a comment, you need to read box, right? And then I will send it to you like in
the DMs. And basically because of the giveaways, I was able to go maybe like from 500 followers to like 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 Tweet Hunter extension. You needed to see the most viral content of people in your niche. So then you can replicate that. Step four will be to experiment as much with the content as you can. Because the thing is 3 to 5k followers is actually the best range of followers
you can have. Why? Because you’re 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 uh 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 incl. 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 trending brand name to then make it go viral. 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 Mobin, our sponsor of today’s video. Mobin 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 Mobin at the first link in the
description. Huge thanks to Mobin 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 make 80K revenue a month on average. uh next month we’re thinking to break 100k. If you see at our uh dashboard we actually double uh every two months in terms of the revenue. So we start with 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 x. 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 like the highest level of X verified organization subscription uh for the brand awards purposes. Yeah, 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 like that much. Figma is free. You can pay like a 30 bucks a month for frame subscription just to host your own website, right? But it’s also not necessary. I have a bunch of friends who make like 30 to 40k MR 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, uh 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 like 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 on to 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 on to 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.