I've been hearing about build in public projects for a long time. Years, probably. I've never actually followed one. Never checked in on someone's daily updates. Never hit subscribe. And to be perfectly transparent, I know nobody is following this one either. However, I do know that they work, and the reasons why. Once the project starts hitting revenues, people can follow along with how the founder is growing his project. Due to the transparent nature of the BIP marketing strategy, people get to know the project, maybe even start to root for the founder, and it could become a word-of-mouth type of marketing strategy. At least, that's my thinking. I haven't really delved too deeply into the psychology of why BIPs work, I just know they can be hugely successful if done right. For me, there are enough reasons to do this without it working, so that's why I'm doing it. I'll probably talk about this more in the upcoming months, but that's where I'm at now.
I'm doing this purely as an experiment. TestVentures is the name after all. This project keeps me motivated, forces me to think clearly through problems by writing about them, and because there just might be a book at the end of 365 days. An audit trail for anyone who wants to start a similar productised business in the age of AI. If that sounds useful to someone in 2027, great. If not, at least I'll have the receipts.
Tomorrow I need to build a client intake process. So rather than write about something theoretical, I'm going to write about how I plan to borrow from one of the best productised service businesses I've come across, and use it to build our client onboarding.
The Designjoy Playbook
Brett Williams runs a company called Designjoy. One person. No employees. Thirty-five active clients paying $5,000 a month each. Over $100K in monthly revenue. A 98% profit margin. Five hours of work a day.
I know. It sounds like one of those LinkedIn posts where the punchline is a course you can buy for $997. But Brett's been doing interviews about this for years, and the model is well documented. He started in 2017 charging $449 a month, built the business on the side for three and a half years while working a full-time job, didn't quit until he hit $60K in monthly recurring revenue, and has been raising prices based on demand ever since.
The mechanics are simple. A client subscribes through Stripe. They get a Trello board. They submit design requests — as many as they want — but only one is active at a time. Brett works through the queue, delivers within 48 hours on average, and moves to the next task. No meetings. No discovery calls. No status updates. Everything is asynchronous. Clients can pause their subscription whenever they want — unused days get banked and they resume when they're ready.
That pause feature is clever. It feels safer than cancelling, so clients stay subscribed longer even during slow months. Retention engineered into the billing.
The onboarding is equally stripped down. No welcome call. No kickoff meeting. Client pays, receives a link to their Trello board and a pre-recorded Loom video explaining how everything works. Total onboarding time: about an hour from the client's perspective. Brett recorded that Loom once and sends it to every new client. One video replaces an infinite number of onboarding calls.
What I'm Taking
I already started building pieces of this before I even looked at Designjoy's model, which is a good sign — it means the structure is intuitive for productised services. I set up a Trello board last week. Took about five minutes.
Last week I wrote about my Stripe issues — being locked out of my own account for a week while trying to onboard a client. That's fixed now. I've created an enterprise payment link and a regular one. What's still outstanding is a 50% off coupon for nonprofits, and then some kind of client introduction mechanism.
That introduction is where the Designjoy approach really clicks for me. I need to build either a welcome page, a Zap-triggered email, or — most likely — a simple Loom video on the Trello board itself. Me introducing myself, explaining how the queue works, showing where to drop requests, and setting expectations on turnaround. Record it once, reuse it forever.
Incidentally, not everyone knows about Loom and that genuinely surprises me. I love this product. I can't say enough about how much time it saves versus getting on calls that neither party really wants to do. Calls can be incredibly disruptive to your day. If you can avoid them — and you should be able to for 90% of your tasks — use a Loom. Asynchronous communication is the way to go, especially when you're trying to build a lifestyle business that's time zone agnostic and keeps client calls to an absolute minimum.
So here's what I'm borrowing from Designjoy for TestVentures v1:
A Stripe recurring payment link with a simple pause option. Client subscribes, gets charged monthly, can pause anytime from their Stripe portal. No invoicing, no chasing payments, no awkward conversations about overdue bills. Stripe handles all of it.
A single Trello board per client. Columns for Backlog, Up Next, In Progress, Review, and Done. Client drops tasks into Backlog. I pull them into In Progress. One active task at a time. When it's done, the next one moves up. Clean, visible, no ambiguity about what's being worked on.
A welcome message on the Trello board with a Loom video. Me explaining how it all works — how to submit requests, what "one task at a time" means, expected turnaround, how to pause. Five minutes, recorded once.
That queue discipline is really the backbone of the whole system, and I'll explain it clearly in the onboarding video. One task at a time, finish it, then move on. Without that constraint, you end up with fifteen half-done things and a client who feels like nothing is getting completed. The queue is what makes the unlimited requests model actually work. It's a forcing function for focus, for both sides.
What I'm Not Taking
Brett's model is explicitly solo and he plans to stay that way. He's talked in interviews about why he won't hire — he doesn't want to manage people, doesn't want to compromise on quality, and doesn't want his 98% margins to collapse under salary overhead. That makes sense for design, where his personal taste and speed are the product.
My model is different. I'm building towards four or five specialists underneath me, with a target of $100K a month. Enterprise clients at $7,500-plus, nonprofits at a reduced rate or pro bono. I can't deliver that volume alone, and I don't want to. The intake system scales to a team — each specialist manages their own set of Trello boards, I review output before it hits the client's Review column, and the queue discipline keeps everyone's workload predictable.
When we have twenty clients — and that's the plan, not the dream — that's twenty active tasks across four or five people. Manageable. The Trello boards might get noisy at that point and I'll figure out something better, but since that isn't a problem now, I'm not going to solve it now. This is really important and something I keep reminding myself: don't overthink things. Make small tests and move on. Done is better than none.
What's Left Before Monday
The client intake v1 needs four things to be live: the Stripe payment links with coupon codes, a template Trello board I can duplicate for each new client, that Loom onboarding video, and a quick "How We Work" summary — probably just a pinned card on the Trello board itself.
I'm estimating about 70 minutes of actual work. Which means this is one of those problems that felt bigger than it was until I wrote it down and realised it's just a few small tasks in sequence. Writing is thinking.
Thinking Out Loud
These are my thoughts, just talking it through. Since I know it's crickets around here right now, I'm mostly thinking out loud to myself and bouncing ideas around with my AI coach. That's been one of the better things to come out of this experiment — having a structured system to pressure-test decisions and keep the direction honest.
Perhaps a prospect will stumble onto this post one day, get curious, and decide they like what I'm talking about. I hope so. But if not, the writing itself is worth it. It forces clarity, creates accountability, and builds an archive I can reference when things get complicated later.
Revenue: $0. Clients: 1. Prospects: 6.
Going to change that revenue number this week. I promise — to myself.
Day 16 of 365.