By the time I started Huetale I'd already founded a product company and worked inside more than ten teams, which is a useful thing to have done before you start one of your own. You've watched good work die in decent process. You know which meetings are load-bearing and which are theatre. And you've seen what happens to a company whose value is stored in two people's heads.

Most creative studios are impossible to hand over. The value sits in the taste of the two or three people who founded them, which makes the business a job with extra paperwork attached. Take those people out and there's very little left to run.

Rubin and I built Huetale to survive that question from the first week.

We started as a two-person studio doing branding, rebranding, and redesign work for founders in Web3, AI, SaaS, and tech. We ended up building the layer underneath the work: playbooks, pricing architecture, an accelerator methodology, and four independent studios running on infrastructure we installed by hand. Huetale was later acquired.

Between those two points we changed direction three times. What follows is the reasoning behind each turn, the money the wrong turns cost us, and the operating principles that came out the other side.

The first read

I wasn't guessing at the problem. I'd sat on the other side of it, inside product teams, watching a company fail to explain itself to the market while everyone in the building assumed the explanation was obvious.

Founders kept arriving with the same fracture. They could explain their product to an engineer in ninety seconds and then fail completely to explain it to a buyer. The pattern was consistent enough to be diagnostic: their homepage described how the thing was built, their deck described what round they were raising, and neither document described what changed for the customer. Three different explanations of the same company, and no two of them agreed.

Every one of them called it a design problem. It was a clarity problem wearing a design problem's clothes.

That distinction became the thesis. Design was our medium. Clarity was the product. And clarity is diagnosable, which meant we could charge for a process instead of a look.

The work arrived in three shapes. Some founders had nothing yet and needed a brand built from zero. Some had a brand built at a stage they'd long since outgrown, usually a logo a co-founder made in a weekend and a name that described a product they no longer sold, and needed a rebrand. And some had the positioning roughly right and a website, deck, or product surface actively working against it, which is a redesign. Different scopes, same diagnostic. You can't redraw anything until you know what the company is claiming.

The bet

Two people. No team, no office, no overhead. Rubin and me sitting directly with founders, figuring out what they actually were, then shipping a brand that said it.

We split decision rights before there was anything worth fighting over. Rubin owned content, marketing, client calls, operations, and studio logistics. I owned design, strategy, positioning, art and creative direction, project management, hiring, resourcing, business strategy, and client relationships.

The rule that made it work: we argued about strategy and never vetoed execution. Either of us could challenge a direction before it started. Neither of us could override the other inside their domain once it did. Most co-founder failures I've watched aren't caused by disagreement. They're caused by disagreement with no defined owner, so every decision reopens until one person quietly stops caring. Defined ownership is why we could later run four founder engagements at once without the partnership showing a hairline.

What happened

Zero to six figures. No paid acquisition, no outbound, no cold email. Referrals and word of mouth, driven by work people wanted to forward to someone else.

The mechanism is worth naming, because most people read it backwards. Two people can't take everything, so we declined anything that didn't fit, and the declined work was doing the marketing. Every no sharpened what people said about us when we weren't in the room. Referrals are a description problem before they're a volume problem: people can only refer you for something they can name.

Constraints are a positioning strategy you don't have to enforce.

Following the pull upstream

Four months in, the inbound changed shape.

Agency founders started reaching out, and not for branding. They wanted help with their own agencies. Revenue but no systems. A team but no process. Four years of client work and nothing to point at: no case studies, no deck, no way to explain themselves to anyone who hadn't already hired them.

The ceiling on our existing model wasn't a mystery, and that was the problem. You can calculate a two-person studio's maximum revenue on the back of an envelope. Take your billable capacity, subtract the weeks you spend selling instead of shipping, multiply by your rate, and accept that the rate has a hard cap because clients benchmark against agencies with fifteen people and lower prices. We ran the number. It was a good number. It was also going to be the same number in three years, because the only inputs were hours and neither of us could manufacture more.

Serving agencies changed the input. We'd stop selling a project and start selling an operating system, and an operating system keeps working after we leave the room. That's the difference between income and equity in a methodology.

The trade was uncomfortable. Walking away from proven, well-paid work to build a category that didn't exist. Nobody was selling agency infrastructure. No comparable to price against, no competitor to study, no case study to borrow credibility from. We had a pattern we kept seeing and a strong suspicion it was big enough to chase.

We followed the pull. Not because it was safe. Because the ceiling on the safe path was already in view, and a visible ceiling is a slow-motion decision you either make now or make later with less runway.

That became the test for every pivot after it: where is the pull, and does leverage increase if we follow it?

Diagnosing what was actually broken

Before selling a fix, we spent real time on the diagnosis. We interviewed agency founders, audited operations, and mapped the failure points. Across every agency we looked at, they were nearly identical.

Positioning was nonexistent. "Full-service creative agency" was the default descriptor, and it commits the agency to nothing while promising everything. The downstream effect is what actually kills them: with no differentiator, the only remaining variable in a sales conversation is price, so they discount to win, then staff the discounted project thin, then deliver work that can't be used as a case study, which leaves them with no differentiator for the next pitch. That loop is self-reinforcing and most founders experience it as bad luck. Their own brand was consistently the weakest brand in their portfolio.

Process was improvised every time. Get a lead. Hop on a call. Send a proposal with soft scope. Start work. Discover halfway through that expectations don't match. Deliver something. Chase the invoice. Repeat. No SOPs, no phase gates, no revision limits. The tell isn't that projects go badly. It's that a five-year-old agency runs its fortieth project exactly the way it ran its first, which means forty projects of learning went nowhere.

Proof of work didn't exist. Agencies with five years of delivery had zero case studies. Every project generates the raw material for one at no additional cost, and almost none of them collect it. A case study is the only asset in a service business that compounds: it costs a day to make, works forever, and shortens every sales conversation that comes after it. Throwing it away is the most expensive habit in the industry.

Growth was accidental. Referrals carried the business until they didn't, and then panic set in. No pipeline, no content engine, nothing that generated demand on purpose.

These weren't four problems. They were one broken operating model that most small and mid-size creative agencies are running right now. And the fix couldn't be a course or a template pack, because the failure was situational. Someone had to come in, understand the specific business, and build the infrastructure by hand.

Turning scars into a service catalog

Most people show you the service menu and skip where it came from. Every service Huetale sold was a scar we earned first.

Positioning

In year one we said yes to everything. Branding, rebrands, social media, app design, whatever came through the door. It nearly killed us, and not because the work was bad.

Here's the part that's easy to know and hard to act on while invoices are landing. Saying yes to unrelated work doesn't just dilute the brand, it destroys the compounding. Ten projects in one category make you faster, sharper, and more expensive by project ten. Ten projects across ten categories leave you a beginner ten times. The revenue looked similar on a spreadsheet. The businesses those two paths build are not comparable.

The month we tightened our own positioning, revenue went up and stress went down. Positioning became our most profitable service for other agencies, because we'd already paid for the expensive version of that lesson and could sell the shortcut.

Scoping

Early on I priced a branding project without pinning down what "branding" meant to that particular client. Three revision rounds later we were working for free.

The failure wasn't vague scope. It was a word that both parties understood differently and neither of us checked. "Branding" meant a logo system and guidelines to me. It meant a logo, guidelines, a website, social templates, and a pitch deck to him. Both readings were reasonable. Only one was priced.

Rubin built the fix into contract structure rather than conversation. Deliverables defined by artifact and count, not category. Revision rounds numbered in the scope, not negotiated after the work has already ballooned. Phase gates where the client signs off on direction before we build on top of it, so a change of mind costs a week instead of a project. The core move is putting the expensive disagreements at the front, when they're cheap. That system shipped inside every agency setup package we sold afterward.

Subscriptions

The worst part of project work isn't the work. It's the silence after. You close a $15K engagement, feel good for a day, then look at an empty pipeline and realize you spent the whole project not selling.

That gap is a structural feature of project-based revenue, not a discipline failure, which is why "just do more outbound" never fixes it. Selling and delivering compete for the same hours in a small studio. Subscription revenue breaks the tie: you sell once and deliver monthly, so capacity spent on sales drops permanently instead of resetting every quarter.

When we built two of the studios with their founders, we killed the project model outright and priced monthly tiers instead. Predictable income for the studio, and a lower commitment threshold on the client's side, which matters more than people expect. A monthly fee is a reversible decision. A large project fee is an irreversible one, and irreversible decisions get escalated, deferred to next quarter, and quietly killed by someone who never took the call.

Communication

Early Huetale ran on WhatsApp updates, feedback buried in email threads, and approvals lost in DMs. We spent more time managing conversations than doing work.

The hidden cost wasn't the hours. It was that feedback scattered across four channels can't be resolved, so decisions got remade weekly and work got redone against opinions nobody could locate. So we built a protocol: one dedicated channel per client, weekly calls with a set agenda, async updates in Trello where the decision and the date live in the same place. Feedback that isn't in the channel doesn't exist. That single rule ended more scope creep than the contract did.

When we installed this at other agencies, some founders couldn't believe they'd been drowning in the same mess for years without ever building structure around it.

Case studies

For our first few months, every sales call was us describing capability with no evidence. The week we documented our work properly, close rates doubled. The work hadn't improved. People could finally see it.

We turned that into a service: pull an agency's best work out of dusty drives and turn it into case studies and decks that convert. It's the highest-margin service we ever sold, because the asset already existed. We weren't creating value. We were collecting value the agency had already produced and abandoned.

The principle underneath all five: experience has no commercial value until you package it. Most founders learn hard lessons and then carry them around in their heads forever, retelling them at dinners. Rubin and I wrote ours down, built systems around them, and charged for them. That's the whole difference between having experience and monetizing it.

The accelerator: building four studios from zero

Consulting agencies one at a time paid better than client work. It was still time for money. Better rate, same constraint.

The accelerator flipped it. Instead of advising from outside, we'd work hands-on with a founder to build their studio from nothing. They brought domain expertise and ambition. We brought a head start assembled entirely from things that had cost us money to learn.

Each founder was aimed at a market we weren't serving, so we were sharing method rather than customers. That mattered for a second reason too. A playbook only becomes an asset once it works in someone else's hands. A methodology that only functions when its authors run it isn't a methodology, it's a habit, and these four builds were how we found out which one we had.

The four, in brief

One studio for crypto and blockchain companies. One growth agency for Web3, AI, and SaaS startups. One design subscription built around AI-assisted workflows. And one that landed in a category nobody had named yet, somewhere between a design partner and a thinking partner, which made the first draft of its pitch an interesting afternoon.

Different markets, near-identical build. In each one we installed the same layer: positioning and the brand that carries it, the service model and how it's packaged, pricing architecture, SOPs, funnel, messaging, website, onboarding, and the internal systems that hold once the founder gets too busy to hold them personally. They brought domain expertise and ambition. We brought a head start assembled entirely from things that had cost us money to learn.

The impact

Each founder skipped the year most agency founders spend learning the same expensive lessons. They opened with positioning sharp enough to say no to the wrong client, priced on purpose instead of guessing and then discounting under pressure, and ran subscription revenue where the default would have been project work, which changes a business's cash position from the first month rather than the second year.

They also opened with proof. Case studies, a deck, and a way to explain themselves before they'd taken a single client, which is the opposite of how almost every agency starts.

For us the return was different and bigger. The playbook transferred. It didn't depend on Rubin or me doing the creative work. The frameworks, the systems, the positioning methodology, the pricing logic: all of it installed cleanly into someone else's business and produced results under someone else's name.

Four founders, four markets, none of them us. That was the thing worth building.

Lab access at $8,000 a month

Everything we'd learned, compressed into one offer. Two requests at a time. Pause or cancel anytime.

Every design subscription on the market runs the same loop: client sends brief, designer makes thing, client receives file. The founder still has to decide what to ask for, judge what good looks like, and connect any of it to the business. They're buying hands.

Lab sold the brain. Six components:

Startup OS. A custom operating system for how a startup runs its creative function. Built from scratch per client, never a Notion template. Task structure, decision flows, and how design connects to everything else in the business.

Process setup. Workflows, handoff protocols, review cycles, approval chains. We'd audit how the team actually worked and install process matched to their size and speed. Light enough for four people. Structured enough to stop the drift that quietly destroys quality.

Design management. Running the design function for startups with no design lead. Prioritization, quality control, feedback loops, consistency. Managing the thinking behind the output rather than just the output.

Network effects. Introductions to developers, marketers, investors, and other founders when they genuinely made sense. The smallest line on the pricing page and one of the largest in practice.

Help and advice. Monthly calls with two people who had built and sold a studio rather than advisors who'd read about it. Clients used those calls for pricing decisions, hiring, pivot logic, and investor prep.

Dedicated support. Concept to delivery, async, two to three day average turnaround, unlimited revisions, unlimited users, scope tailored per project. New brands, rebrands, and redesigns all ran through the same queue.

The pricing logic

We priced against the client's alternative instead of the market's average. That's the entire move, and it's the one most agencies get backwards.

The market average for a design subscription sets an expectation of $3K to $5K, and pricing inside that band puts you in a comparison table where the cheapest credible option wins. The client's actual alternative is different: hire a mid-level designer at a loaded cost above $8K once you count salary, equipment, benefits, management time, and the two months of hiring risk before anyone produces anything. Against that alternative, $8K buys strategy, process, network, and support with no hiring risk and a cancel button. Easy math to defend to a board, and a conversation that never mentions competitors.

The price did a second job as a filter. At $8K, the founders who inquire have already decided that design is load-bearing for their business, which meant we spent zero hours educating people on why it mattered.

The differentiator

A subscription that bills for output has a structural bias toward saying yes to everything, because throughput looks like value delivered and pushback looks like friction.

The two-request cap fixed that on our side. With a queue capped, we weren't competing with our own backlog, so telling a client their request was the wrong request cost us nothing. It's a constraint that reads as a limitation on the pricing page and functions as the thing that made honest advice affordable.

So when a Lab client said "I need a landing page," we asked why first. Sometimes the answer was yes, build it. Sometimes the answer was that they had two customer profiles fighting each other in the same funnel and no landing page on earth would resolve it. Most subscriptions structurally can't offer that, because their entire model rewards executing whatever gets asked.

Delivery as a design problem

Agencies deliver files. A logo in a zip. A brand guidelines PDF nobody opens after week one. A Figma link that dies when access lapses. The relationship ends at the handover.

Rubin and I decided early to treat delivery itself as a design problem. Not just what we handed over, but how it arrived and what it felt like to receive.

We produced physical brand books. Clients didn't need a printed copy to use their logo, they needed the object. A printed book on a founder's desk gets shown to investors, handed to new hires, and left on the table during meetings, which means the brand keeps getting reintroduced by the client long after we've gone. A digital file is a single impression on the day it's delivered. A physical book is a distribution channel we built once and never maintained.

Premium deliverables arrived in a custom cover, sometimes foil stamped, sometimes stripped back, always built to match the brand we'd just made. The point wasn't luxury. It was escaping the comparison set. A prospect holding that package has no reference price for it, because nothing else they've been quoted comes in that form. The moment a buyer can't map you onto a comparable, they stop negotiating on price and start deciding on fit.

For Lab clients and longer engagements we'd send something chosen: a book on brand strategy relevant to their industry, a design object connected to the concept we'd built, sometimes a specific tool. Never expensive. Always specific. Good design is the practice of caring about details past the point where most people stop. If we couldn't extend that to how we treated our own clients, why would anyone trust us to extend it to their customers?

Why this was a business decision

Retention went up. Clients with physical touchpoints stayed longer and expanded scope more often. Switching agencies means walking past a daily reminder of what you're leaving, which is a switching cost you can manufacture for the price of a print run.

Referrals went up. A brand book gets passed around a co-working space. A custom-packaged deliverable gets photographed and posted. Nobody screenshots a Drive folder. We were buying reach at a cost per impression that no ad platform can match.

The price anchor moved. Prospects stopped comparing us against other agencies on a spreadsheet and started comparing an experience against a transaction. Different competitive frame, and one where price sensitivity drops sharply.

Internally we called this culture design. Building a brand isn't finished at the visual system and the messaging. You're installing a standard for how things should look, feel, and land. Ship a zip file and you've spent three months arguing that details matter, then contradicted yourself in the final five minutes.

It didn't scale in the traditional sense. It cost time and money and never appeared on a dashboard. It's also the reason Huetale felt different to work with, and "feels different" is the hardest advantage to copy, because a competitor can't reduce it to a feature and match it.

How the thinking sharpened

Huetale wasn't a straight line. The model got sharper as we collected data.

From breadth to depth. Four founders in parallel gave us a wide data set fast, which was the point. Over time we moved toward longer engagements with fewer founders, because the ones who got the most value were the ones who got the most attention. Breadth showed us the patterns. Depth showed us the nuance, and the nuance is where the methodology actually lived.

Pricing became a design problem. Early pricing was intuitive. It worked and it wasn't systematic, which meant we couldn't tell whether a win came from the price or in spite of it. So we started treating pricing the way we treated brand strategy: research the market, understand buyer psychology, test, measure, adjust. Moving from gut-feel to structured pricing was the single biggest operational upgrade we made, and it changed how clients read the offer before the first call.

We productized our own knowledge. Early on, most of our system was verbal. Rubin and I knew how things worked because we'd built them together. As we grew we wrote it all down: frameworks, templates, playbooks. That documentation effort is what made the accelerator possible at all. You can't transfer a system that lives in someone's head, and you can't sell one either. The month we finished writing it down, the business became bigger than the two of us and, not coincidentally, became an asset.

Onboarding became a weapon. The first version of Lab onboarding was functional. The later versions became one of the strongest parts of the product. We designed a kickoff that aligned expectations, mapped priorities, and had clients seeing output inside week one, because a subscription lives or dies on whether the client feels return before the second invoice lands. Founders commented on it more than almost anything else we did.

Growth stayed intentional. We tested other channels and kept landing on the same conclusion: for high-touch, high-trust work, relationship-driven growth produced better clients than any funnel we could have bought. Paid acquisition optimizes for volume of leads, and our constraint was never leads. We chose quality of client over quantity of inbound and it held.

Choosing craft over capacity

Later on we made a call that doesn't defend well on a spreadsheet. We capped the client list and stopped taking new work.

This went further than the breadth-to-depth shift. No new logos at all. A small number of clients, served properly, and everything else declined at the door.

Financially it's the wrong decision and I knew it while I was making it. Every no was revenue we could have booked with capacity we technically had. What we didn't have was the ability to hold the standard across more relationships at once. Quality in a two-person studio isn't a policy you write down, it's a function of how much attention each client actually gets, and attention is the one input you can't scale by trying harder. I'd rather lose the revenue than ship work I'd have to explain.

The other half of it was us, and I'm not going to dress that up as strategy. Two people running a studio, founder engagements, and Lab clients on top is a pace with a shelf life. Rubin and I were both feeling it. Pulling back protected the work and it protected us, and on a given week I couldn't always tell you which of those mattered more.

Depth turned out to be the better product anyway. The clients who got more of our attention got results the high-volume version would never have produced. But I'd have made the same call even if the numbers had gone the other way, and anyone deciding whether to work with me should know that.

The acquisition

Huetale was fully acquired.

The buyer needed a creative function, and buying a working one was faster than building it. That's the reason, and it's the whole reason.

The terms are under NDA. I'll leave them there.

What this demonstrates

For anyone evaluating how I think about building a business:

Craft. Brand builds, rebrands, and redesigns across Web3, AI, SaaS, and tech, with the strategy underneath each one. The design work was never the deliverable on its own. It was the visible half of a positioning decision.

Market reading. I found a gap nobody was serving. Agencies needed infrastructure and were being sold advice. We created the category and proved demand with revenue instead of a thesis deck.

Pricing strategy. I've run project-based, subscription, and premium productized models across multiple entities, and priced against the buyer's alternative rather than the category average. I've also priced things wrong, watched what happened, and adjusted on evidence instead of theory.

Operational design. I've built systems that transferred into four different founders' businesses without collapsing under someone else's execution. Process, quality standards, communication protocols. Built for ourselves first, proven transferable second.

Pivot logic. Three direction changes: studio, then agency infrastructure, then founder accelerator, then productized Lab. Each followed a demand signal instead of a guess, and each one traded a known ceiling for an unknown one. The question was always the same: where is the pull, and does leverage increase if we follow it?

Monetizing experience. Every service we sold started as a problem that cost us money first. Scars became the product catalog. That's the literal mechanism, not a metaphor.

Experience and culture design. I treated delivery as a design problem. Printed brand books, physical packaging, curated objects. Not decoration. A manufactured switching cost, a referral engine with no media spend, and a price anchor that made us impossible to commoditize.

Partnership architecture. Clean role separation with a co-founder: argue on strategy, never veto execution, one owner per domain. That structure is why we could support four founders at once without the relationship cracking.

Honest risk assessment. I know what we didn't solve. Distribution was never systematic, which means our growth was durable but not controllable. Pricing optimization stayed reactive longer than it should have. Scaling creative quality past two people stayed an open question. Client onboarding took too many iterations to get right, and documentation always lagged the work by a few months. I list the gaps next to the wins, because anyone showing you only wins hasn't built something hard enough to learn from.

Thanks for reading and taking the time!

If you’d like to know more about me or dive deeper into my work, feel free to reach out. Let’s connect, share ideas, and explore ways we can work together. Contact me anytime, I’d love to hear from you ♥

PS: I only present a curated set of visual moments from each company, chosen through my lens of perspective and taste. I’m thankful to everyone who’s been part of this journey, and to the tools, resources, and assets that made it possible.

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