Running a Six Figure Web3 Development Agency

Lessons & Insights from running a Six figure web3 development agency.

We might have to let go of our employees as we have no revenue for next month.

These are the exact words I said to my co-founder Shehroz last year when we had no confirmed revenue for the coming month. Our runway was about to finish, we were burnt out, exhausted physically and mentally, and there was no light at the end of the tunnel.

Fast forward to today, we have scaled our team from 3 to 15, worked with more than 50 web3 projects by developing world-class products for them, reached 6 figures in revenue, and are scaling continuously in the web3 space despite the market conditions.

I normally don't post such things, but I wanted to take a moment to reflect on the growth that Nalikes.com has achieved in the past few years and thank everyone who made it happen!

I am writing this to inspire those of you who are starting out, feel stuck, or are questioning why you started your own business, startup, or agency in the web3 space.

I also want to share the lessons I have learned that have costed us thousands of dollars, sleepless nights, humiliation, and stress so you can avoid the same mistakes.

The truth is that running your own business sucks, especially in a space like Web3 that almost everyone thinks is a FAD. If you don't have a clear WHY, a burning desire to succeed, do not innovate continuously, and are not consistent, then chances are you will fail.

As Kapil Gupta says, prescriptions do not work. I cannot give you a prescription on how we were able to do it because if you were to follow the exact same steps, or even if I were to follow the exact same steps, neither of us would be able to achieve or replicate the same results.

Therefore, I will share our journey briefly so you can get some inspiration and ideas on how to carve your path forward.

A picture worth Millions of Dollars?

Three years ago me, Shehroz and Talha were discussing on what to do next and Shehroz said that there is something called an NFT. (Yes, one of my co-founders has the same name as me.)

We asked Shehroz what is an NFT and he showed us a picture of a Bored Ape. He also said that this image is worth millions of dollars (It was back then 😅 ). I could not understand why would someone pay such an amount to buy an image when they could just copy, download or take a screenshot.

Out of curiosity I started learning everything I could about this so called image that was worth millions of dollars. Few days in and I fell down the crypto rabbit hole and I realized that this NFT thing Shehroz was talking about that, was just the the surface of what the overall web3 space and blockchain technology had to offer. 

If you have no clue what web3 is I recommend reading this tweet or detailed blog post on Why Web3 matters by Chirs Dixon.

We had found this new thing called Web3, and not many people knew about it. It was an internet revolution. The internet was changing one day at a time in front of our eyes, and we wanted to take part and contribute to that revolution by leveraging our skills.

One of the things that I live by is that knowledge without action is useless, so we had to start somewhere. We decided to get involved in the communities and learn as much as we could. While doing so, we identified a unique opportunity and a problem that no one else was trying to capture or solve.

When everyone digs for gold, sell shovels!

The unique opportunity was that everyone was trying to dig for gold, but no one was selling shovels. This means everyone wanted to launch their own coin, NFT collection, project, or software product.

Everyone wanted to be a founder. We knew this was not sustainable in the long run. In the short run, they might get traction for their project because of the market trajectory. However in the longer run it won't work unless you have a unique edge. This is exactly what happens in a gold rush. Everyone wants to dig for gold, but no one really takes the time to think about why and how they should do it to ensure they succeed.

We personally did not wanted to start with half-cooked ideas that would not survive when the market went down. We thought, what if we could help other people dig for gold, aka develop and launch their ideas?

This was one reason we launched our own dev shop.

But the problem we encountered was even more massive than the opportunity. There was not a single reputable development services provider. Every individual developer or company was anonymous, charging ridiculous amounts for basic work, and providing a subpar customer experience.

We thought to ourselves that if the web3 space is to move forward and onboard the masses, it would happen through great products that solve particular problems. To build those products, there must be individual developers or service providers who can help.

If you are a technical person, you can build the product yourself. However, after conducting a market survey, we realized that the majority of people in the web3 space were non-technical, which meant they could not build on their ideas, even though some of them had really good ones.

As a result of this unique opportunity and to solve this massive problem, we launched Nalikes Studio.

The name Nalikes is ironic and means "misfits." I will explain this in more detail in a future post, but for now, all you need to know is that this name perfectly fits what we set out to achieve.

Revenue From Day 1

For those of you who have undergone the journey from 0 to 1, you know how difficult it is. You feel lost, with high uncertainty, doubt, and fear. You don’t know if the things you are doing will yield results or not. Even though we have spotted an unique opportunity and we clearly knew the problem we wanted to solve the path was unclear.

We also made a firm decision on why we wanted to bootstrap and not raise funds. Raising money looks attractive, but it is one of the worst things you can do as a startup founder in the early days, which we will also discuss in a future blog post.

If we weren’t going to raise funds, it meant we had to focus on generating revenue from day one. If we had not forced ourselves to generate revenue from day one, I highly doubt we would have come this far.

How did we do it?

As I mentioned above, we started getting involved in communities and sharing free value. This meant helping people with their projects for free and giving advice without charging anything. In a very short span of time, we established a name for ourselves as reputable developers in the web3 community. We also focused a lot on building relationships. People don’t really understand how valuable relationships can be. One relationship we built with a crypto fund led us to get our first client.

When we got this client, we made sure to give them our hundred percent, provide high-quality service, and ensure their success. They had a massively successful launch.

Since we knew the future of our studio depended on the success of our clients, we did everything we could to make sure they succeeded. After the successful launch, we started getting more projects through word of mouth and referrals.

Later on, when the team started to expand, I developed inbound strategies using SEO, paid ads, content, Upwork, and outbound strategies using cold outreach via Twitter, Discord, email, LinkedIn, and Telegram.

The takeaway here is that if you want to acquire customers and generate revenue in a service-based business, then:

1. Get the first client using your friends, family, existing network, and communities. If you have to offer free work upfront, then do so to build credibility. However, the prerequisite to this is that you must have something unique and valuable to offer. As Naval Ravikant says, society pays you for the things they want but don’t know how to get. In our case, it was product development.

2. When you get the first client, make sure you put in your 110%, provide a world-class service, and do everything you can to ensure they succeed. If you do that, you will not have to worry about your next gig or project as they will come to you through word of mouth and referrals.

3. Lastly, when you get to the stage where you cannot rely only on referrals, start looking at inbound and outbound strategies.

I will be sharing all the inbound and outbound strategies that we used and are currently using in detail in the coming blogs.

The Road Ahead

Me and co-founders started alone from scratch and now we are leading a global team of 15. The journey has been challenging and rewarding at the same time. We will continue to work with founders and startups in the web3 space by helping them build great products that solve an existing problem, onboard masses and obviously generate revenue. We are obsessed with our customers and every step that we take is to ensure their success. We will also be focusing on investing in web3 products and launch our own products in the coming future.

For My Team mates

I want to thank you for all the great work that you do. I am proud of each and every one of you for the growth you have achieved on an individual level and the great work that you do. We wouldn’t have been able to come this far without you. I can only say that this is the beginning, and we have a long way to go.

For Fellow Agency Owners

I feel your pain, challenges, and struggles. I cannot take away all your pain and worries, but I have decided to make your lives a little easier by sharing everything that we have done and will be doing to scale our business in my blog. I will be sharing practical steps on how to generate leads, source deals, set up partnerships, hire and retain talented people, project delivery and much more.

For Web3 Startup Founders

If you want to work with the best web3 devs in the game to ensure you tackle the right problems, launch and develop your product the right way, and focus on generating revenue from day one, then feel free subscribe to my blog I will be sharing insights and case studies of successful web3 products. Additionally, we are offering free product discovery sessions for a limited time to help you gain more clarity about your web3 product.

“You can have everything in life you want, if you will just help other people get what they want.” - Zig Ziglar

I live by this quote, and that is my aim with this blog.

Thank you for reading!