What's up everybody? This is Cortland from AndyHackers.com and you're listening to the

EndieHackers podcast. More people than ever are building cool stuff online and making a lot of

money in the process. And on this show, I sit down with these endahackers to discuss the ideas,

the opportunities and the opportunities,

and the strategies they're taking advantage of, so the rest of us can do the same.

All right, I'm here with Brett Williams. Brett, how's it going?

Great, man. How are you?

Doing excellent. Nice to meet you. I've been seeing your name. Pop up constantly on

Andy Hackers, on Twitter for like the last couple years. And it's crazy. You have this crazy

business. You're making over a million dollars a year as a one-person design agency.

Yeah, it's pretty, it's pretty crazy. It's been a crazy ride for, I've been going at it. Yeah, I mean,, uh, it's, it's pretty, uh, pretty crazy.

It's been a crazy ride for, I've been going at it. Yeah, I mean, any hackers around for gosh, many, many years, but going at this for, for five. So it's, I've been around the block a couple of times with this thing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's like the most inspirational possible story. It's like, who doesn't want to make a million dollars by themselves?

Every Andy hacker is like, if I could just like not hire a whole team, not manage a bunch of people, if I could work.

Like, it looks like you're in your apartment.

I assume you just work from home and make a ton of money doing what I love.

Like that's the dream.

And you've like hit that dream and you've been there for some time.

It wasn't just like yesterday. You've been posting about this for years. I was reading some of your old comments on Andy Hackers. When you just kind of started, design joy, things were going okay. And one of them you talked about this fear that it wouldn't scale. You're thinking, you know, I'm doing this on the side. I've got a full-time job or, you know, a different job. I'm working on

these design projects for people. You know, I'm already at the point where I've got six or seven customers. I'm not sure if I could possibly scale this business. So maybe, I think you said, maybe I'm forever doomed to be a lifestyle business. And here you are. You clearly push past that point. Yeah, I mean, it's, it's partly, you know, my own

self-doubt, but also, you know, I've had a lot of people over the years that I've just spoken to that, that also kind of put that doubt in as well, you know, when I explain the model and explain the fact that I'm just doing myself, I mean, you have people on one hand that say, you know, Gideon clients will never be your bottleneck. It'll be scaling this thing. And then you have other, you know, the other side is like, you're going to burn yourself out and you're never going to want to design another screen again, right? Like, and those two things have, I've certainly played a part in just my mental health every day and just figuring out, like, is this a long-term play? But, I mean, I guess time is as sort of told, and time will continue to tell whether it is, but I've been going out long enough where I've proven a lot of them wrong up until this point. And I've just gotten better at what I do. So it's in a sense it's getting a little bit easier the further I go along. So let's talk about, like, the actual business. It's called Design Joy. I'm looking at your website. It's super slick as it probably should be because you're a designer. What's your skill set? Like how do you build something like this? What did it take? Yeah. I've gone through the typical path. A designer designer kind of goes through. I started out. I actually started out. I was one of

the first, this is kind of a silly thing. I was kind of one of the first ones on the internet to actually

create these like silly, like corny inspirational quote images back in 2009. So I started out with like

...