Flexy Global
Garik Avetisyan had spent five years as CEO of a 20+ person team building a cross-platform photo editor (web, Android, iOS). During this time, he discovered a painful truth: finding a talented, responsible, affordable UI/UX designer or agency was "practically an insurmountable task." Most top-tier agencies charged six-figure fees that startups couldn't afford, while quality freelancers were hard to vet and manage. After his company exited via acquisition in 2020, Garik saw an opportunity to solve this problem at scale.
Garik co-founded Flexy Global with two close friends: Nastya, an art director who had designed his previous product, and Davit, whom he'd known for 30 years. His philosophy was deliberate: "one person is better than 2 but worse than 3." Three co-founders provided diversity of thought and natural checks against premature decisions, without the political friction of two equals. The team launched June 1, 2021, with two service models. The first was project-based: custom design audits and fixed-price proposals for companies building new products. The second was subscription-based: providing a dedicated full-time designer for a minimum three-month commitment. This flexibility attracted startups at different stages—those in ideation, those pivoting, those hiring internally, or those drowning in project work.
Their initial go-to-market was brutally simple: networking. Garik created an Excel list of 100+ friends and sent emails to all of them. His co-founders did the same. Within weeks, they had projects. "The first channels we appealed to were our friends and family members. For the first few months, our projects came from friends only." Simultaneously, they built portfolios on Dribbble and Clutch, showcasing each completed project. They also tested Facebook and Instagram ads (which "didn't work much") before pivoting to cold email and LinkedIn outreach. By their second week post-launch, they'd landed 2 projects and "are growing ever since."
What worked: word-of-mouth from personal networks (still delivering projects a year in), and Dribbble/Clutch as evergreen lead channels. Cold outreach via email and LinkedIn yielded "quite positive" results. Subscription pricing provided recurring revenue predictability, addressing the lumpy cash flow of pure project work. What didn't: paid social ads provided negligible returns early on. Hiring proved to be the real bottleneck—not finding designers (they could always find them), but finding *good* designers who were creative, reliable, and could context-switch between projects. Garik admits being "particularly slow" in hiring, which he now sees as intentional wisdom rather than laziness, though it temporarily hindered scaling.
One year in (June 2022), Flexy Global had 15 employees: 7 full-time designers, plus project managers, content creators, and lead generation specialists. They were running $25k-$100k/month in revenue and had set a goal to hit $2M ARR by year two. They operated from offices in Yerevan (Armenia) and Minsk (Belarus), with plans to expand to Kiev and open sales offices in the Middle East and USA. Garik's ambition was explicit: make Flexy Global the North Star agency that every startup founder, PM, and business owner would recognize. They were also building an internal tool to streamline operations, with an eye toward potentially productizing it.
- •Solving a genuine pain point from Garik's prior 5 years as a product CEO made positioning and messaging authentic—he understood exactly why customers struggled to find good design.
- •The dual pricing model (project + subscription) captured multiple buyer personas and reduced churn risk by matching customer needs at different lifecycle stages, rather than forcing one-size-fits-all pricing.
- •Lean initial go-to-market through founder networks proved far more cost-effective than paid ads, validating product-market fit before scaling acquisition spend and reducing early-stage capital burn.
- •Building visible portfolio presence on Dribbble and Clutch created a compounding, zero-cost lead channel that worked passively as each new project was showcased, turning clients into case studies.
- •Co-founder structure of three (not one or two) provided natural decision-making balance, with Garik's co-founders explicitly countering his tendency toward premature scaling, preventing costly mistakes.
- 1.Start by solving a problem you've personally experienced for years as a customer or operator—document exactly what frustrated you, then validate that frustration is shared by at least 50+ similar buyers before building.
- 2.Design your pricing to map to customer segments, not just cost-plus logic: identify 2-3 distinct buying personas (e.g., early-stage startups vs. scaling companies) and create offerings that match their constraints and workflows.
- 3.Before spending on paid acquisition, exhaust warm channels: build a 100+ person list of personal/professional contacts, segment by fit, and send personalized outreach explaining why your solution matters to *them specifically*.
- 4.Create a portfolio/showcase strategy on existing platforms (Dribbble, Clutch, GitHub, ProductHunt, etc.) that fits your category, update it religiously with each customer win, and let inbound leads flow passively as social proof accumulates.
- 5.Recruit co-founders or early employees who genuinely know you and whose judgment you trust, specifically to counterbalance your own blindspots—formalize this as a decision-making dynamic rather than hoping it happens organically.
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