Imagine you ran a small pizzeria and wanted to attract customers online and knew very little about marketing. Where would you start?
Eddie Deva founded his design agency PixelBull to help service small local Albanian businesses in New York that were normally unable to contract the help of large design agencies. Through hard work and referrals, he now boasts a clientele that includes lawyers, real estate enterprises, and more, and he now earns six figures every year.
Eddie believes his success comes from emulating role models like his father. In 1999, his father emigrated from a war-torn country with only a couple of hundred dollars. Eddie watched his father and brother build a satellite installation empire on borrowed money and then ride their fortunes into further ventures catering to the local Albanian community. Their eventual triumph inspired young Eddie to start businesses of his own when he came of age.
However, before founding his agency, Eddie spent eight years as a designer and head of marketing at multiple startups. While working for others, he learned guerilla marketing tactics (like billboarding highly-specific parts of town or creating booth events at tradeshows) that would later grow his agency. He even spent two years building a failed GrubHub competitor in university that fell through.
Read on to hear how Eddie got his start by helping his community and building an online design service handling unlimited projects under one, affordable, flat subscription. Also, see some of his top tips for running and maintaining a global design team.
Moving to New York With $700 For a Family of Four
Few founders can say they had to get their start in one of the priciest cities in the world with barely enough to cover a month’s rent. Eddie can.
Like many ethnic Albanians at the time, Eddie’s family fled Kosovo during the infamous Kosovo Civil War in 1999. They arrived in New York City along with thousands of other Albanians and $700 in their collective pockets. To make ends meet, they borrowed from friends until Eddie’s father began installing satellite dishes for his neighbors. The business grew quickly and resulted in a successful sale in 2008 that changed the family fortune.
“There were about thirty thousand Albanians in New York at that time,” says Eddie. “We would bring access to TV channels from back home to people here. Everybody wanted them because their only other form of communication with their home country was a weekly call with their family.”
In university, young Eddie tried to follow in his entrepreneurial father’s footsteps by attempting to build a food delivery app like Grubhub for college campuses called Campus Bite. He attracted investors and spent two years of late nights in his dorm building it, but eventually shut the whole thing down when he realized he was hopelessly behind his better-known competitor GrubHub.
“I actually met my university’s president and he was willing to use school funds to help us with an investment and incubation,” he says. “But I had spent so much time building and perfecting it that GrubHub outpaced our product. It could track your orders online and we were still using faxes. I suddenly decided I didn’t want to do this anymore.”
To this day, Eddie regrets not going through with Campus Bite as he believes it could have benefitted from the pandemic and likely led to an eventual acquisition.
“GrubHub acquired plenty of those kinds of startups back in 2021,” he says.
Fortunately, work in design and some startup experience helped Eddie get his next job which would launch him into the world of marketing.
Get ‘Em Where They Live
Eddie credits his exceptional marketing skills to his time working with a business called Setplex after university.
Setplex was an internet protocol television (IPTV) solutions company that let any client business launch telecommunications channels for people to stream online. Eddie explains:
“Let’s say, for example, you want to launch an Albanian TV station in the United States,” he says. “Setplex creates the platform for you to broadcast it to customers and you just go ahead and market it and bring in the video content.”
At Setplex, Eddie was given a rare opportunity to join a rapidly expanding company with the creative freedom to try any marketing tactic he liked. He immediately started coming up with effective, highly targeted methods that always just seemed to work.
“So I’d say, ‘Hey, why don’t we do direct mailing for Bosnian viewers?’ We did that and it worked very well. Then I suggested we do simple billboards that are really cheap and put them where Bosnians live so that our business looks bigger. That worked as well. We’d go to trade shows and play games at our tents and that worked too.”
Under Eddie’s creative directorship, Setplex expanded rapidly around the world. He’d go on to work there for six years until he started feeling the pull of entrepreneurship again.
Get a “Yes,” And Then Expand
In 2019, Eddie’s brother launched an Albanian food delivery business called Fresh Alb. Eddie marveled as it took a firm foothold in the US Albanian community and brought in huge profits for his brother.
Eddie knew he was good at marketing and design and he saw from his brother’s success that having a connection with Albanians and other Balkan groups was one of his key advantages. He’d grown up in an Albanian community and could speak the language while also being able to communicate perfectly in English. And so, in January 2020, Eddie contracted a designer in Kosovo and started searching for local clients who could use website redesigns.
His first pitches were local New York businesses: Pizzerias, judo gyms, dentists, and so on.
He’d pitch them a standard $1,500 package that included a reworked website and business cards. From there, he’d pitch an additional $800 retainer for extra design work they might want. Eddie would handle all work during normal US business hours and his Albanian designer would do all work during his daytime hours of 6 PM through 9 AM. They had a perfect setup for 24-hour service.
As business expanded, Eddie noticed that his clients wanted a lot of projects quickly. Far too quickly to price individually. He’d noticed other design agencies creating subscription models where clients paid a monthly fee to receive unlimited design tweaks. He decided to implement this feature into his agency.
Now some of you who know a bit about agencies are probably wondering, “Isn’t this the same thing as a retainer?” Eddie says his system is almost the same but with a key difference: clients can only receive one or two tasks at a time depending on how much they pay. Tasks are normally completed one at a time in the order they are added to the queue.
“Subscriptions make our hours and customer pricing easier to control,” he says. “Our customers know exactly how much they’re paying for and if they need more deliverables per month, they increase their subscription.”
We Don’t Really Do Marketing
Interestingly for a digital agency, PixelBull has never done a single SEO blog or Facebook ad. Instead, Eddie sends gifts to potential clients. The return on investment has been much better than free design samples.
“At first we would do free designs or free videos for clients that would take about two weeks, and then the clients often just disappeared. They wouldn’t even say they didn’t like it. They would just take the work and leave. Gifting was better because we’d rather lose one hundred bucks than lose two weeks of time without any feedback.”
Eddie explains his gifts include everything from personalized Montblanc pens, desk accessories like luxury name plates, motivational canvases, and sometimes more personalized gifts if they’ve seen the client post about a hobby they enjoy on LinkedIn.
These days, Eddie doesn’t even need to send out the gifts to get work. After a year and a half, people started reaching out to his team organically.
“We had no idea how they found us,” says Eddie. “They’d just come in and subscribe and we’d be in business. When asked, they’d just say they’d heard of us somewhere before.”
Eddie says the key to growing his agency has been bringing clients in with great prices and simple design plans and keeping them around through service that goes above and beyond.
“Clients say we’re like their creative arm,” he says. “We’ll often give them suggestions of different things they should do like new webpages or updates to old designs that could use a rework.”
Today, PixelBull has eight full-time employees based in the US and Albania and Eddie now runs the business he always dreamed of – with one caveat. When agencies lose staff, they struggle harder than other industries.
The Stresses of Agency Life
Eddie loves PixelBull, but he also believes an exit may be in his future as the stresses of running an agency wear on him – specifically, the human element.
For example, hiring new employees is a painful process that Eddie’s only managed to systemize recently.
“Anybody can come up with an amazing portfolio,” he says. “You can work on a website design for a month or just copy it, whatever it is. When it comes time to work, you’ll see who’s who. If we have two hundred applicants, we’ll cut them down to twenty people, and we can give them that one week of pay. They work every day on the same task as the others and then we pick the two designers that are the best and hire them full-time. ”
When hiring new employees is such an arduous task, sudden employee departures can ruin entire months for Eddie.
“The myth of entrepreneurship, especially with agencies, is that you make a lot of money and it’s easy,” he says. “To be honest with you, I was working during a holiday when my family came to see me because a designer quit suddenly. When you have a guy who’s maybe spending two hundred grand on this campaign and then you can’t deliver the assets to him by the end of the month, you don’t get the nicest emails and calls.”
Despite the difficulties, Eddie is content to finally run a business of his own that brings in predictable recurring revenue. It all goes to show that with a simple, in-demand service at a great price, you can thrive in a saturated market.
