Case study · Creative services
They turned a serviceinto a product.
Cacao Creative sell design by subscription: unlimited requests, one monthly fee. The model worked from the first client. What it ran on was email, spreadsheets and people remembering things.
- Client
- Cacao Creative
- Where
- Remote-first, UK
- Sector
- Creative services
- Built with
- Next.js, Node, MongoDB, Stripe
The client
A design studiothat sells like software.
Cacao Creative do outsourced design for marketing teams, on a subscription rather than by the project. You pay monthly, you ask for what you need, it comes back. No scoping call, no statement of work, no argument about whether a third round of amends is in.
It is a genuinely better way to buy design and it is a much harder way to sell it, because everything the model removes for the client - the scope, the estimate, the paperwork - somebody at the studio now has to hold in their head instead.
The decision
The model was fine.The plumbing was people.
Briefs arrived by email. Progress lived in whichever thread it had started in. What a client had used of their month was a thing somebody worked out when asked. None of it was broken, and all of it depended on the same few people being available and remembering.
The decision was to stop treating that as an operations problem and start treating it as a product. That is a different kind of spend: not software to make the studio tidier, but software the business is then partly made of.
How it went
Built with them,not for them.
A studio that sells design has opinions about software, which makes this a harder brief and a much better one.
Miroslav gave us the time. Weeks of it, across the build: how a brief actually arrives, what clients ask before they ask for work, where a request stops being one request, and which of the fifty things a platform could do would have gone unused. Most of what is not in Limitless is not in it because of those sessions.
01
We mapped the studio before we designed the product
Every step a request takes from a client's head to a delivered file, including the ones nobody had written down.
02
Credits, so the model is visible
The hardest part of selling a subscription is that nobody can see what they are getting. Clients now watch it move.
03
Billing built in, not bolted on
Stripe from the start, because a subscription product where payment is a separate manual job is a spreadsheet with a login.
What we built
One platform.Briefs, delivery and billing.
A pass through the platform. Cacao own the product and the code sits in none of our repositories, so this is animated from the real screens - every pixel of interface is genuine, the path between them is staged.
What changed
The part you can count.
65%less admin time
The hours that used to go on chasing briefs, answering where-is-it emails and working out what a client had used.
26%higher gross margin
The same work, sold the same way, with the cost of running it around the edges taken out.
£50,000secured in grant funding
Awarded on the strength of the platform, because a studio with a product is a different proposition to a studio with a service.
Limitless has completely reshaped the way we work. Before, managing design requests was chaotic - spreadsheets, Slack messages, and endless back-and-forth. Now, everything runs through one clear, intuitive platform.
It is not just a tool - it is the foundation for how our studio operates and grows.
Miroslav Minev
Head of Creative, Cacao Creative
Still going
A productkeeps asking for things.
Next is reporting clients can act on, time tracking that feeds scoping automatically, and opening the platform to creators beyond the studio's own team.
More of the work
No pitch, no deck
Tell us what isactually happening.
Describe the mess in your own words. We will say what we think is going on underneath it, and whether there is anything we could usefully do about it.
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