Drool is shut down - An honest post-mortem.
An honest post-mortem on shutting down my design agency. Lessons on scope creep, hiring pitfalls and remote ops friction.
This one sucks to write.
Drool started as a way for me to get back to my roots, and it turned into my most successful venture by far. We grew fast, took on a lot, and for a while it genuinely felt like we had momentum. But as of today, Drool (the agency) is officially shut down. (You can read more about Drool’s journey here.)
Important note: I’m still taking on freelance work personally. If you’re looking for help with product UI, landing pages, design systems, or React/front-end, then please reach out.
What worked
- Cold outreach worked insanely well early on. It helped me build a real pipeline instead of waiting for referrals to magically appear. (I’ve written extensively about what actually works in cold outreach in 2025.)
- The positioning was clear: we worked best with early-stage startups in areas I genuinely cared about (AI, B2B, analytics, no-code SaaS).
- We proved there was demand—fast. I even scaled up to a team of 6+ full-time + part-time support at one point.
What didn’t work
1. I said “yes” way too often
Not just out of fear of losing clients, but because I genuinely wanted to try new things.
Problem is: once you normalize “sure, we’ll handle that too”, clients start assuming unlimited scope is included. The requests got weirder, timelines got fuzzier, and a lot of work went into outcomes that were hard to defend.
2. Hiring + selling at the same time is a great way to break your own neck
At peak, demand forced hiring. And good designers take time to find.
Meanwhile our sales motion was still mostly cold outreach which became less predictable over time. Leads kept coming in, but quality dropped and conversions tanked.
Outsourcing sales made this worse. Huge mistake. I learned a lot, but it cost real money and months of focus.
So when clients dropped off, I had two bad options:
- let people go (brutal), or
- keep them and eat losses hoping things bounce back (also brutal, just slower)
I tried correcting this by building an open community of design freelancers (so capacity could flex), but by then the momentum was already gone.
3. Expanding into new verticals too early
When the design pipeline got shaky, I tried adding frontend dev as a vertical.
I hired freelancers, but because I didn’t have a strong engineering background, I couldn’t reliably judge quality early. By the time issues showed up, we were already deep in delivery and the work (and trust) suffered. (I eventually learned to code properly through projects like Learnway and Codemap, but by then the damage was done.)
4. Remote ops friction adds up
Remote teams can work, but the overhead is real:
- time zones
- async delays
- coordination tax
- context loss
- “small” miscommunications that become expensive
Over time, things started moving so quickly that it became hard to keep everything under control.
Summary (the honest version)
Drool shut down because I scaled headcount and scope too quickly, while the sales engine became unpredictable. I over-accommodated clients, expanded into markets/verticals too early, and the operational load of a remote agency made everything harder to sustain.
What’s next
I’m back to freelancing - but with better scars and better systems.
I’m also working on a few new projects (keeping them under wraps for now). If you need a design engineer who can handle UI/UX + build (React/front-end), I’m available.
