Ilya Dmitruk is redesigning the agency around the designer

A designer can spend years learning what to add to a screen. Ilya Dmitruk’s career has increasingly concerned what to take away: an ill-defined service, a layer of communication, a fresh negotiation over work that will change next week anyway. At Eleken, the agency he founded in 2015, subtraction became a business proposition. The interesting part is how often the same exercise has brought him back to his own job.

His recent public writing offers a useful test for agency owners: “Whose calendar does your revenue depend on?” A full appointment book can look like success until the owner tries to leave it unattended. Dmitruk has been asking how a company acquires a life beyond the person whose taste, relationships and decisions got it started. It is an awkward question for a creative founder. Being indispensable is flattering, right up to the moment one would like an afternoon off.

Before the subscription, a portfolio

Dmitruk’s route into design began after he left university. He dates his start as a UX designer to 2012. Three years later, he founded Eleken. The first commercial connection was pleasingly direct: he put work on Dribbble, people noticed, and inquiries followed. Before there was an agency proposition to explain, there were designs for prospective clients to look at.

That origin gives his later preoccupation with business machinery some texture. The first task was to demonstrate a craft. The next was to organise demand for it. Those are different jobs, although a young agency can make them appear identical for a while. A portfolio can introduce a designer to a buyer; it cannot decide who will answer the next question, price the revision or protect the time needed to finish the work.

His Dribbble portfolio remains public, including a presentation deck for Koemei. A 2016 design showcase also credited him for Eleken’s own website. These are small traces of the working designer behind the executive title. They matter because the later business was built around a service he had personally delivered. He had approached the agency question from the drawing side of the desk.

A smaller promise, made clearer

Early Eleken offered app development to a broad range of clients. Its website promised to turn ideas into products, a statement hospitable enough to welcome practically anyone. Such generosity creates a problem: a prospective customer must still work out why this particular company belongs on the shortlist. A wide doorway is less useful when nobody can tell which room it leads to.

Dmitruk narrowed the offer to design, and the audience to software-as-a-service companies. Working with content strategist Kateryna Abrosymova, then at Kaiiax, Eleken developed positioning around practical product design. The commercial arrangement supported the message: a dedicated designer, paid for through a predictable monthly fee. A business serving subscription software had adopted a subscription of its own.

The marketing had to account for an inconvenient detail. The narrow search terms describing this offer had little or no search volume. The strategy therefore paired them with broader terms for UI/UX services and web app design. It also addressed the people around a buying decision: company leaders, product managers and designers. Clarity about the audience did not require pretending that everyone searched in the same language.

The campaign’s reported result was more than 20 monthly leads within three months of the redesigned website’s launch. That figure gives the change a concrete outcome without making it a fairy tale. The useful sequence is visible: choose a customer, explain an offer, make it discoverable. The word pragmatic acquired something more valuable than elegance. It had a job.

The founder’s first sales vacancy

By November 2021, Dmitruk had a problem worth advertising. In a recruitment post, he explained that his investment in marketing had produced more interested prospects than he could personally handle. He wanted Eleken’s first sales manager. The person who learned the service and delivered results would have the opportunity to build a sales department.

The vacancy reads like a small turning point in the founder’s working life. It describes a monthly retainer, designers assigned full time to clients, and a remote company serving the US market. Those details already required an explanation a colleague could learn and repeat. Selling could begin to become a shared company capability.

The proposed job mixed conversion with continuity: speak to incoming prospects, help create sales material, prepare proposals and stay in touch with converted clients when needed. Dmitruk was handing over part of the relationship work that often clings to a founder. A recruitment advertisement rarely gets cast as an entrepreneurial milestone. This one deserves a modest place in the story. A busy person was trying to create room for another person to act.

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Let the designer answer

In conversation with Cristian Dina on the Tekpon SaaS Podcast, Dmitruk described an arrangement in which clients collaborate directly with their assigned designer. Daily contact and iteration are central to the offer. The company helps with new products, redesigns and extra capacity for existing teams. The designer needs enough continuity to understand what the product is trying to accomplish.

Direct access sounds simple, which is partly its appeal. Every extra relay creates an opportunity for a question to lose its point. Software work makes that especially inconvenient: a detail in an interface can carry a decision about how somebody completes a task. Putting the person doing the work in the conversation gives those details somewhere to go.

Eleken’s current account of its process adds an internal counterpart to that autonomy. Designers go through a three-month UX bootcamp, receive senior review and take part in weekly lectures and peer feedback. The arrangement asks individuals to communicate independently while giving them a professional structure behind the scenes. Independence still needs colleagues.

The distinction is worth dwelling on because a subscription can otherwise become little more than a billing preference. Here, the business proposition includes who speaks to whom and how expertise is maintained. A monthly invoice cannot, by itself, make collaboration sensible. People still have to understand the product, ask questions and make decisions. Dmitruk’s model attempts to organise the conditions in which they can.

The design agency that needed design

Then came a particularly good joke at the founder’s expense: Eleken’s marketing team needed creative assets, and its designers were occupied with client projects. The design agency had a queue for design. Any business tempted to mistake expertise for spare capacity might recognise the situation.

That internal problem became the starting point for TodayMade, founded by Eleken’s CEO. Its founding followed attempts with an in-house marketing designer, freelancers and outside agencies. Each left difficulties around the range of work, reliability or coordination. The response was a separate subscription service for marketing design, bringing together disciplines such as illustration, animation and presentation design.

There is a consistent habit here: begin with an inconvenience close enough to inspect. Eleken’s SaaS focus addressed the purchase and delivery of product design. TodayMade addressed the production of marketing assets. Their customers and deliverables differ, but the recurring question concerns how people obtain design work without organising an entirely new production each time they need it.

A company with room to move

Dmitruk now writes about the operational cost of accommodating every client differently. Separate approval habits, payment arrangements and communication rules accumulate. His prescription is to standardise the way work is handled while allowing the work itself to suit the client. This is a designer’s familiar concern with consistency, applied to the business behind the interface.

“Every new client should not require you to create a new company.”

Ilya Dmitruk

He has also publicly sought conversations with owners of small design agencies while developing a product for their operations. The questions concern intake, proposals, contracts, expanding scope and understanding project profitability. He described cutting features in response to those discussions. The impulse is recognisable from the earlier pivot: make the problem specific before making the offer larger.

For a designer who attracted his early customers by showing his own work, building a company necessarily changes the meaning of authorship. Other people make decisions. Other people carry relationships. The founder’s contribution increasingly sits in the arrangement that helps them do it. That can be less photogenic than a finished interface, although anyone who has spent an afternoon clarifying a brief may consider it an art form.

Dmitruk’s career makes a case for treating the agency itself as something that can be redesigned. The portfolio brought inquiries. Focus gave the offer a shape. Hiring opened a route beyond founder-led sales. TodayMade grew from an internal queue. The next question remains the one on his calendar: how much useful work can happen when he is elsewhere? For a founder, leaving room may turn out to be a rather substantial piece of work.