Design+Code: A Decade That Began With a Visa Denial — A $100 Ebook Written on the Road Became a $1M/Year Learning Subscription

Businesses that start with a firing, or with a decision to go independent, are common. Ones that start with an immigration ruling are not.

Meng To, founder of Design+Code (designcode.io), is a self-taught designer, born in Cambodia and raised in Montreal. According to a Treehouse interview, his H1B visa was denied in 2013 despite twelve years of professional experience, not holding a bachelor’s degree was a factor. He had been working at the US startup Heyzap on a J-1 visa, and he could no longer stay in the country.

What he chose next was to write a book while moving between Singapore, Bali, Jakarta and Hong Kong. “Instead of freelancing, I’m just going to write a book,” he said at the time. That book went on sale at the end of April 2014 for $100. Ten years later, it has become a $19/month learning subscription doing $1M a year.

Ten years in numbers

The $1M annual figure comes from his own site. The $83.3K monthly figure appears in the free portion of Starter Story’s breakdown. The business has never taken outside capital, his own page states this explicitly, and Starter Story lists it as one founder, self-funded.

The launch mechanics deserve a mention. Release was end of April 2014, but 600 pre-orders came in before that, at $100. That is not a cheap price for a technical book, and the author was an independent self-taught designer with no publisher behind him. He was already known through his work posted on Dribbble, and an audience that would “buy it because he wrote it” existed before he started writing. The years preceding the three months of writing are what produced those 600 pre-orders.

Why one book turned into a subscription

The pivotal shifts are ones he names himself: “book to online education” and “writing to video platform.”

A $100 one-time book has a structural ceiling. 35,000 readers is impressive, but it is 35,000 one-off transactions and it promises nothing about next month. Worse, design tooling churns fast. The first edition’s subject was Sketch and Xcode. Among his listed pivots is “Sketch to Figma, iOS-only to React + SwiftUI, because we use them”, which is another way of saying that the subject matter itself goes stale within a few years.

As a book, that makes revision an ever-growing cost. Move it to a $19/month subscription and the same churn works in reverse. New tools require new courses, but that also means the reason not to cancel gets renewed every year. The official pricing page notes an average of ten course releases per calendar year. The shape of the business was decided at the point where tool churn became a renewal motive rather than a cost.

The same staleness problem exists in Japanese course sales: in a record of nine courses run on Udemy and one reaching roughly $1,500 a month across 24 courses, platform discounting and search ranking drive revenue. Design+Code selling its subscription directly on its own site is a choice to keep those variables in its own hands.

What worked, and where the ceiling is

What worked is that the founder actually switches tools himself. His page says, in effect, that they moved from Sketch to Figma and from iOS-only to React + SwiftUI because that’s what they use. Course topics arrive as the byproduct of his own production environment changing, not from market research. Forty courses and 194 hours of instruction is not a volume you produce on the side.

The ceiling is equally visible. At $19 a month, this is priced cheaply for a learning subscription. Divide $1M a year by $19 a month and the required paid membership base is substantial. Running that price point with a team of 14 means carrying a structure where production cost scales with headcount while the price is hard to raise. Growth for three straight years is stated. The growth rate is not.

The pricing itself is straightforward. A free BASIC tier opens some courses plus five premium videos, Pro is $19/month. TEAM bills the same per member for up to five people. Pro includes source files, ePub, certificates, UI assets and commercial-use rights. Drawing the free/paid line at a concrete “five videos” presumably makes the amount of sampling easy to control. Annual billing at 47% off reduces the number of cancellation decision points to one a year.

There is also heavy coupling to the founder’s own visibility. He appears as the instructor, which makes his presence part of the product, scaling to 14 people does not make the face on the box easy to replace.

Nobody gets to choose a 2014, when Sketch was the center of the conversation

In 2014, Sketch sat right in the middle of a changeover in mainstream design tooling. He describes it as having changed people’s entire design flow, with everyone talking about Sketch. You cannot choose the moment when your subject is the center of industry conversation. And the ability to write while moving between countries for two years depends heavily on cost of living and family circumstances.

The numbers need care too. $1M a year and $83.3K a month are two faces of the same figure, not two independent verifications. The figure is revenue, not profit, and what remains after fourteen salaries has not been published. Nor is it stated as of when the “three years of growth” applies.

What survives is the specificity of the route: a person who lost his livelihood to a single visa decision turned those two years of movement directly into a product. The travel was less an escape than an adjustment of the time and living costs writing required. From one $100 book, the thing being sold changed shape three times over a decade before landing on a $19/month membership base. What never changed was the subject, and who it was taught to.