When Phil talks about starting Jam, he doesn't talk about a master plan. He talks about a course he bought with his education allowance, an idea that kept getting shot down inside a traditional agency, and a moment when the circumstances finally aligned to try it.

I sat down with Phil and David, two of the three co-founders of Jam, to trace the arc of what they built: a productized design subscription service spun out of a restructuring at Unfold, their legacy digital agency, profitable within a week, and sold to Napkin roughly two years after launch.

It's a story about accidental agency ownership, a borrowed model that actually worked, and what happens when designers stop trying to be marketers and let someone else scale what they built.

The Agency That Nobody Planned

Unfold started the way a lot of agencies do: not on purpose.

David's brother-in-law Eddie had been freelancing when David lost his job in 2017. They joined forces at a coworking space, started pulling in friends with useful skills, and before long they had clients, then employees, then more employees. Within a few years they were at 30 people, serving big names across brand, web, product, and illustration. It felt like progress.

Phil joined in 2020, hired as one of two product designers. By the time he'd been there two years, the product department had grown to ten people. The whole agency had scaled quickly and organically: no borrowed money, always a half-year safety net, just steady growth.

Then, around 2022, the lead funnel started drying up. The market softened. The overhead didn't. By 2023, they had to restructure.

That's where Jam started.

The Idea That Kept Getting Rejected

Phil had come across Brett from Design Joy, the well-known solopreneur who built a productized design business and then created a course called Productize Yourself. Phil bought it with his monthly education budget, devoured it in a day, and immediately started pitching it internally at Unfold.

The pitch didn't land.

The objections were reasonable. Unfold was charging $35,000 to $40,000 a month for traditional agency work. A $5,000-a-month subscription felt like undercutting their own model. The team was siloed into departments: brand, web, product, illustration, and a productized service would need to cut across all of them. The structure wasn't there for it.

So Phil kept the idea in his back pocket. He wasn't looking to leave and do it solo. He wanted to do it as a team, with the specialization and depth that a one-person shop couldn't offer. He just needed the right moment.

The restructuring of 2023 created it.

"We don't really have as much of the red tape now," David and Eddie told him. "Let's just try it. Worst case, nobody signs up."

Profitable in Seven Days

They launched Jam on June 1st. Phil signed the first client on May 31st.

Within the first two weeks, Phil was on eleven sales calls. Nine of them converted on the spot. His friend Matt, the same person who had originally referred him to Unfold, told him that conversion rate was actually a problem.

"Your price is too low," Matt said. "If that many people are signing up immediately, the deal is too good."

They raised the price from $4,995 to $5,995 per month in July. The conversion rate normalized to around 20–25 percent. That felt like a real business.

The offer itself was simple but highly structured: one active task at a time, updates delivered every two business days, fast feedback required from the client. Async by design, no dedicated Slack channels, no on-call designer, no status calls. Just clean, efficient delivery through Trello and Loom.

Phil was transparent about this on every sales call. If you needed someone at your beck and call, Jam wasn't the right fit. Turns out a lot of clients preferred it that way. They didn't want more meetings. They wanted a Loom video they could review on their own schedule.

What made Jam different from Design Joy wasn't the model, it was the team. Clients got access to senior-level talent across brand, web, product, illustration, and eventually animation. One point of contact, a design manager who handled all communication and updates, but a full bench of specialists behind them. A client working on a brand project might have a brand designer, an illustrator, and a web designer all touching the work without ever meeting anyone but their design manager.

"Someone came to us with 30 freelancers he was managing himself," Phil said. "He signed up because he didn't want to find all those contractors anymore. We'd just manage it."

Built to Sell From the Start

Neither David nor Eddie had sold a business before. But they'd talked about it. The idea that Jam might be an exit—someday, if the conditions were right—was there from the beginning.

Phil's contribution to that ambition was practical and unglamorous: he wrote everything down.

He'd been given a copy of The E-Myth by his mentor before Jam launched. He didn't finish it, but one concept stuck: treat everything like a franchise. Build it so that someone else could step in, read the documentation, and run it without asking you every question. Not because you plan to franchise it, but because the alternative is a business that only works when you're in it—and that's a business no one wants to buy.

Every process at Jam got documented as it was created. How to onboard a client. How to onboard a design manager. How to deliver an update. All of it captured with screenshots, written out clearly, designed so it was actually readable.

"I only did it because the book told me to," Phil said. "But it set us up to sell way earlier than I ever expected."

The Decision to List on Acquire

David had an existing relationship with Acquire.com from years of browsing listings as a hobby. When they decided to test the market, it was the natural first call. They got grandfathered into a favorable rate based on a prior listing connection, and Acquire's team helped them work through how to position the business and think about valuation.

The decision to list wasn't a declaration that they were done. It was a question: is there someone out there who could scale this faster than we can?

Their ceiling was around 24–25 active subscriptions. They'd hit it a few times and couldn't get past it. They'd tried advertising on Dribbble, cold email campaigns, posting their work—nothing moved the needle consistently. They were designers, not marketers. They knew how to design marketing materials, not how to run marketing campaigns.

"We figured we could probably find somebody who's really good at that," Phil said. "And we've got the infrastructure they could scale."

They brought on Acquire's premium support, a dedicated representative named Kai who walked them through the process weekly, helped them understand what buyers were looking for, and kept the conversations moving. Over several weeks, they talked to traditional agencies looking to add a design subscription layer, marketing agencies looking to fill out their service stack, and other operators who understood the recurring revenue model.

Some of those conversations didn't result in offers. A few of them resulted in Jam subscriptions instead, people who came in as potential buyers and left as clients. That said something about the product.

The Law of Price and Terms

Phil's mentor, a business broker at First Choice Business Brokers, gave him a line that guided his thinking through every offer conversation:

"You either get your price at their terms, or you get your terms at their price."

It sounds simple. It clarifies a lot. In every deal discussion, Phil was running that calculation. If a buyer wasn't going to meet the number, the terms had better be really good. If the terms were aggressive, the price had to compensate. You're always trading somewhere.

After several months and multiple conversations, they were moving toward taking the listing down and revisiting in six months when a new NDA came through from Napkin.

The Buyer Who'd Done It Before

The first call with Napkin was different from the first minute.

Napkin had already acquired a design subscription business. It was priced lower, $100 to $1,000 a month, but they'd scaled it past 800 active subscriptions. They understood the model, believed in the model, and weren't asking Phil to explain what a productized design service was. They were asking how fast they could scale this one.

"I think we can do that with you guys," Napkin's founder said. "All the numbers work. We've got the experience. You guys just figure out the numbers."

The second call brought in more of the Napkin team: the CFO, the operator who would run Jam day-to-day after close. Phil found a personal connection with one of them that went back to overlapping involvement in specific organizations in 2011 and 2012, paths that had never crossed but had run through the same communities. That kind of shared context accelerates trust.

David, who had been skeptical after so many other promising conversations, got on the second call and agreed: this one felt different.

An LOI was on the table within a week.

The Part Nobody Tells You About Equity

The deal structure had three components: cash, equity, and an earn-out covering roughly 18 percent of the purchase price tied to Jam's revenue over the first 12 months post-close.

They were happy with the terms. Then Phil sat down with his CPA.

The equity component was shares in a private company—Napkin's plan included going public in the coming years, but the shares weren't liquid. The problem: if the shares had a third-party valuation assigned to them, Phil would owe taxes on that value immediately, even though he couldn't sell a single share.

"I'm going to lose half the money. On day one. And I have to pay for shares I can't use for years."

What followed was a scramble. Tax attorneys, transaction attorneys, Unfold's existing legal counsel, Phil's own CPA—multiple professionals working through how to restructure the purchase agreement language so the tax liability on the equity was deferred until the shares could actually be converted or sold. Napkin was accommodating. The changes went through. It saved a meaningful amount at close.

The lesson: a buyer with the best intentions may not have thought through the tax treatment of equity consideration for a US-based seller, especially if the buyer is Canadian and globally structured. Get a transaction attorney who knows this territory before you sign the purchase agreement, not after.

The Close

They flew to Sarasota in October to meet the Napkin team in person, a few weeks into due diligence. In that meeting, they were clear: they didn't want to stay on as owners in disguise. No ongoing salary. No retained management responsibility. They'd step off the ownership and operations seat and plug back in as design contractors, like everyone else on the team, for as long as they were helpful. Napkin was fine with that. They just wanted the founders accessible for questions during the transition.

The purchase agreement went through several rounds of redlining. David and Eddie had transparency throughout, nothing in their financials or processes was inaccurate, nothing surfaced in diligence that they hadn't disclosed. Clean books, documented processes, an honest accounting of the business.

Phil signed at a coffee shop on a terrace, by himself, not knowing the signing would happen that day. The wire hit at around 6:15 or 6:30 that evening.

David signed with his family around him, his youngest son's finger pressed to the screen to complete the final signature.

"It ain't real till it's in the bank," David said.

What They'd Tell Themselves Earlier

David's lesson: separate the entity as soon as you see traction. Don't wait. Get the operating agreement, the bank account, the documentation, the structure in place early, before you're scrambling to do it retroactively. And grow organically. They never borrowed money. They never stressed about payroll in ways that forced bad decisions. That safety net mattered.

Phil's lesson: document everything from day one. Not for some future buyer. For your own consistency, your own sanity, and yes, your future buyer. The E-Myth gave him one idea and it shaped the entire Jam exit. Start writing things down before you think you need to.

He'd also say: don't assume you're building toward a sale in five years. You might be there in two. Have everything ready as if it could happen sooner.

What's Next

None of the three have a next venture locked in. Phil is still doing some design work through Jam as a contractor. All three are processing what it means to have gone from accidental agency owners to first-time exiters in the span of a few years.

Phil, who is straightforward about his faith, puts the whole arc in a specific kind of perspective. They started a business and were profitable in a week. They sold it two years later. That's not the normal arc. That's not what entrepreneurship is supposed to feel like.

"I tell everyone this made no sense," he said. "We started from nothing, we were making salaries within seven days, and we sold it two years later when I wasn't even sure anyone would want it. I can't pretend like I made this happen."

He's taking it.

Listen to the full conversation with David and Phil.

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