Design Investing — Sovisart

DESIGN INVESTING

A term I put into the market in 2024.
(Iren Kolt)

Design investing means treating a piece of design work as an asset, not a one-off job. One asset — a product, a template, even a single Figma file — doesn’t have to be monetized one way. It can be monetized in dozens of ways, and most of them aren’t standard practice anywhere in design: design school teaches you to sell your time once, not to treat what you make as something that keeps paying. My own international experience is what lets me not just know these paths, but actually apply them — build a product once in Figma, and sell it again and again, across formats, platforms, and markets, without starting over each time. These five principles aren’t abstractions — they’re the actual operating principle behind Figma + AI and everything else Sovisart teaches.

The five principles

An asset, not a service.
Every piece of work is built to be reused, refined, or licensed — it doesn’t disappear the moment it’s delivered to a client.
2. One asset, several channels.

Run it through four questions — who pays, how they pay, where the contact point is, what’s actually being sold — and you’ll almost always find two or three channels instead of one.
3. Start on close to nothing.

The real investment is strategy and the skill to build the asset, not a startup budget. Most of what I teach starts at zero, or close to it — around $100.
4. Recurring income over a one-time check.

All else equal, a subscription, a license, or a royalty beats a single file sale.
5. Reassess the portfolio, regularly.

Markets and platforms shift — NFTs collapsed, Etsy hiked seller fees by 30%, Spotify stopped paying out tracks under 1,000 streams a year — so the assets you already built get run back through the same four questions on a schedule, not left on autopilot.

The four-question test

Who pays

End buyer (B2C). An individual purchasing the finished file, license, or product directly for their own use.
A business (B2B). A company paying for the asset as part of its own product, brand, or operations — usually a bigger ticket than B2C, often recurring.
An advertiser. Pays for access to your audience’s attention, not for the asset itself — the asset is the draw, the ad is the revenue.
A donor or grant-maker. Pays to support the mission behind the work, not to own the output.

How they pay

One-time, for the file. A single payment for a finished, deliverable asset.
One-time, for a license. A single payment for the right to use the asset under specific terms, not for the file itself.
Subscription. Recurring payment for ongoing access to an asset, a library, or updates.
Bundled into someone else’s product (an “ingredient” license). The asset is licensed into another company’s product and paid for as part of that product’s price, not sold to the end user directly.
Advertising against an existing audience. Revenue comes from advertisers paying to reach people the asset already attracts.

Where the contact point is

Your own site. Direct relationship, full margin, full control over presentation and price.
A specialized marketplace for that asset type. Built-in discovery and buyer intent, in exchange for a commission and someone else’s rules.
Social platforms, directly. Selling or licensing through the same channel the audience already uses, with no separate storefront.
A closed community. A paid or gated group where access to the asset is bundled with membership.
A partner integration. The asset reaches buyers through another company’s product or platform, under a formal partnership.

What’s actually being sold

The complete finished file. The whole deliverable, as-is.
Individual components or assets. Pieces of a larger asset, sold separately for buyers who only need part of it.
The methodology or brand, as a license. Not a file at all — the right to use a system, process, or brand name.
Access and belonging. Membership or proximity to the work — the asset is the reason to join, not the thing handed over.
A physical object. The design made tangible: print, merchandise, a physical product.
Audience attention (advertising). The asset’s draw, monetized through whoever wants to reach the people it attracts.

the book

I’m currently writing a book on design investing — the full framework behind the courses, in one place. It’s not finished yet. When it is, it will live here.
In the meantime, Figma + AI walks through design investing in practice, not theory — join a live cohort, or follow along on YouTube / Telegram for updates on the book.

YOUTUBE