No Backing Out
I got a client. Yes I offered to do the work for free, but I’m still counting it. There is a small business local to me that sells South African food. Her food is great, we buy from her a lot. She’s super active on Instagram, but I noticed she doesn’t have a website.
I reached out to her on the back of placing an order with her for some food. Explaining to her what my plans were and that I’d put together a site for free, and that I just needed to get some projects under my belt. I wrote, and rewrote the message a few times before forcing myself to hit send. And I’m glad I did. She was really grateful, and said that she’d love to work with me. Now, I realise that her reaction will in large part be down to me offering to work for free but it still felt nice. It also forced me to put some actual skin the game: I talked about my plans and reached out to pitch my services. There is now someone relying on me to deliver something. It’s obvious now that I can’t back out of this, like I’ve done with all my projects to date.
Anyway, I let her know I’d reach out when I was ready to start work. I also made it clear that I’d be treating the project like a paid gig, and I’d be using it as a test case to refine my initial processes. I will need to look at getting a contract together that I will ask her to sign, which will outline what I’m offering as part of this free work. I actually need to give some more thought to what it looks like on an ongoing basis in terms of content updates, redesigns etc. I’m happy to build the first iteration for free, but perhaps after a year, I charge hourly for content updates, page additions etc. any re-design work would be considered a brand new, paid project.
My focus at present is getting my own website built and deployed. I’ve been mucking around on Figma a bit too much on details that don’t really matter right now. The design in Figma is unfinished, but it provides enough of a direction for me to get the site up and running.
As I mentioned in this piece, I am trying to dog-food the whole process. In my notebook, I am documenting the entire creation process of my site so that I can start looking for potential automation opportunities with bash scripts when it comes setting up the project base structure. Premature optimisation? Probably. But I want to actually do this properly and get a repeatable process nailed as soon as I can to ensure I am delivering a quality product.
That’s where I’m at for now.
This post was last edited 1 month, 4 weeks ago.