Leslie Mathys

Starting a Business

In my previous post, I decided to make a go of leveraging the skills I currently have to build a business. These skills include my ability to code websites, my better-than-average eye for design, and the soft skills I've developed in my career to date. As part of this process, I am really trying to make sure that I don't get fixated on the small things, which is very common for me. I want to have a strong bias to action.

Before I launch

However, I do want to get a website set up and deployed before I start reaching out to anyone. Now I know that I could go out and just try to get clients ASAP and start. I think my reasoning for not doing this is pretty sound though, hear me out: I have chosen to operate with Astro and Tailwind to build static sites for small businesses. Going through the full design process and then building and deploying in this stack will allow me to dogfood this process. Before I go to market, I will some sort of rough idea of the order in which I need to do things. It also allows me to get better acquainted with Astro. I've used it on a few occasions but never for actual projects. I need to be my own test case, before I go to market. In short, I am treating my own company as a way to roadtest my stack before I offer it out to the masses.

In addition to the above, I've been watching a lot of YouTube videos to try to extract commonalities among peoples' approaches, and to use those where they make sense. Already, I have picked up some good tips, things such as how many rounds of revisions to offer, pricing structures etc and just getting a better understanding on the business side of web design, and some of the obvious pitfalls I need to avoid in order to maintain my sanity.

Niche

I still havent figured that out. I'm well aware there are good niches and some bad in terms of the average type of customer you tend toget within that niche. For now, I am just going with small businesses as a broad niche. The reason for this is because I have connections who have small businesses that I plan to offer free work for in the beginning so that I can actually get some clients under my belt. I need to make it easy for myself at first and get some runs on the board.

My web design offer

Regarding the offer, I still havent fleshed that out, but at a baseline it makes sense to have two overarching offers:

I have also decided that I want to add more value. I will do this by including setup of a Google Business page, alongside the other standard practices like setting up Google Search Console and on-page SEO.

Trying to differentiate yourself from the army of other web designers will be a challenge to navigate. During my working career, I have had extensive experience working with trades and construction companies, and I have a decent understanding of their world. I'm hoping I can structure my website copy to push the buttons of those pain points. This has also meant that I have been consuming content on how to write better copy, and what makes a landing page successful, where to place CTAs etc. It's been a lot, but really cool.

Commonalities between each approach

Lump sum particulars

This upfront model seems pretty standardised across the board, from what I've seen. In general:

Monthly subscription particulars

I've seen varying approaches to the monthly subscription model. And those mainly centre around ownership of the site.

Re: ownership, some companies set a timeframe, let's say 12 months, after which the user owns the site legally (provided all payments were made). Others offer subscriptions that are ongoing and don't entitle the owners of the site to the ownership at all. If the client wants take ownership of the site, there is a fee payable, from what I've seen that fee is 12 months' subscription.

From a business perspective, I understand both approaches to the subscription model. It probably comes down to the types of business you're serving ultimately. Some clients may happily pay less and know that you'll look after everything for them and not care that they still have to buy out the contract if they want to take their business elsewhere. This seems. In terms of building recurring revenue, this makes complete sense for the web designer. But I'm not sure that I agree with the practice because I don't think I would like to be on the opposite end of an arrangement like this.

Pricing structure verdict

I'm not sure yet, but I think there is a need for having some sort of subscription offer, because the people I am going to targeting initially, won't have large budgets or money to pay upfront. I need to figure this out.

Final thoughts

When I decided to do this, it evoked a visceral feeling of fear and angst within me. I think this means that subconcsiouly I know that I have the skillset right now to actually make a good go of this. I'm not able to fool myself into thinking that I need to spend more time learning things, I am good to go now. So I just need to lean into this feeling, and put in the work to make a success of it.

This post was last edited 1 month, 4 weeks ago.

#business #lmwd