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The entire industry of freelancers and small agencies has it wrong.
The problem with building a one-off website for a new client is this…
- An incredible amount of focus is shifted into the design/development/launch
- This takes away focus from the real goal of a website: to help your client win more customers or retain/help existing ones
- It’s a one and done deal
- There is no real value in launching a website by itself
- Clients get caught up on all of the details of website launch, which pushes things out forever, makes it a stressful process for them, instead of just launching and adjusting afterwards
By shifting the focus to website management, you not only make the launch process easier, you help your clients with a real solution.
So here’s what I’m going to do.
No upfront pricing web design. Instead, it will be 1 or 2 year website management plans that will include hosting, website maintenance, content updates, onboarding, etc.
If you’ve spent any amount of time in design/development, it’s not hard. You can push out a new website in a day. You can prebuild 50 or 100 pages or templates and reuse them on every project, offering them as cool in-house solutions. You can even tell clients that we only use every template ‘x’ amount of times, or reuse them once they’ve been used in a specific state or territory.
The website design/development/launch solution is already solved. The real value add is being there as a consultant for your client, guiding them on things like SEO, integrations, new pages, new initiatives… etc. It’s never ending. But web design on the other hand, always ends. There’s always an end point where the goal for the client is to pay you and then sail off into the sunset with their new website.
To be clear, this isn’t new. A lot of successful agencies are already doing this. Recurring revenue is where it's at. But for some reason, there’s a huge disconnect here on the forum and for freelancers in general. The goal isn’t to chase never ending web design jobs; it’s to grow together with your clients. As they grow, you get paid. But you need to help them get there in a way that you stay on board.
To be clear, I’m already doing this with dozens of clients (there was once upon a time an upfront cost with them), but now I am making a new “website dev agency” (really a website “management” agency) targeting a specific location and specific industry. The monthly costs will be somewhere in the range of $199 to $499 for the complete end-to-end solution that we control. Why do I need to charge $5k and miss out on a huge pool of clients?
It will be positioned as an SaaS lite with a very hands-on professional service component. Once I onboard a couple of new clients to this specific solution, I’ll share the website details and process more.
Right now:
- Need to finish up the website design
- Build out 3-5 basic templates they can customize or buy (maybe a small cost component here, like $500 for the initial build)
- Scope out specific needs of the target market
- Build out the client dashboard
All of this will be done on WordPress with basic paid tools; no heavy coding required (although I have a solid understanding of HTML/CSS/JS/PHP and can do anything with ChatGPT at my side).
The problem with building a one-off website for a new client is this…
- An incredible amount of focus is shifted into the design/development/launch
- This takes away focus from the real goal of a website: to help your client win more customers or retain/help existing ones
- It’s a one and done deal
- There is no real value in launching a website by itself
- Clients get caught up on all of the details of website launch, which pushes things out forever, makes it a stressful process for them, instead of just launching and adjusting afterwards
By shifting the focus to website management, you not only make the launch process easier, you help your clients with a real solution.
So here’s what I’m going to do.
No upfront pricing web design. Instead, it will be 1 or 2 year website management plans that will include hosting, website maintenance, content updates, onboarding, etc.
If you’ve spent any amount of time in design/development, it’s not hard. You can push out a new website in a day. You can prebuild 50 or 100 pages or templates and reuse them on every project, offering them as cool in-house solutions. You can even tell clients that we only use every template ‘x’ amount of times, or reuse them once they’ve been used in a specific state or territory.
The website design/development/launch solution is already solved. The real value add is being there as a consultant for your client, guiding them on things like SEO, integrations, new pages, new initiatives… etc. It’s never ending. But web design on the other hand, always ends. There’s always an end point where the goal for the client is to pay you and then sail off into the sunset with their new website.
To be clear, this isn’t new. A lot of successful agencies are already doing this. Recurring revenue is where it's at. But for some reason, there’s a huge disconnect here on the forum and for freelancers in general. The goal isn’t to chase never ending web design jobs; it’s to grow together with your clients. As they grow, you get paid. But you need to help them get there in a way that you stay on board.
To be clear, I’m already doing this with dozens of clients (there was once upon a time an upfront cost with them), but now I am making a new “website dev agency” (really a website “management” agency) targeting a specific location and specific industry. The monthly costs will be somewhere in the range of $199 to $499 for the complete end-to-end solution that we control. Why do I need to charge $5k and miss out on a huge pool of clients?
It will be positioned as an SaaS lite with a very hands-on professional service component. Once I onboard a couple of new clients to this specific solution, I’ll share the website details and process more.
Right now:
- Need to finish up the website design
- Build out 3-5 basic templates they can customize or buy (maybe a small cost component here, like $500 for the initial build)
- Scope out specific needs of the target market
- Build out the client dashboard
All of this will be done on WordPress with basic paid tools; no heavy coding required (although I have a solid understanding of HTML/CSS/JS/PHP and can do anything with ChatGPT at my side).
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