Ask HN: Is there any money in website design for small businesses anymore?
with all the website builders that are available, is there any money in doing web design for small businesses?
I had a prospective customer whom I was offering website design and maintenance service. He ended up doing it all by himself using an online website builder. I suddenly felt like I don't have anything to offer that business. I feel so discouraged. I'm a decent programmer but it seems everything small businesses need is already built and is way polished that I could build. What should I do?
208 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 68.1 ms ] threadYou need to go upmarket in terms of delivering value and consequently charging more for this extra value. Sit down with your prospective customer and learn more about his business. What are his pain points? Where and when does he earn most of his revenue, and from what type of clients? Can some of his processes be automated to save him money and bring in more revenue? That's where I think your focus should be.
The website presence itself is commoditized. The processes that accelerate business usually require customization, even if it’s using an off-the-shelf product and then integrating, configuring, and training. You could even become a sales channel and get a cut of the product revenue for making the sale.
I’ve had very good success with this marketing pitch. Customers love to see how their sites are faster and better looking than their dime-a-dozen competitors.
You will not need to write the whole thing from scratch specific to the customer. Instead, just code the extra bits.
Having said that, I think there is a large market for websites designers and coders, and we see an active community on Wix of people who build websites for customers
Sure, straight-up "let me build your website" style sales may be an industry that's slowing down, but it certainly isn't for online sales or integrating any other services, so ymmv.
Do you think eCommerce dev jobs will still exist 10 years from now?
Thanks for any advice!
If you’re willing to be the person configuring a website with one of these builders, yes. As other commenters have mentioned, these builders only get clients so far (pretty far in fact) but eventually they’ll need something else. Being a web “guy” or “expert” to them is what you want.
Clients want a convenient solution to this problem. That’s why website builders are so successful. Once they’re busy enough, they don’t want to think about this at all and that’s what they’ll pay for. Be that person.
Leads are what any business wants the most:
- How to drive free traffic to sales funnels.
- How to connect with a potential customers.
- How to build the right audience for the product.
- How to craft the sales message that resonates.
- How to understand A/B/N metrics and speak in plain english to the business owner.
I know of companies which do the entire process for big companies:-
1) Manage the ad spend for campaigns
2) Build the websites to convert, the sales funnels to sell
3) Some even offer the customer support for the website.
Some even charge a fee for the building of said materials and even a % of each product sold.
I would be careful though. These systems for online businesses are becoming better and better and some aren't just 1 products, but multiple products now.
Give it another 5-10 years and even what I'm talking about will be fully automated!
Anything related to web-design should be a side-effect of the true product you're selling, which in your case should be web-based software application development (IMO).
My opinion:
#1) Get really good at a web-framework. Doesn't matter which, but something like laravel would be a great choice. Learn MySql/MSSQL to go with it.
#2) Market yourself as a specialized consultant and bill $100 hr+. I don't know what market you're in, but if this is a big leap for you then work up to it. The kind of clients you want to work with will pay this without blinking. Sometimes they won't even know about the bill because it goes straight to AP. blah blah blah patio11.
#3) Never say you do web-design. Say, 'I convert your MS Access application that runs a critical component of your business (barely) into a multi-user/role, always-online, accessible-from-home web-application. Along the way we're also going to streamline this to make your company more money. It will pay for itself. That will be $30k.'
I agree #3, but on #2 - I've never dealt with any business of individual who operated like a blank check ("just send the bill to AP"). They all have budgets - implicit or explicit - and all want a rough idea of range at the very least. Is this a $3k project or a $20k project? They all have a need to know up front. You can sometimes tell up front - you get better at it - when people are going to complain about it more.
Told someone on a project they were looking "in the $2k range, at $x/hr". Sent a bill for $2200, and they flipped out. "You said it was $2000!"). Well.. no, I emailed you that it would be roughly in the $2k range, and if it was going to go much outside that, I'd let you know beforehand. I got you your project done 3 days ahead of when you wanted as well... blah blah blah.
Written agreements up front with clear expectations, etc.
More to the point on money, working with people where the money is coming directly out of their pocket (vs an operating business where there's a budget, and the person you're dealing with is simply managing a budget) will take you much further. IME, most of the people you work with where the money is directly from their pocket will watch every nickel and take $9 of time to explain a $2 expense.
This isn't to say you should pad billing or rip people off by any means, but... taking hours to explain how web hosting works, and that no, we can't build a custom ERP system on your godaddy account that you prepaid for 4 years in advance last week when you bought your domain name, and that if this really is a "million dollar idea", you will need to spend more than $200 for an MVP. All of that is low-value stuff you want to figure out how to avoid.
You joke, but I was in this exact position on Wednesday. It's natural to think that web consulting is dying or that there's a race to the bottom on pricing, until you come face-to-face with the level of ignorance many business owners (even successful ones!) have about technology. The world of business software is mysterious to many people. And while it's easier than ever to build a solution that replaces clunky .xls files or (worse) paper -- that can still be a major hurdle for someone not familiar with it.
I think the solution to OP's question is to see yourself as not just a developer but also a tour guide. Educate your customers without judgement. Teach them why what you do matters (translation: market to them!) Lots of people won't see the value and will never pay $100+/hour. But some of their competition will. And that's how you build a consultancy of your own.
To clarify, any clients I have that behave that way are firmly out of the SMB segment (or have grown to that point as we have worked together), seem to be in cash-flow heavy industries like manufacturing or construction, and we've been working together for several years.
I think you made the point I was going for - it may be more hassle than it's worth to do work for a client that makes a fuss over $2200 vs $2000.
The thing I’d add is to not sell undifferentiated web design but rather find the business problem that web design is one approach to solving (e.g. “Your insurance agency doesn’t get enough leads”) and then sell yourself as the expert on fixing that business problem.
Examples from my day job:
- Transaction pricing, trade system setup, and item costing is effectively controlled by Excel VBA (written by one guy who left, and maintained by a third-string developer who moonlights from his job at another company)
- Was told we couldn't do something on our site because it was "an old WordPress site" and had to be totally rebuilt for over $50,000.
- Apparently PhotoShop is too complex for mere mortals, thus everything must be outsourced and under no circumstances should we invest in our copy and do anything in house.
Oh - and I should mention that the process owners for these areas are usually technically clueless and utterly paranoid about anyone else touching their baby. The fastest way to get anything done is to pay up for OT and let the existing insane clown posse do the additional work at overtime rates. Rates are ridiculous - my spouse and I run a digital business on the side and our equivalent total project costs are 1/10th (if that!) what these guys seem to shell out (then again, we're both ex-IT / developers, so we know how to design and buy things correctly...)
I've flown past most of this crap since I've been retained to deal with a slightly more fundamental problem (aka: Dude, Where's My Sales?)... but there's probably a lot of money sitting in these kind of messes if you do some networking.
Possibly, but you may just be stuck doing donkey work (almost regardless of rate, that gets boring after some time). You can identify problems and offer to 'fix' them for businesses, but they need to be willing to actually change their processes. If there's political turf wars over "don't touch my pet project", no amount of money thrown at the problem will make it better. And yes, you possibly can siphon some off of those for a while, but I think for many people it's going to end poorly (political types will turn on you, etc).
You already mentioned some issues in that scenario above - never do anything inhouse with the talent you've got there - people need to set themselves up as middlemen. When the answer to the company's inefficiencies involves "remove the middlemen", it's a major battle.
> Was told we couldn't do something on our site because it was "an old WordPress site" and had to be totally rebuilt for over $50,000.
Interestingly tho, I can possibly see that. I might not tell someone $50k, but if I see some old WP site, and someone's asking for moderately complex functionality, I do not want to touch the existing site. It'll be a rebuild, or a separate service, and then integration work between the two. The $50k price may have just been a "we don't want to do this but this is our 'happy' price" sort of deal. If a new piece of functionality may cost, say, $10k of service work, I don't want to have to tie it to whatever legacy stuff came before, as I'm now responsible for supporting everything on it, because I was the last one to touch it ("it never used to do that before - you broke it!")
However, finding such clients seems to be extremely difficult. Is there any advice you might have?
The problem with the web design business is that a big percentage of the job that needs to be done is ad hoc which makes it unaffordable in the long term. There are too many hidden costs in communication and negotiations not to mention that nine out of 10 times the client isn't exactly sure what he wants. This is why most shops try to build their own CMS so they can commoditize the building process and start charging for software licensing instead of design.
So what could you do as a solo developer? My advice is twofold. Either try and build a service and not just building websites (for example a Facebook scheduler), or enhance your skill set with some consulting. Don't just build websites, build experiences. Make the client feel like you're the guy to help him take advantage of the whole "Internet" thing. That may include social media moderation and whatnot.
Another very lucrative niche is building themes for WordPress sites. You build a very good theme for various devices and you charge a fee which includes support and updates. There are people out there who are killing it with this model (I know a guy who makes €12k/monthly from building themes). Of course it requires good design skills but perhaps you could team-up with a designer.
My two cents.
I guess barrier of entry is a bit higher into themes requiring software development, graphic design and even a bit of UX expertise. So there is less competition. You would still be competing globally though.
If you're a low-skilled web developer who can knock together a reasonable website using something like Wordpress, you probably aren't offering a service that is usefully better than Squarespace or Wix. You might still pick up some work from businesses that just can't be bothered to do it themselves, but you'll be continually squeezed on your rates.
If you understand online marketing and can help businesses increase their sales, you're in a good position. Some small businesses just want a pretty website or a cool app for the sake of vanity, but most would prefer to make more money. If you know a reasonable amount about UX and SEO and direct marketing, you can justify a decent daily rate.
Basic stuff like "you haven't updated the menu on your website since 2015" or "Google Maps is directing people to the wrong side of your building" can make a meaningful difference to someone's bottom line. I've spoken to a lot of small business owners who were surprised to learn that an email newsletter subscriber is usually several orders of magnitude more valuable than a Twitter follower. It's not rocket science, but it's worth paying for. Squarespace can commoditise the technical function of web design, but they can't commoditise marketing consultancy.
In my experience, there's plenty of money for the consultant who teaches a business how to stop settling for their website as a commodity and start seeing it as an extension of their "brand".
At this level, you are competing with advertising agencies and marketing firms. Or you can turn those ad agencies into your clients - many don’t do the kinds of volume to support an in-house team.
I did well over 200k last year building, fixing and maintaining WordPress websites, working from home in a region with a relatively low cost of living. I expect to do even better this year, though I have resisted the urge to grow via hiring - I prefer to pick and choose my projects and be exclusive. My clients are a mix of agencies and “mid-size businesses”. I turned away another 50k of opportunities that didn’t feel like a good fit.
Beware though: success depends on more than just being able to build nice websites. You have to know how to sell yourself, manage customer expectations and a whole slew of soft skills to position yourself as a trusted advisor and expert. You need to understand your customers business, their challenges and pain points, how their customers think and behave, etc. Etc.
The junior marketing person you are working with at one company a few years later may be head of marketing at a much larger company.
It can also work in reverse when your contact moves on and their replacement comes in with a pre-existing relationship with a competitor. Then it's nothing but work to keep them - same can happen when a small business sells and you have a new owner to build a new relationship with.
Have a client that is in the process of selling to what will be the fourth owner since I built their management software 12 or so years ago.
[0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2234155/
But, consulting pays about the same, and since the contracts are usually for months if not a full year the situation is a lot more predictable.
Does this involve making themes? Plugins? Is it only client billing or are you selling anything else like, reselling themes, affiliate etc?
My clients are a mix of agencies
I've heard this mentioned many times. How does one get agencies as clients?
There is a small split for how you would freelancing vs. consulting via agencies in my experience.
For consulting, you will usually only be brought on if you have a special skill set that the agency themselves can't fill out, and often only if their client specially requests those services. So consulting work via agencies is much rarer in my experience.
For freelancing, as long as the agency is doing well there is almost always something to do, and ~20% of their tech teams consist of freelancers, so it's not really "surplus work" but more their part of their normal mode of operation.
Of course, all of this are just anecdotal data, and may vary widely from region to region.
A cold email better be great to work. A better bet is to go to meetups and local conferences for like Wordpress or SEO or digital marketing. You’re likely to meet some agency folks or people who contract with agencies. Chat them up, offer to buy them lunch, stay in contact.
Or, just look up agencies who are hiring for developers. Contact them and offer your contracting services.
A good portfolio is key. Strong client references are even better but it takes time to build those.
You can also do thought leadership type stuff like blog about topics, or participate in regional online communities.
I’m familiar with agencies because I have hired and worked with a lot of them recently.
For example: One of our oldest business associates, who has passed over a lot of work over the years, we met volunteering for the local seafood festival.
Interested in how you off-board those opportunities? Do you have a referral network who'll take on the lower-end prospects, or just offer them some guidance?
I imagine there's a longer selling cycle for the mid-sized business, offset by higher pricing? Which group is harder to serve? (eg. more iterations and drama inserted into the job vs. shaking hands, getting it done, and getting paid)
My sales cycle is very short. I usually close the sale in the first meeting - or walk away knowing that a PO is imminent. Or I finish that meeting knowing that there’s no real opportunity there. Over many years I’ve developed a pretty good instinct of what is an opportunity and what isn’t, and where there’s a good fit and isn’t. Wish I could be more prescriptive, but it seems to be one of my magic powers.
The older I get, the more I value clients who are willing to shake hands once and let us handle it from there (or better yet, send me an email before a project and a check after it).
Having some 23 year old AE clumsily attempt to "manage" us is a recipe for imminent violence.... (us => spouse and I)
I agree with the first part, but disagree with the second. Rather, partially disagree. Most agencies are inept. There are some out there that run a very tight ship and it is a pleasure to work for them. They tend to be larger and have a system for handling contractors.
That said, since it's always less profitable, you're always better off having your own clients.
On a qwerty keyboard o is next to i, r is next to t.
THIS! My goal is to move away from my full-time day job and concentrate fully on my current side hustle...and arriving at or close to where you are now - both income and low expenses/cost-of-living, etc. Even if i'm a little under the 200k, that's squarely within my goal. I applaud you on having reached this, and wish you continued success!!!!
My company targeting this kind of cold outreach can typically pull one or 2 recurring paying client out of 100 cold emails. That's 100 outreach which products approx 15 people who give the affirmative reply (15%) which leads to 3 or 4 calls which leads to 1 or 2 clients.
It's a slog. But the math works and we have a system down for the outreach so it's very repeatable.
1. Are you based in an urban area like SF or NYC?
2. How long did it take you to build up your clientele?
2. Several years. First couple were tough. I took a 66% pay cut on Year 1 from my role as a senior developer at a Fortune 50 company.
I should add - I’ve never met about 30% of my customers in person, and interact with them strictly by phone. I’m presently sitting in Mexico on vacation, and met one of my clients for the first time in the airport in the way here.
Those skills are hard won. Sounds like you could create a great course and monetize it.
(Not talking about udemy etc, talking about a high end course with sensible price points in the hundreds or more)
My friends who have consulted have pulled in some seemingly hefty sums, only to feel like they came out behind a good salary with good benefits.
Generally you pay less in taxes for an equivalent net profit as a small business than you would with that amount as a pre-tax salary. You pay slightly more in SE tax (~8%) but you get access to other write offs that more than make up for it, especially with the recent tax reform (huge deduction for pass-through businesses). And you can take as much time off as you want, which may cost you, but the flexibility is nice.
And operating expenses for most consultants are very low. For me it’s just been a new computer every couple years and a tiny bit of software and hosting. Basically nothing.
Healthcare is a big one though, if you’re not covered via a spouse or something.
There are benefits. Like matching 401K, paid vacation (though if this isn’t long enough it can be a negative), and mainly, health insurance. Those should be counted for a normal salaried job. Otherwise taxes should be compared the same way, no?
You also need to pay for your own computers, SAAS services you use, etc. The more you make, the less this becomes an issue.
How can a 7% difference mean you compare non tax salary to taxed self employed income? As was the point of my comment. It doesn’t make sense. The disparity is way worse if you do that.
Also it was never said to compare revenue to salary. I assumed profit would be compared to salary.
1) Why do you use your name for your site ( jasonpomerleau.com ) rather than something easy to remember? For example I run into cases where people are going to need a wordpress site but no way I am going to remember that when I need it.
2) Why does your site have a big picture of you as the homepage image? And I do mean a big picture of you? What is that your unique selling point?
Not intended to be snarky and what you have done is great just curious.
2) See 1). By the time a prospect reaches me, there’s already been a warm introduction of some kind. The big photo is the human you’re going to end up working with. I’m not super handsome but nevertheless i think it communicates that human component rather well. I do get teased occasionally about my “Steve Jobs” headshot but it doesn’t seem to have impacted sales.
If I was trying to grow and build out a team I would have taken a very different approach.
My growth strategy is oriented around productivity and workflow improvements, not adding heads. I’ve managed to become very fast and quite efficient, such that I usually blow my competitors completely out of the water. I’m only one semi-ugly dude, and thus every component of what I do has to be ruthlessly focused on what matters most.
I know a great deal about this topic. It always pays to make it easy for people to find or remember you. Even if you get primarily word of mouth.
> Plus I really suck at naming things. :)
Well then you should do what people who use you are doing. Find someone who does and pay them for the advice (per what I say about 'it always pays to make it easy for people to find or remember you).
Even if you already have more customers than you can service having more potential customers allows you to charge a higher price for what you do. There is no reason to have friction in marketing. It's not the same as HN trying to use a hard to find name to keep people out and have only higher quality comments (reason it's still probably news.ycombinator.com instead of something easier to find for newbies)
I'm more laravel/mobile/node/vue/react, and I find I under-charge, but I think if I were doing WP I'd need to charge even less... Currently my best-long-term client pays $40...but I feel I want/deserve 60-70 and trying to land that for my next couple clients... do people pay you more than $40/hr for wordpress or do you just charge per project?
Laravel or other custom work starts at $125 for clients I'm expecting volume from or $150 for one off projects, again given in estimates as a flat fee for the project. If I expect something will take 8 hours to build, then I'm giving them a quote of $1200.
You can scaffold up a lot of CRUD stuff in Laravel in 8 hours.
I'm wanting to potentially do some sort of hosting/support plan...and work on a site that has a ton more inbound marketing related articles on my biz. Then hire some offshore or jr devs or techs wanting to become devs to support the easy issues, I'll take care of the harder stuff, or hire some tier 2 people to do that... basically have something like $200/month for hosting, unlimited non-coding issues, change fonts, update settings, fix white screen of death, etc...w/ backups/malware scans/etc... -- the idea being get some recurring income.
Then I can up-sell people who need custom apps, full-design, etc... But before I can move into agency, I need solid/steady income. I had a bunch of imposter syndrome/depression but I'm depression free since August (therapy), and I've lost 90 pounds, and just have more energy, and I'm a lot more focused now, and just want to take freelancing to where I know it can go.
So I guess there is a place for a professional business for building websites
I no longer need to scour through some crappy website for opening times etc. because it's on Google Maps, even a photo of the menu on Google Maps is a much better experience than any restaurant website I've ever visited.
If the site needs interaction with customers it's probably better off with Facebook or WhatsApp.
Someone once gave me the advice to never offer a discount. You can do things for free, but never discount anything. If you do, you’ll end up discounting everything.
If you pitch a 2500k website to a 20+ person business there is 0 perceived value in that. That’s one persons time in their org for 2 weeks.
What’s the value you are bringing? Decades of experience, marketing experience, conversion optimization, inbound marketing strategies, CRM integration...
If that business is - say a law firm for 20 attorneys.
A sale to them is 10K+ for a new legal gig.
If your website can outperform others and you bring them 5 more leads a month, 50+ more leads a year ... 10+ more sales then you can charge much more!
You are losing jobs to companies charging for the real value they bring.
Let those small one to two person companies use wix or whatever
And if that’s the only value you bring then you need to learn different skills
Companies WANT to pay good money for good services. They are probably laughing at your 2500 quote and going with the 25,000 quote.
Move of the value chain. They get a new website but that’s not what you’re selling.
You’re selling leads, sales, new business, business growth, hands off / zero worries on their part.
Start charging way more today.
2. you mean 2.5k not 2500k. The latter would be a king's ransom for a wordpress site, even by your (apparently) high standards
The local pizza shop's potentially a good customer if you're selling them a way to take orders online and get people to buy their special offers and refer their friends through social media. Plenty of value in that, especially if you're yielding more proven results than those flyers they pay to have printed and delivered every couple of months. If you're selling them a homepage with a picture of a pizza and a phone number then yeah, that's what Wix etc are for.
But to use Wix Code, you will need to know some level of coding, hence value to sell for your clients.
And I agree, there is a huge market for people to build websites for customers, you need to focus on the value you deliver to your customers, from design all the way to coding, SEO, content and social.
I've found a good niche making sites with minimal login and membership features. These are far too customized for the likes of Wordpress, but can be built in just jQuery and Bootstrap, without all the overhead of a full web framework. Some examples would be sites that track individual members actions, listing sites, websites that would track their employees' performance.
For example if someone wants a store set up, you probably don't want to ask them to pony up for a custom $20,000 solution. Just get them onboard with Shopify on a retainer, and if they have custom needs start programming custom Shopify apps.
You can also look into ways on how to optimize their current set up. Like introducing a way to schedule appointments in a way that removes a bunch of headache from their point of view. They might not even have thought to do anything like that because it was unknown to them.
I talked about this recently in a podcast I was on about being a freelance web developer at https://twitter.com/nickjanetakis/status/1086296676640456704.
But, long story short. Before you know it, you're not just "the web guy" to them. You're the guy they come to for answers for a lot of things related to their business.
Learn those platforms down cold and you will be able to build a site on them way faster than almost any small business owner. And interacting with you will be way faster for them. Combine those deltas and that’s your business.
Or, if you want to do more custom work, target bigger businesses, like midsize. Or look into PR firms, which are constantly setting up new sites for campaigns, coalitions, candidates, etc.