Journey to 25 web design clients

ygg

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You're welcome to my new journey - getting 25 clients for our starting web design business - website creation / speed optimization / etc.

Me and my partner are trying to dive into the web design niche. Yeah, it's super saturated, there are bad actors too, and frustrated clients who've been scammed... and also people offering complete websites for $50!

I'm creating this thread to keep some accounting, motivate myself and others, share knowledge, network, etc.

We already sold several websites to friends and referrals in the previous months, but this was just to get us started, and have some runway money.
Now we try to find clients outside of our immediate contacts and friends by different methods.

I'll update with what we're doing, how it works out, etc. Here's for starters of what we did this week:
  • Cold calling ±700 local dentists who had no website, and this led to absolutely nowhere. Complete 0 interest
  • Changed the niche, and we booked 2 appointments from first 60 calls today, so we're not yet ditching the cold calling. We were in the wrong neighbourhood...
  • Cold emailing: booked a meeting from first 300 cold emails, but the guy was a cheapo, thinking we're ripping him off for a $500 business website. Another lead showed potential, but not yet turned into a meeting.
  • 1 meeting booked from Facebook

Current main challenge is to book our calendar with meetings, and stay organised with leads from different channels. Check back my thread for more!
 
Quick update:

Sold a basic business website today on our smallest monthly fee package. It was a referral from a close relative.

In the meantime - checked multiple CRM and PM tools today. Most PM tools are bloated with options, and we just need a few, so I guess we're going the Google Sheets road for our Project Management needs for now.

CRM tools are pretty much the same, but hopefully I'll find something suitable. We're getting a few leads here and there, for now we just write them down, but need to organise it way better.

We're getting 1-2 meetings per day in the past few days. Currently sourcing the leads from FB groups, cold calling and cold emailing.

Have been playing around with BAS (Browser Automation Studio) for the past 2 days in order to create a simple bot to pre-qualify websites that might need our help. It's a very simple solution for basic lead generation, hope to make it work.

Clients: 1/25
 
Have you thought about uploading short videos to YouTube, Instagram or TikTok? I recently saw a TikTok where a guy shared his process for creating landing pages for clients. In the comments, there were a lot of people interested in his services. Maybe you could try something similar if you have some free time to record.
Good luck!
 
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Another 2 websites almost-sold for today and yesterday - both clients confirmed over the phone, preparing contracts and sending invoices for tomorrow.

Both are dentists from cold calling, so maybe the niche isn't that bad after all. Cold calling is a big hustle, but we're seeing some initial results without having an optimised script and a straightforward process. I will count the new clients towards the goal once they've paid something.

Lead and work management is becoming a mess quickly, we need some professional tools ASAP. We can't focus on sales too much before fixing this. Anyone can recommend a good CRM/PM tool on a budget? The ones I like all cost $100/m, which is out of our budget as of now.

We're currently taking some time to prepare all of this, even our website isn't according to my standards, contracts are very basic, content extraction from clients is terribly slow with multiple websites in development, basic portfolio... can't focus much on sales yet.

This niche is saturated. If you can crack this, you can crack any other niche easily as well.
The niche is huge, I believe I read somewhere there are 100k± domains purchased daily, and a lot of these people need websites. It's very competitive, indeed, but it's possible.
 
Great journey idea. I have followed similar challenges by companies that sell whitelabel webdesign and from what I've read it can be a challenge to sell to businesses that don't have any website yet because they don't see it as a priority. You could try to use GSA to send some automated messages via contact form and offer to improve existing websites. It's relatively cheap to do and then you're not contacting any completely cold prospects.
 
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Another confirmation for a small monthly package website over the phone.

Still working on preparing the contracts, so no payments yet, invoicing is ready.

Most of our incoming leads right now are from cold calling, we're averaging 3-5 meetings daily while calling a few hundred businesses per day.
While doing this we're also preparing the CRM and the PM tools, pdf offer/proposal which we have but is very basic, improving our thin website, upwork profile. Also our current name is not great, so considering a domain name change too.

Great journey idea. I have followed similar challenges by companies that sell whitelabel webdesign and from what I've read it can be a challenge to sell to businesses that don't have any website yet because they don't see it as a priority. You could try to use GSA to send some automated messages via contact form and offer to improve existing websites. It's relatively cheap to do and then you're not contacting any completely cold prospects.
CFM is not our priority as of now, a lot of spammers doing that, but definitely will consider this option.

Have you thought about uploading short videos to YouTube, Instagram or TikTok? I recently saw a TikTok where a guy shared his process for creating landing pages for clients. In the comments, there were a lot of people interested in his services. Maybe you could try something similar if you have some free time to record.
Good luck!

Yes, definitely considering more social media pressence, however, we don't have the manpower to do that yet.
We only have an empty FB page with 3 posts for now, lol... a lot of things to prepare before we can just focus fully on marketing and sales.
 
Are you doing the meetings in person or online? One thing I've noticed is people have a lot more success with getting clients and better prices when they can do the meetings in person.
 
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Good luck for the journey! Following

Do you guys have experience in sales?
 
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Good Luck for gaining more clients. Let's hope for the best
 
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Are you doing the meetings in person or online? One thing I've noticed is people have a lot more success with getting clients and better prices when they can do the meetings in person.
All meetings/appointments are online, over the phone. We did 1 in person, but didn't close a few weeks back.
I've had good success in personal meetings too for my marketing services, but here we try mostly online.

Good luck for the journey! Following

Do you guys have experience in sales?

No, not much experience in sales. I specialise in marketing/lead gen/etc, my partner is web dev.
We're learning on the go.

Good Luck for gaining more clients. Let's hope for the best
Thank you!
 
Good luck with this! As you say there's plenty of competition but plenty of opportunities as well. Nice going with the cold calling, it's a grind!
 
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While doing this we're also preparing the CRM and the PM tools, pdf offer/proposal which we have but is very basic
Which one are you using? In all the agency facebook groups almost every one is suggesting GoHighLevel but I never switched from my OpenSource solution.
 
How much you charging for speed optimization?
 
Which one are you using? In all the agency facebook groups almost every one is suggesting GoHighLevel but I never switched from my OpenSource solution.
This one is out of our budget for now, we needed a solution that's max €20/user/m. Went with Zoho's free plan for now.
How much you charging for speed optimization?
We haven't got a client for stand alone speed optimization yet, but pricing would be $100-150 on average, up to $500 in extreme cases.


Quick update:

Contracts are ready for both monthly subscription and full website creation. Sent 4 of them this monday, got one of them signed, invoice should be paid today. Counting this one towards the goal, the other 3 contracts I've sent look promising, but waiting for payment before I count them towards the goal. Sold a domain too, which is nice I guess.

After checking 20+ CRM tools we decided to go with Zoho's free plan for 3 users, it's almost perfect for our needs, and it's free (not affiliated with the tool). For Project Management - we're going with the built in calendar in Zoho + Google sheets.

Currently averaging 100-150 cold calls a day, which should be at least 300/day for it to make sense, but we're not there yet. We have about 5 warm leads currently in negotiatons, hopefully we close at least 1. Besides cold calling, we're also using FB groups for sourcing leads, but it's crazy competitive. Any post looking for a website is getting 50 replies within the first couple of hours.

Last week was slower, I was dealing mostly with organisational stuff - choosing the CRM/PM tools, preparing the contracts, etc.

Next in the pipineline is to widen our communication channels, and improve on what's working for us. Need to restart the cold emailing, as it gave us good initial results, finish setting up upwork, etc. Stay tuned.

Clients: 2/25
 
Went with Zoho's free plan for now.
Totally forgot about Zoho. They actually offer a solid and value for money suite of tools that somehow doesn't get a lot of attention (probably because they don't have an affiliate program?). As far as I remember the only comparably priced solution is Freshsales which is also free for 3 users.

Besides cold calling, we're also using FB groups for sourcing leads, but it's crazy competitive. Any post looking for a website is getting 50 replies within the first couple of hours.
I wonder if anyone can sell a decently priced website via these Facebook groups, it really seems like they are flooded with cheap offers.
 
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