Web Design, a Bad Business Model

After running a small Web Design company for over a decade, I can tell you, building websites for clients is not the best business model.

Defining the Rat Race in Web Design

The rat race is a term used to describe the cycle of work and consumption, typical of living paycheck to paycheck. Essentially, it’s the feeling of being trapped in a never-ending pursuit of more without truly enjoying the journey.

However, from a web design business perspective, it has a different meaning; finding new clients to create websites for over and over again. It is a repetitive endless cycle; find a client, build a website, then find another client to build another website and so on. In general terms, it’s The Client Acquisition Rat Race.

If you are a solopreneur, the problem is even worst, when you have time to find new clients it’s because you don’t have enough work, and viceversa. Finding the right balance is hard.

Websites are more often than not a once-off project. Companies don’t change thier websites for years. If you do a good job, a website can last over a decade (we’ve built a few of those). Some clients return to the same web designer for a revamp, but most of the time, they want to try a different designer every time.

Escaping the Client Acquisition Rat Race

The answer is simple, recurring services.

Successful web designers typically don’t just offer web design, often they become marketing agencies/consultants that offer all sorts of marketing services:

Marketing strategy
Social media
Paid advertising
SEO
etc.

That way, they don’t have to find new clients every time, client acquisition is less crucial if you have recurring services.

Building websites for clients becomes just part of what they do.

Marketing services are naturally a better business model, because these are recurring services.

However, marketing services is not a solution for everybody, what if you don’t have the skills or the passion for it?

Non-marketing Recurring Services

The truth is, we are not great marketers. Being a small team of 2, our skills are more on the technical side of the spectrum.

Early in the journey we introduced recurring services:

Email
Website security
Hosting
Domains

These services are great, but they come with a problem too.

Email, Hosting & Domains are comoditised services and it’s very hard to market by differenciation from the competition. Having said that, these services can become very easy to provide and while the margins are small, they add up to help your business become profitable.

Website security also produces recurring predictable income, which is great, we are working to grow this arm of the business.

The Koala Widgets Way

We recently launched this website to create and promote widgets for websites.

We are working on various Widgets, like this Website Cost Calculator or the CEPI Calculator, where clients can subscribe to embed them in their websites.

These widgets are the reason why Koala Widgets exists and it’s our current attempt to escape the web designer rat race.

It is still early days for the widgets and we don’t have many sales yet, but the subscription model it’s more promising than building websites for clients.

What About You, How Do You Escape the Web Design Rat Race?

Hopefully, you can take some ideas from this article and introduce more recurring services to your offer.

Affiliate Marketing

Finally, I have to mention affiliate marketing as an option.

I was hesitant to mention affiliate marketing because in most cases it doesn’t generate recurring revenew, so I have to clarify, I’m referring to recurring affiliate programs.

Some hosting companies like Kinsta in the US or 8 Web Design in Australia offer great recurring affiliate programs.

At Koala Widgets we also offer a recurring affiliate program. We value highly the distribution of our widgets and our Affiliate program is a reflection of that.