However - can any of it scale without putting more working hours per sale?
Do you have any automation going on or is it simply good old "agency vs client" type of work?
1
Hello Satch, thanks a lot for the comment.
As of right now we are an agency and a marketplace (pre-packed service bundles) company. We are building (with our team) new tools that will automate some of the processes we offer for a more scalable business model. We are in the middle of developing new mobile apps, desktop apps and others to facilitate our workflow, communication with our clients and results.
1
OK nice.
Just wondering - when you say "Marketplace" - do you mean that you have freelancers/smaller agencies competing for each incoming project or do you do it yourself with your team?
1
What is the average value of your web sale? How do you plan to compete with sqaurespace? I find it almost impossible to justify using anything else for clients these days, almost none of them have requirements that squarespace can't handle? Sure people like to be told they're important and need custom design, but I find the only people that really need this level of web design work is other agencies? Admittedly yearly hosting is quite expensive. The real cost in web development is usually content preperation / stratergy? And every client I've introduced to squarespace loves the editor, I've not found anything out there that competes with it? Even the high end wordpress builders are generally pretty annoying?
If you want to massively improve your bottom line, don't just sell web and brand services. Sell innovation processes. The budgets for this are huge (with big companies) and it basically boils down to a long a drawn out expensive process where you convince the rich people to give you lots of money for experimenting on their behalf, with very little legal requirements for you to produce anything specific. And it's quite fun as well, although sometimes difficult to really bring products to market. The thing is, so many companies have no hope of doing this, so they need to use consultants to do this. Also, you don't even have to do the building it part of it, you can just do loads of UI and user research, https://www.seguetech.com/persona-development-important/ paper prototyping, all manner of stuff. Present that stuff really well, hand hold, and you will be onto a winner financially, with low risk. (It will be highly political though, as you will basically be going into big companies and making people look slow / not know what they are doing, so be careful about that. Bring everyone on board and try to keep everyone happy / motivated.
I see this as the key agency like space in the market these days.
1
The thing about Squarespace is the unified brand. Their designers have quite literally created 15+ templates that maintain a similar brand across the board. With that, every time a client site is designed using Squarespace, they are creating a site that is extremely similar to another company's, and they are essentially only extending the Squarespace brand.
I won't even begin to explain how awful it is to try and do anything custom with their platform, as well.
Now, with all of that being said, it's a fantastic platform. But to say that you literally shouldn't use anything else is absurd. Companies will literally pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to have a web presence in line with their own brand.
1
I have to agree 100% with that. Also, even though there are people willing to create their own site, there are many others who want to put together an extremely professional looking site (done by pros). Also, there are many big things to consider when creating a site, for me the most important is "conversion optimization" and Squarespace does not have a huge number of tools for that.
1
Obviously major corporations who can pay 50-100k for a large web build should probably do something custom.
But the problem is when you are dealing with 1-2-5-10k builds + content development and custom build. If you are big enough company to say not touch anything less than 20-30k, then that's ok. But there are just so many smaller people who should go nowhere near custom. Who cares that their small stuff looks kind of similar to someone elses website? As long as they have a decent logo & branding, that should fit into one of the templates? Unless I'm missing something here? Perhaps you specifically don't want to have a good looking website, or want some outrageous "creativity"? (PS I love weird creative stuff)
I've messed about with some squarespace customising, yes, it's bad, even their git backed developer mode. Seems all over complicated. You can inject stuff quite well, and take over functions via javascript, but not very robust. I use this for doing CMS builds - https://wagtail.io/
So I guess I'm just simply saying, unless you have 20k+ to spend on a web build, use squarespace most of the time. And if you are a business be cautious about selling yourself short and not charging enough. If you are not going to provide serious value beyond squarespace, use it.
We want to make money (that's obvious) but really our main goal is to help those small businesses or even just individuals with ideas they want to develop. By saying this, what I mean is that we are here for small and smaller businesses... our prices are super reachable for them... So, basically the main question you gotta ask yourself if you want a new website is:
Squarespace (low cost) (poor design) OR Wegacha (a bit higher cost) (professional look and feel + optimized for conversion)
1
That's fair. Thanks for the clarification.
I work with a few clients with their Squarespace sites in more of a consulting role like what you were getting to in your first comment, and I can see the benefit of them paying me hourly here or there to do anything extremely custom, versus paying a flat upfront charge for a custom build.
Plus, it's very nice to have an easy-to-use platform with employees/leadership coming and going - there's no constant training taking place, and everyone seems happy with it. Aside from their unique style/brand, I can and have seen the value of it.
1
Great read! Would love to learn more about how you started creating trust to drive new client acquisition. I'm in a similar spot and trying to learn about the different approaches out there.
1
Congrats on all the work!
Regarding your two pricing models, we ran into a similar situation with https://palar.support . How does the conversion of your traditional 'booking a call ' compare against self-service products?
0
How come most of your clients sites and testimonial sites have invalid SSL certificates and a removed shopify page? This seems untrustworthy to me.
1
Hello Martin. Shopify is actually having internal issues right now. Anyway which sites are you referring to? Thanks
1
Hi again Martin, another thing might be that you are looking for sites based on logos and those are not their url's... for fucho, the site is fuchomma.com, for artizan | artizanjoyeria.com. Also, remember we don't only make websites... we do many things like branding, design, advertising and others... so for GO2 Distribution we didn't make their site, we made only their branding. Hope this helps! Cheers!
1
Ok, that clears things up. I checked on status.shopify.com . They seems to have some issues. I'm sorry for the inconvenience.
Looks nice!
However - can any of it scale without putting more working hours per sale?
Do you have any automation going on or is it simply good old "agency vs client" type of work?
Hello Satch, thanks a lot for the comment.
As of right now we are an agency and a marketplace (pre-packed service bundles) company. We are building (with our team) new tools that will automate some of the processes we offer for a more scalable business model. We are in the middle of developing new mobile apps, desktop apps and others to facilitate our workflow, communication with our clients and results.
OK nice.
Just wondering - when you say "Marketplace" - do you mean that you have freelancers/smaller agencies competing for each incoming project or do you do it yourself with your team?
What is the average value of your web sale? How do you plan to compete with sqaurespace? I find it almost impossible to justify using anything else for clients these days, almost none of them have requirements that squarespace can't handle? Sure people like to be told they're important and need custom design, but I find the only people that really need this level of web design work is other agencies? Admittedly yearly hosting is quite expensive. The real cost in web development is usually content preperation / stratergy? And every client I've introduced to squarespace loves the editor, I've not found anything out there that competes with it? Even the high end wordpress builders are generally pretty annoying?
If you want to massively improve your bottom line, don't just sell web and brand services. Sell innovation processes. The budgets for this are huge (with big companies) and it basically boils down to a long a drawn out expensive process where you convince the rich people to give you lots of money for experimenting on their behalf, with very little legal requirements for you to produce anything specific. And it's quite fun as well, although sometimes difficult to really bring products to market. The thing is, so many companies have no hope of doing this, so they need to use consultants to do this. Also, you don't even have to do the building it part of it, you can just do loads of UI and user research, https://www.seguetech.com/persona-development-important/ paper prototyping, all manner of stuff. Present that stuff really well, hand hold, and you will be onto a winner financially, with low risk. (It will be highly political though, as you will basically be going into big companies and making people look slow / not know what they are doing, so be careful about that. Bring everyone on board and try to keep everyone happy / motivated.
I see this as the key agency like space in the market these days.
The thing about Squarespace is the unified brand. Their designers have quite literally created 15+ templates that maintain a similar brand across the board. With that, every time a client site is designed using Squarespace, they are creating a site that is extremely similar to another company's, and they are essentially only extending the Squarespace brand.
I won't even begin to explain how awful it is to try and do anything custom with their platform, as well.
Now, with all of that being said, it's a fantastic platform. But to say that you literally shouldn't use anything else is absurd. Companies will literally pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to have a web presence in line with their own brand.
I have to agree 100% with that. Also, even though there are people willing to create their own site, there are many others who want to put together an extremely professional looking site (done by pros). Also, there are many big things to consider when creating a site, for me the most important is "conversion optimization" and Squarespace does not have a huge number of tools for that.
Obviously major corporations who can pay 50-100k for a large web build should probably do something custom.
But the problem is when you are dealing with 1-2-5-10k builds + content development and custom build. If you are big enough company to say not touch anything less than 20-30k, then that's ok. But there are just so many smaller people who should go nowhere near custom. Who cares that their small stuff looks kind of similar to someone elses website? As long as they have a decent logo & branding, that should fit into one of the templates? Unless I'm missing something here? Perhaps you specifically don't want to have a good looking website, or want some outrageous "creativity"? (PS I love weird creative stuff)
I've messed about with some squarespace customising, yes, it's bad, even their git backed developer mode. Seems all over complicated. You can inject stuff quite well, and take over functions via javascript, but not very robust. I use this for doing CMS builds - https://wagtail.io/
So I guess I'm just simply saying, unless you have 20k+ to spend on a web build, use squarespace most of the time. And if you are a business be cautious about selling yourself short and not charging enough. If you are not going to provide serious value beyond squarespace, use it.
http://www.canababes.com/
https://www.wearefloat.co.uk/
http://www.lizziemayson.com/
We want to make money (that's obvious) but really our main goal is to help those small businesses or even just individuals with ideas they want to develop. By saying this, what I mean is that we are here for small and smaller businesses... our prices are super reachable for them... So, basically the main question you gotta ask yourself if you want a new website is:
Squarespace (low cost) (poor design) OR Wegacha (a bit higher cost) (professional look and feel + optimized for conversion)
That's fair. Thanks for the clarification.
I work with a few clients with their Squarespace sites in more of a consulting role like what you were getting to in your first comment, and I can see the benefit of them paying me hourly here or there to do anything extremely custom, versus paying a flat upfront charge for a custom build.
Plus, it's very nice to have an easy-to-use platform with employees/leadership coming and going - there's no constant training taking place, and everyone seems happy with it. Aside from their unique style/brand, I can and have seen the value of it.
Great read! Would love to learn more about how you started creating trust to drive new client acquisition. I'm in a similar spot and trying to learn about the different approaches out there.
Congrats on all the work!
Regarding your two pricing models, we ran into a similar situation with https://palar.support . How does the conversion of your traditional 'booking a call ' compare against self-service products?
How come most of your clients sites and testimonial sites have invalid SSL certificates and a removed shopify page? This seems untrustworthy to me.
Hello Martin. Shopify is actually having internal issues right now. Anyway which sites are you referring to? Thanks
Hi again Martin, another thing might be that you are looking for sites based on logos and those are not their url's... for fucho, the site is fuchomma.com, for artizan | artizanjoyeria.com. Also, remember we don't only make websites... we do many things like branding, design, advertising and others... so for GO2 Distribution we didn't make their site, we made only their branding. Hope this helps! Cheers!
Ok, that clears things up. I checked on status.shopify.com . They seems to have some issues. I'm sorry for the inconvenience.