How I pivoted from charging $7,500 flat to just $1,000/m
Hey everyone,
I'm a web designer building websites and landing pages in webflow.
I recently decided to productize my service and reduce the amount we charged for pages and sites.
You can read more about that on our new landing page: https://www.imaginaryspace.co.uk/
Why productize?
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Remove all meetings. We just charge a subscription and do all the comms inside a client dashboard.
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Focus on designing rather than admin. With this new model, there are no contracts and invoices. Just a stripe link and T/C's.
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Easier to market. I now know my USP. Traditionally marketing my agency was always a bit of a ball ache as I never really knew why people should choose us. Now with a product, I have a much better vision as to how I can help people.
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TOTALLY ASYNC. I don't have to worry about meetings, deadlines, etc. All I do is log in to my client's dashboard and check for feedback. Send a loom video with any follow-up questions and wait.
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The client feels the time pressure not me. Instead of worrying about revisions causing me to go out of scope the client now takes on the responsibility of time management and making sure everything gets to me on time. Otherwise, they get charged for another month.
I really loved pivoting to this model and would love to hear what you think about paying a subscription for a landing page rather than a big flat fee?
Please let me know what you think of the landing page as well!!
Absolutely makes sense. Taking out the hassle of back and forth conversations between you and clients.
I’d love a follow post as to how you transitioned from agency to product.
Will make sure to do this!!
I think it is totally the right way to go. It frees you up to do your best work. I breaks the dynamic of the client squeezing you or you holding back because they are not paying for certain features. The client gets to work at their own pace and you get to deliver results. Then they get your best work, the product looks amazing and that helps you and the client grow. Bravo!
Thanks!
Great article and great idea. I like your approach.
Thanks Stefan - appreciate you!
I realize this post is more about why I pivoted than how. So I'll make a follow-up post about that soon.
I see that you are providing unlimited pages and unlimited change requests.
Wouldn’t that be too much of a burden in case of pestering clients or if the number of pages is too high?
Also, did you try creating templates on webflow and sell them instead?
Hey !
We limit the amount of requests to one at a time. This avoids us being overwhelmed with work and keeps a steady pace with the client.
Our model atm is not priced well to offer this but we're more focused on onboarding and growing. As our rates grow I hope to find customers that are willing to pay a premium for the privilege of it being unlimited but only time will tell.
We haven't tried the template route yet but it sounds like a cool idea.
One request at a time looks like a good idea, but you might face issues as you scale.
This product might give you more ideas regarding the thought process for webflow templates - https://www.flowbase.co
This is awesome. Would you be up for coming in my podcast trailblazer.fm to share your experience with this?
I'd love to. DM me on twitter! Harry_aldian
Sweet. DM sent 🥰🥰
Hey, congrats on the launch/pivot.
My question is, how are you driving customers to your landing page?
2 weeks ago, I also started working to create a productized service in design field at https://www.growby.net. I started by reaching out to a few businesses in the offline world. The response has mostly been positive till now.
Wishing you all the best.
Hey!
We're doing a lot of things. Mostly replying to people on Reddit & LinkedIn with questions about landing pages and trying to help them out. That includes indie hackers as well.
I'm also in the process of launching an email outreach campaign targeting marketing agencies and startups based in the UK, US & Dubai. Should be able to send 1000 emails a week hopefully.
Other avenues:
Reaching out to old clients and telling them about it.
Launched a referral program using rewardful (https://getrewardful.com).
Contact all old business connections and ask them for referrals/meetings to talk about the system.
That's super awesome, Harry. Is there a particular tool you are using to get those 1000 email ids?
Good question! You can use a service like fiver or Upwork to find VA's especially suited to doing this. $50 for like 500-1000 quality leads is not a bad deal.
Or you can also just buy a database of emails.
You can then use tools like: https://neverbounce.com/ To clean the emails and make sure none of them bounce.
Its important to remember that if you bounce a load of emails your email address will be shadow banned. :(
Thanks for sharing! This is super helpful and I will be sure to check it out.
Question: You design websites and landing pages using webflow, but what if a customer comes with some custom requirement on website which is not supported by webflow? How do you handle it?
PS: I did basics in web flow done know how power ful it is. But still wondering if its supports custom development of customer requirements.
Webflow supports a lot but when a customer comes to us we're very upfront about the fact that we design and then develop in webflow. If they just want the designs thats fine. But if they want development from us specifically it has to be in webflow.
I have still yet to come across any objections to this! :)