Nieman Creative

We're almost a year into this thing, which is pretty cool. It's still here. It makes money. We're having fun. That's all that matters.

I've been doing a little reflection over the last few weeks to think about this business long term, and what that would look like for us to run it and be happy doing so.

Sparked by a conversation with someone we look up to in the agency space, I had this sudden realization... I'm allowed to change my services! LOL.

Now this is seemingly quite obvious but it was never a possibility in my mind until our friend asked us about how we run SEO campaigns. Their questions were: what is really easy for you, and what causes the most frustration or friction?

To their second question, "what causes the most frustration or friction", my answer was quick and easy: writing monthly blog posts for clients.

So, to make a potentially long story short, we chose to remove writing blogs from our monthly SEO campaign offering. It's not a huge loss for the service as a whole (since there are TONS of freelance writers out there ready for companies to hire them) and it takes a lot of stress off our plate.

For you, what are you offering as a service to your customers or clients that you just hate doing, or tends to cause more friction than value? Now think about what it would look like to remove that offering. Does your service as a whole still stand? If so, I'd say consider taking it off your plate.

Hey IH,

We just had a unique project situation that I thought I would share. I think this might be the start of something new for us, and should provide some value to you as well.

We recently brought on a client for a small SEO project. Long story short, there were some technical restrictions on the client side that prevented us from doing everything that we needed to do according to our original project scope.

At this point, we had 2 options:

1. Cancel the project and refund the deposit the client had already paid.
2. Pivot and try to offer value another way

We obviously didn't want to lose the deposit and the client was great, so we offered another solution: a consulting call.

This was a smaller SEO project, so I thought it would be the perfect opportunity to try out a consulting call. Doing this allowed us to accomplish a few things:

1. Lower the project cost for the client
2. Increase our dollar per hour return
3. Deliver far more value to the client in the form of knowledge

Here's why this is so interesting... in the span of an hour, we were able to deliver just as much value (if not more) to our client for less cost on their end, and far less time on our end, all because of a technical restriction.

This has the gears turning in our minds and we exploring the idea of offering more consulting.

Let us know if you have jumped into consulting at all and how that is going for you!

After some frustration in our career and finding what we were passionate about (web design, development, and helping people grow aka helping businesses) Kelcie and I (Jesse) started Nieman Creative in March of 2021 on the side of our full time jobs.

We honestly didn't know what to expect, but with the popularity and pure power of tools like Webflow, we knew that there was a lot of opportunity in the web design and development space. I have been doing some web design on the side of the last 4 years and it just made sense to make it more of an official thing.

For those of you who are toying around with freelance, we took the step to start NC for a couple of reasons:

1. Accountability - putting something official out there felt like a great way to keep us accountable. It definitely worked and has prevented us from just dropping it and moving onto something different.
2. It gave us confidence - Establishing a business allowed us to feel like we could approach clients with something to show. A portfolio was definitely a big part of this.

A big frustration we have had since we started NC was that we just didn't have as much time to commit to it as we wanted. I'm sure this is something that all founders feel when they start something on the side of the full time role. We felt like we were spending 8 hours a day doing something that felt purposeless to us, and that was taking away time that we could have been spending creating special things for clients.

We are so pumped to share that I have landed a new career opportunity that will allow us to spend WAY more time building Nieman Creative. Next week I will start as a Technical Project Manager at Finsweet, an incredible web development agency. Here's what this means for Nieman Creative:

• Kelcie doesn't need a full-time job anymore so she will be able to focus a ton of time on NC.
• We will be able to expand our SEO service offering. Kelcie is taking on more of this load and will lead our SEO efforts.
• We are going to learn so much from Finsweet and offer even more excellent service to our clients.

Needless to say, we are so pumped about the future of NC and how we are going to be able to serve our clients in this next season.

Stay tuned for more!

If you follow me (Jesse) on Twitter, you've probably seen me mention Ammo Studio. Ammo is a creative studio similar to NC helping startups with web design and Webflow development.

I have been chatting with Diego (Founder of Ammo) for a few months now and we excited to partner up and offer SEO as a service for Ammo customers.

This is a unique venture for us. It's a great opportunity to help our a quickly growing studio as well as nail down some more consistent revenue for us.

This work will be done under the Ammo brand. Our hopes at NC are that we will be able to learn from Ammo and how we are able to serve their client base with SEO. We will be able to take these learnings back to improve SEO for our own clients.

It's a win-win!

You can follow along with Ammo's growth by following Diego and Ammo on Twitter:

@the1diegodiaz
@ammo_HQ
ammo.studio

After a slow few months, August and September have picked up.

As we are still running NC on the side, it has been tough to schedule in marketing efforts through our social platforms and SEO.

To help make things run more efficiently, we have refined our PM (project management) flow within Notion so that things are "almost" foolproof.

We have initiated a dedicated Discovery Meeting/Call at the beginning of each project which has been a breath of fresh air. This has allowed us to deeply understand the needs of each client and talk through various solution options. We are excited to see how this continues to reap benefits moving forward.

We have also clarified the flow that each project needs to follow by creating specific stages (in order) that each project needs to pass through in it's lifecycle. This allows us to quickly understand where a project is at without having to dig through notes and emails.

We also started the process of pushing SEO for our own site in hopes that this will help generate some more organic traffic to the site.

This month we should wrap up with 2 new projects. We plan to share about these on instagram once they are launched.

It took a little longer than expected, but our website is officially live! We spent a lot of time (probably more than needed) making sure the copy and flow of the site were just right.

Kelcie did a great job and pushed me to just get it launched.

The temptation to make an MVP perfect is real. We would encourage anyone launching a site or product to just get it out and then refine.

Check out the live site: https://niemancreative.com

We just finished up handing over our first project as a business!

This was a cool moment for us realizing the potential of what NC can be.

For those interested, here are the tools we are currently using to run the business:

• Bonsai - Contract and invoice management
• Notion - Project and task management
• Figma - web and asset design
• Webflow - website development

Early this year we decided to step out and start Nieman Creative. Helping businesses and entrepreneurs has been something we have tinkered with over the last 4 ish years. We felt that there was no better time than now to get started.

We are a small studio (Jesse and Kelcie to start) helping small to medium businesses grow with bespoke web design, development, and SEO.

We are starting NC on the side of our full-time jobs with the goal of growing it to take over as a full-time responsibility.

To get started, we are sharing about NC through our family and friends. I (Jesse) have also started engaging in Twitter to learn and gain some leads.

We are excited to share the journey!