Damn sorry to hear that.
Can you share what you think went wrong or what could have been done differently?
Hit me up if you want a quick talk.
Yeah, sure thing. I'm super busy this week but I'll message you to talk sometime soon. I'll try to give as detailed an answer as possible of why I think it didn't work out here on the thread though.
From the time I first started the business, I'd always had trouble getting a consistent stream of prospects coming in. I struggled with cold calls and was never confident enough to do in person cold sales (being 18 at the time), although I realize now that this shouldn't have been a barrier to me. When I did get potential clients coming in, this led to me drastically undervaluing my services, making it so that I barely broke even on most of the jobs I had.
When the summer ended and I got to college, the schoolwork and my social life distracted me and drew away my time, and I was pretty much only able to handle one client at a time during this period. At this point, I had been building websites for nearly a year but was still only managing to get $500 jobs that would drag on for weeks and months at a time.
Eventually I just got frustrated and started kicking around some other business ideas, and then I finally shut it down for good when I got a summer job offer that would pay me much more than I was making with web design, and would give me several connections that I could leverage for a future career in finance (my college major).
For what I could have done differently, I think if I had just done a few things (listed below) better, then I'd still be running the web design business today.
1. Had more confidence. This was by far my number one issue. I was afraid to make cold calls, go to networking events, quote fair prices on websites, and just generally put myself in a vulnerable position. I thought that as a high school student no one would take me seriously, and that fear consumed me. If you want to succeed in any business, you have to take risks and let yourself get burned a few times, and this was something I tried to avoid and I paid the price.
2. Picked better clients to build my portfolio sites for. Although I built some very nice free sites for my portfolio clients, none of them ended up getting many page views, which seriously hamstrung my ability to sell 4 and 5 figure sites as I grew my business. How could I confidently claim to potential clients that I could get them results when I had portfolio sites in similar industries that had yet to generate much extra revenue? I needed to target companies that already had some web traffic but a weak website.
3. Had a stronger focus and "why". Although I enjoyed running the web design business, I never felt that burning need to put everything I had into the business to make it work or else I would die or something. I never had an "FTE" to dial me in and push me out of the comfortable life I was living. Especially once I got to college, I would often take several days to a week off at a time that I could have spent trying to bring in prospective clients. If I was truly doing everything I could to make it work, I would not have done this.
Anyway, I tried to be as transparent as possible with what went wrong here and I hope this stops others from making the same mistakes in the future. Just to reiterate if it isn't clear, the failure of this business is 100% on me, and I'm going to take these lessons with me for all of my future ventures. Even though it didn't end up working out
@Fox, your web design resources and the web school taught me so much about how to run a successful business, and I have no regrets about anything that happened in this whole process.
