[Progress-Thread] Starting Front-End Web Design As a Short-Term Strategy

[RealDreams]

05/16/20​

Fixed yesterday's bug, after about 12 hours. I felt like shit the whole day because I couldn't figure out how to fix it.

Anyways, I start to suspect Italian business owners give no clue about web designers. This is just an hypothesis I have to test.

I bought the web domain for my country and I began translating the website in Italian. Most Italian people (I'm more than certain business owners, too) don't know English so I'll take that into account.

@Fox talks a lot about the importance of trust. That's something I'm missing right now. A friend of mine found an Instagram influencer who needed a website and referred me to him. That guy didn't let me know anymore. I don't really care honestly. The point is, I need to find a way to gain people's trust.

How to gain trust, though? Lower prices? Is that really the way to begin with?
I thought about contacting some companies and straight-forward offering them a new website (without too much sales thought) for like $100 as a first-project. Clearly, I will make the offer AFTER I explained them how it would benefit them and their business.

One thing I'm struggling with is, trying to find the "perfect" cold-email. Or rather, trying not to mess things up as I live in a small city and one day or another I will have expired the local people to contact.

My main concern is, why ask $100 to someone who would pay much more? Unfortunately, that's something I can't really predict. Especially if they don't reply back with an offer.

So the idea here is, maybe I should price high for bigger companies and work almost for free for small businesses with low revenue, applying the hypothetical reservation price of each business.

If anyone has some advice to give me I'm open for any kind of feedback!

 

[Odysseus M Jones]

PLCs (ie very large companies with shares listed) not only have their accounts audited and published but produce a nice glossy brochure once a year called Shareholders Report. You only need one share to receive it in the post.

Checking companies for revenue & the PLC trick are awesome ideas! Kudos to you for sharing them.

I think anyone can download annual reports etc free from whatever stock exchange where company is listed. It was in HK anyway & saves buying. Google is £1000 a share.

 

[RealDreams]

I thought I had the same problem (I live in a small town with about 12k people), however, there are lots of close towns / cities that would drastically increase my reach. So I wouldn't worry too much about running out of potential clients, unless you live on an island with just a couple of small towns.

You will have to "move out of town" so to speak when you start getting some clients, as you want to start targetting bigger and bigger businesses. So, unless you somehow fail to get any sales in your city and the neighbouring places you will be fine.

Also, consider the fact that your first emails are not going to be perfect no matter what. Cold emailing is a technique perfected over time (just like anything else), so consider your current situation as the training wheels to eventually land bigger projects.

I'll definitely scale onto closer cities once I either expired all the businesses to contact or received no echo from my cold emails. I've also thought of doing cold calling, however I'm not sure how that's welcomed in Italy since I've never tried. All these things I have to try to confirm the hypothesis.

 

[RealDreams]

Congrats on progress, Vic.

There are probably peps on the forum who can answer this question directly.

One thing that you could do (if the lead is cold and no way to turn them into customer)
is to ask if they know someone who would benefit from having more trustful* website.
This can turn into two positive things - they themselves might reconsider your offer, or they tell you someone to call. If they refer someone, you call them and have a foot in the door by telling, "John from XYZ company told me you might need a better website, is it good time to talk for a minute?"

Ofc, they can tell you they don't know anybody but it never hurts to ask.

* exact wording would have to be decided upon, i write from top of my head.

Sounds like a wise idea. It's basically wording it in a way that makes them feel like they are missing out on something, such as "If you know somebody who needs a website which gets them more results and trust for a price which you'll not usually find anywhere else...", only a fool would not want that lol

I'll try this asap! Thanks a lot!