I have been self-employed since around 92, I have more failed startups under my belt than some you have had sex. My current business is 13 years old but it still makes me just a living,
I grew it from me and one bloke to 13 employees. Now here is the thing, when I had all those employees I earned less than I did when it was just 2 of us.
I didn’t get to do much except sales, admin and fixing stuff those 13 Guys fucked up. After doing some sums I let attrition do the job and reduced back to a solo outfit.
Now I am tired before I start my day, my back hurts and lifting stuff that just two years ago was a breeze is no longer as easy. This is an age thing, I realised the other day that my pension plan is good for just about 3 hours. https://dustfactory.co.za You can look at my website here and until about 3 years ago it was supplying too many leads for me to reply to. COVID broke that., but I am tired more than not getting enough work. .
I ran a web dev company before this one in a small town in Africa and clients were limited, too much competition, people offering work at stupid low prices and I got tired of counting cents, so I went back to my trade.
I used my skills developed during that period to out perform all my opposition on the web for the woodworking business. The most important thing that I learned in the business was saying no, or even fuck off. You cannot offer value and quality if you are too cheap.
I have moved to a big city, reduced overheads and can now retire about 3 hours before I kick the bucket. I really don’t want to get back in the death spiral competing with people charging too little for their service, mainly because I am convinced that a website that doesn’t bring results is not an investment for any business.
I have started updating my skills again, updating the CMS that I built and have been using. also have registered a few domains to build sites on as test beds.
The numbers below are based on exchange rates and are in no way accurate, they are just an example. My question is as follows, let’s say the cheap blokes are selling web sites for $100 and they place them, charge for hosting about $7 a month, but are doing no SEO, no forward planning, just put it up and forget it, How much should I be charging a month for full service?
Would you be willing to pay $250 a month for a site that includes all the SEO stuff like semantics, includes me sorting out your local SEO stuff, creating content regularly or would that seem like too much of a difference. I am assuming small businesses as clients.
Next check out my website and tell me if it creates confidence. Note not all the content is complete yet, but check out these pages please.
https://centuriondesign.co.za/
https://centuriondesign.co.za/pages/SEO.html
https://centuriondesign.co.za/pages/web-design.html
Tell me how I could improve them, What could I do that would help you make a decision?
Serious people make serious posts
You’re not a serious person
I’m not here for a debate, just giving you a wake up call
Some observations to show I’m serious:
First. Your title has nothing to do with your post and starts things off with a negative attitude. If you wanted more effective feedback, you would write the question right from the start and would have a more welcoming or positive title. It suggests a lack of maturity and perhaps a sense of entitled thinking and / or an inability the changes. But most importantly, someone reading this has to hunt through the post to begin to figure out what you are asking help about. Wading through a bunch of nonsense and complaints to get to some odd question about pricing. And then random questions about your service in general. And to be clear, it’s confusing to read.
Second. If you want to be a good entrepreneur and successful at soliciting feedback, you need to spend time thinking through how you are going to organize it. I would spend 2-4 hours if necessary to make something look professional or clear to an audience that I thought I could get good feedback from; for free even. I would write an outline and then draft out something. Then I would wait a day and review what I wrote and edited it a couple of times; potentially adding or removing things. Then I would give that draft to several others to take a look at first to make sure it was clear and concise. After that I would incorporate their feedback and then review it one more time before posting it. That’s what a serious person would do. Instead you post a stream of conscious thing that is cluttered and all over the place. If I were a potential customer, I wouldn’t take you seriously unless I absolutely needed your products and there was no other companies providing the service or there were no substitutes for the products or services you sold.
I hope you take this feedback as honest criticisms that you can use to improve yourself. Good luck.
Thank you, noted