Hey Everyone,

I recently launched my web design agency and decided to kick off with cold calling. I’ve reached out to about 100 businesses, particularly painters in Toronto with basic websites, offering a no upfront cost deal at $25 a month for hosting and maintenance for my first 20 clients. Unfortunately, I haven’t seen much traction. Any suggestions on what I might be doing wrong or if my offer needs tweaking? I only do static sites so basically no e-commerce would that be limiting myself?

  • ItsColeOnReddit@alien.topB
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    1 year ago

    I dont get it. What are you offering that competes with Squarespace or shopify? If anything the cheap price makes you less trust worthy. What problem of theirs are you actually solving? I can get templates and a website plan for $16 from Squarespace, so are you just making me email you the info and pictures instead of me using their tools?

  • AgileWebb@alien.topB
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    1 year ago

    You are one of 50 “web design agency’s” that email or call every single business, every day. This is the absolute dumbest business to start. If you are talented, make your own website selling literally anything other than website design.

  • solarf88@alien.topB
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    1 year ago

    OP - I don’t understand your business model.

    Let’s say I sign up with you and pay for… I don’t know, 10 months? And then after 10 months I decide I want to just move the site over to my own hosting, can I do that?

    Or is the site literally gatekept behind a monthly fee? In other words, it’s never MY site. I just get to rent it from you per month?

    What about making sites for people using other hosting than your own? Do you work on wordpress or anything similar to that?

    I’m someone who could/would love to be in the market for some basic web services. I have a wordpress site, but there are some things that are beyond my ability to manage. But I couldn’t even entertain hiring someone like you cause I don’t really understand what you do, what you offer, and what I get?

  • Herronrock@alien.topB
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    1 year ago

    Saturated market and your offering is bad.

    New Painters, pressure washing, Christmas lights etc do not need websites. They need lead generation. You can find them on fb groups for their industry but you will get kicked out for offering your service in the groups. You will have to be covert and search post for those needing help with leads.

    You also need to understand that the website is a piece of the puzzle. Learn how to offer fb ads and google ads along with landing pages. Bring value.

    I can hire a team of VAs that never get sick, never take a day off and do better work. I’ll never hire another marketing company.

  • Corvus_Antipodum@alien.topB
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    1 year ago

    The low price makes it sound like you’re an amateur playing at it not a real professional.

    The “Act now!” schtick always comes across as BS used car salesman pressure tactics.

    Your market is wildly oversaturated and nothing you’ve stated here would make you stand out in a good way.

    Monthly recurring fees are awful and everyone hates them. It’s also not a standard way of charging for the industry so it again makes it sound like you don’t know what you’re doing.

    You’re focusing on people in an industry where having a “good” (whatever that means) website is not a competitive advantage, and specifically people who’ve shown they don’t care about their website.

    I’m not seeing any value proposition for your prospective clients. If their website is “better” how will that make them more money? Do you have any data or numbers or way for them to calculate an RoI that would offset the inconvenience and risk of switching vendors to a brand new single person company with no track record?

    It basically seems like you’re trying to solve a problem your prospective customers don’t care about in a way that makes you seem unreliable and offers them no concrete reason to want what you’re selling.

  • Sweaty-Divide9884@alien.topB
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    1 year ago

    Hate to say it, but you’ll never attract the types of clients you want with those prices. Most good business owners understand that you get what you pay for.

    At that price point I doubt I would get anything good.

    If you’re good at your craft stop underselling yourself. I pay my guy 300-500 bucks per month at the moment and that doesn’t include any seo or marketing. Just creation of static pages.

  • EchoesOfCode@alien.topB
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    1 year ago

    My feeling is that you should try an other market. When I want to hire a painter, I don’t really care about his website, so I don’t see how it would be interesting for him to pay that money.

    However, when I plan to go to a restaurant, I always check their website to see the menu and prices. If I had to start a web desgin agency selling static websites for a small monthly fee, this is the industry I would target.

  • hunterbuilder@alien.topB
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    1 year ago

    I’m a contractor (renovations and I do some painting). I don’t know how it is in Toronto, but in much of the US the construction industry is in high demand and short supply. Any decent contractor is booked out a year or two in advance and doesn’t have time or need for advertising. I stay 100% booked by word of mouth and keep raising my rates. I don’t even bother with social media anymore.

    I have a repeat client who’s a web designer and has been trying to trade me a website for years.
    I told him “Why? So I can turn down more work?”

  • dad-hates-fun@alien.topB
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    1 year ago

    I own a small business and get cold-called relentlessly by web related vendors.

    Starting with a specific target market is a great idea as it will make you stand out. I’d count on making hundreds of cold calls before getting anywhere.

    Look for non-cold calling ways to find new clients as well.

  • MrKeys_X@alien.topB
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    1 year ago

    What could work…

    Choose a template for this niche. Put their logo, name and pictures on the header. Make a printscreen and send them this. Make one whitelabel variant of this theme, If interested show them the WL-theme, and for XXX USD it can be theirs. Now you give them something to see and feel.

  • morajic@alien.topB
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    1 year ago

    I’m a painting contractor. I get offers like yours in my email inbox daily. I don’t open them, don’t read them, and don’t care. As another one of my painting contractor friends aptly described it, it just is another way for someone trying to make money off of our hard work.

  • DotPotential4057@alien.topB
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    1 year ago

    I have seen so many of these “web agency” “web builder” posts saying that they offer really cheap prices and thats a major problem.

    In a marketplace where there are squarespace and other websites for really cheap services that you offer, why are you competing on “price”? Its the equivalent of a retailer conpeting on price against walmart… gonna lose 99% of the time.

    Being cheap is not good for you. Cheap has negative inherent associations attached to it like: worse quality, expectations of results are really low, less trustworthy, scammy, impersonal, etc…

    You need to stand out and the easiest way is to simply look at the average price what everyone is offering and slap a 0 on top of it, 15$ = 150$…

    Also, if you go cheap, realise that you will require 10x more clients than if you go expensive. It would seem much smarter in the start to get 5 clients paying 150$ than 50 clients paying you 15$… afterwards when you want to scale you can start looking at other options.

    Onto prospects. Best prospects are the one who have already bought… with that in mind, prospects who have bought already, many of them are dissatisfied with what they are receiving but arent aware of a better alternative and will switch if presented with one. So a good way to land clients is by finding companies/entrepreneurs who use shitty website hosters/builders and contact them… alternatively, you can attempt to contact those companies and pay for their “unsubscribed” list (customers who left/switched) and then start contacting those people (btw, the more recent the unsubscribed the prospect the higher the chance it is that you will convert them).

    With offers - I would switch your main offer with a “secondary” offer. What I mean by this is instead of offering what you do already as the main offer, instead make the main offer things you would do for them on the backend/once the website and hosting is built for them… it may look like “get 4 additional landing pages built for testing and 5th as a placeholder” or something like that… on top of that, add guarantees as well - at this point Im not aware of any guarantees offered by website hosters so a simple money back guarantee would work splendidly well in theory… also an “obscure” but a very relevant factor to good offers is adding a “reason why” a prospect should buy from you - funnily, the reasons why dont always have to be logical.

    The good thing thats going for you is that you are somewhat “niched” as to not doing any e-commerce. If I were you, I would niche down even further like only offering to build websites for pet companies who are ran by families… it just make you seem more of a specialist (builds trust) and justifies a high price.

    Anyway, hope this gives you some direction since its never easy to provide help in a simple post.