A $25,000 Website Sold on Revenue

I was putting together a new offer around conversion, cloud and automation work in 2021. Websites were familiar ground: I got nasty good at full corporate sites on Wix back in 2015 and 2016, I've developed dozens of sites since, and I've helped scale more than half a dozen of them past a million dollars.

The owner needed more than a website. He needed someone to build the site and set the business direction around it: what it was for, and how it would monetize. Plenty of development companies could build him pages, and many were far more qualified to do it than I was.

I sold the architecture with the build. First, how the site would make money and what it had to do for the business. Then the pages that served that plan. To price and scope it, I taught myself the fundamentals of web development as I went. I needed to know what was possible so I could sell it appropriately, and a hired developer did the build.

• Business architecture and monetization plan
• Self-taught web fundamentals, for scoping and pricing
• Custom build by a hired developer

A $25,000 deal, and a fast site built around the plan. He chose us over much more qualified development companies because the plan came with the pages.

The deal set my price anchor for site work after it. A couple of months later I was quoting other sites against that $25,000.

An owner with a revenue problem who asks for a website is shopping for a plan with a site attached. Price it as the plan, and know enough about the build to promise only what can be built.