Introduction
If making $100,000 a year is a comfortable living, then making a million is… extremely comfortable.
Getting there isn’t going to come about without a lot of hard work, but more importantly, a plan, some sort of strategy to get there, and today we are going to be looking at exactly that, different strategies and models that we can use to get there as a web designer.
We’re going to look at studios, products, templates, courses, and a couple of other things, and we will be looking at some real life examples, and a lot of calculations.
Everything that I’m going to cover are just ideas. Ideas to get you thinking and to see what ideas you gravitate towards the most.
This isn’t a step by step guide. I’m not making a million dollars, and frankly, I might never get to that point, but I’m thinking about how I might get there all the time to figure out what makes the most sense for me to spend my time on.
“What’s the best way I can leverage my time to spend less time to make more money?” That’s the true question that we should all be asking.
If you’re a tinkerer, an experimenter, someone who’s constantly exploring new ways of doing things, then you should keep thinking about all of these options, the best way to use your time to make money doing what you love.
Anyway, let’s jump in.
Working Hourly as a Web Designer
To start, let’s keep in mind, we’re not talking about making a million in year one, we’re going to look at the models to make a million in a year, but that system is going to take a lot more years to set up. So whatever you decide to do, you’ll want to make sure that you’ll be happy to do it for years on end.
The plan is to find systems that show linear or exponential growth is possible, and if our work is tied to our hours, then finding that growth will be much much harder.
For example let’s say we freelance, we do work for other businesses, and let’s say we only work 40 hours a week. Out of those 40 hours, we’re probably only going to be able to bill out for 30 hours at most. So that’s about 1500 hours that we can bill in a year, and so to get to a million we would have to charge out at $666 an hour. Spooky.
Now you don’t need me to tell you that charging that much per hour is going to get you zero clients unless you’re ultra famous, and even then it’s still pretty unrealistic. But, if we disconnect our hourly rate from the work itself, then things start to look a little more promising.
Charging a Set Monthly Price
By charging not at an hourly rate but with a monthly set price for an unlimited amount of designs, Brett from DesignJoy has managed to scale his one person business to a million.
So if we charge $5,000 a month for unlimited design, that’s $60,000 per client per year, which means we would need just over 16 clients to get to a million.
Now managing 16 clients in a 40 hour work week every week for years on end provides a completely different issue, not to mention that this recurring income is still tied to you having to do the work every day, which means it’s definitely not 4-hour work week friendly, but none of these options are going to work easily, and this is just one option we have.
Growing a Design Studio
The full web design studio model; completely different system, completely different responsibilities. When you build up a full studio with multiple employees, your job is going to shift from doing the work, to managing the work, and depending on the kind of work you love to do, this could be a way that makes sense to scale.
I’m not going to focus too much on the studio model because it’s a massive topic and there are already a bunch of great people who talk about how you can grow a studio like that. Finsweet has a whole podcast about web design studio growth, and John D Saunders shows you how you can create SOPs standard operating procedures for studios.
Charging Value Pricing
Now we are going to look at the Alan Weiss model, who is the author of Million Dollar Consulting. Alan’s model, simplified down, is to charge value pricing for projects, and then outsource if you need to. Value pricing is when you’re charging not for your effort, but for the benefit for the business you’re working with. So if you can show that the work you’re going to do should result in a million dollar difference in the organisation, you could charge $100,000 for that project and both parties win.
For example, let’s say you do website work for Intercom to increase paid account sign-ups on their website. They charge between $59 and $999 per month per account and get 5 millions website views per month. So, if you can improve their website so that they get just 500 more sign-ups a month, just 0.01 percent of traffic, that can result in about a million dollars more in sales.
Not bad at all, but getting these kinds of deals means you have to be very well known, and know how to sell to massive companies, and implies that this company would rather look for outside help rather than do it themselves, which is what they will usually do. So there’s a lot of hurdles to cross with this one.
Building a Tool
Let’s move onto products, starting with digital tools. Now we’re not looking at massive tools, because we can’t build Slack with just one or two people, so we’re going to look at tools that connect into pre-existing tools. and I’m going to work with numbers from tools that I’m familiar with, so keep these numbers in mind when you think of a digital tool that you’re more familiar with.
Relume library is a component library for Webflow that you can get access to for $19 a month, but because of the yearly option let’s call that $18 per user per month. $18 a month * 12 months, which is one user, * 5000 users = over $1,080,000. Only 5,000 users isn’t too bad at all to build an empire of cash. Now for this to be, in my eyes a true million dollar product, you have to do that without funding.
So you’ll have to bootstrap your product from the ground up. And not everyone can get through the process of building a product, but it can take years before it’s ready for launch, and then who knows if people will even pay for it. But if people like your idea, if you actually have a great product, then you can get far past a million.
