Before you email
How this goes
Nobody asks this out loud, so here it is written down. This is what actually happens, including the parts that are annoying.
-
You email me and I email you back
Not a form that goes to a queue. It comes to my inbox and I answer it, usually the same day, occasionally the next one if I am in a gym somewhere. Tell me what you make, what the site does now, and what is bugging you about it. Screenshots are fine. A voice memo is fine.
-
We talk once, properly
A call or a visit. I want to know what you sell, who buys it, what the busy season looks like, and what the last person got wrong. There is no discovery phase, no workshop, and no deck ... just one real conversation where I ask a lot of questions about your product.
-
You get a number and a schedule before you pay anything
Written down, in plain language, with what is in it and what is not. If the honest answer is that you do not need a rebuild, I will tell you that, because a site I talked you into is a site you resent in year two.
-
I build it, and you watch it happen
On a staging site you can look at whenever you like. If you are replatforming, your current store stays live and selling the entire time ... nothing I am working on can reach your customers until you say go.
-
We do the unglamorous part
Every old URL mapped to a new one so your search traffic lands somewhere. Tracking wired up and tested with a real order. Your team shown how to change the things they will want to change. This is the part that gets skipped by people who are cheaper than me, and it is the part you feel eighteen months later.
-
It launches, and then I am still here
That is the whole pitch, really. The seasonal update, the new product line, the thing that broke on a Sunday ... you call the person who built it. Some of these sites I have been looking after for over a decade.
The other way to pay for this
Most of these are a normal project fee, quoted up front. But if you sell online and the site basically is the business, there is a version where I take a percentage of what it makes instead of a cheque before it makes anything. I would rather get paid when it works.
- Three percent of net sales
- Until the store has done $200,000 since we started. After that it drops to one and a half percent and stays there for good. Net, not gross ... refunds and shipping come out first.
- Three hours of updates a month, included
- Not banked, not rolled over, just there when you need them. Past that it is $150 an hour, and I tell you before I spend it, not after.
- Invoiced monthly, net 30
- Straight off your own Shopify sales report, so you can check my math any month. People do, and they should.
- A floor, so it stays fair to you
- If the store does under $75,000 in a year, either of us can walk away. A percentage of a business that is not selling is not a partnership, it is a subscription.
- A way out
- You can end the arrangement whenever you like by paying twice what you paid me in revenue share over the previous twelve months. No lawyers, no argument about it.
The whole point: if the site does not make you money, I do not make money. It is the only arrangement I know of where the person who built the thing has a real reason to still care about it in year three.
What I will need from you
- Somebody who can make a decision. One person, not a committee ... this is the single biggest difference between a project that takes two months and one that takes eight.
- Your product information, in whatever state it is in. A messy spreadsheet is fine. I have imported worse.
- Photography, or a conversation about me making it. Bad product photos will undo a good site faster than anything else on this list.
- Answers within a few days when I ask something. Most delays are not build time, they are waiting time.
When I am not the right call
- You need it in two weeks. I am one person with a calendar, and I would rather say no than do it badly.
- You want the cheapest possible option. There are places for that and they are honestly fine for some businesses.
- You want a marketing department. I build and run websites and the things around them ... I am not going to run your paid social.
- You want a big agency with a team and a process and a slide deck. That is a real thing that some companies genuinely need. It is not this.