I struggle mightily when talking to people who have optimize their freelancing practice to expose them to e.g. locally run coffee shops, cranking out $250 or $500 websites. This is a poor business decision relative to serving firms who can comfortably budget professional labor.
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"But what about the local cafe?" I am in favor of the local cafe! Spend your money there! Even teach a pro bonus Get Started With Shopify Or Whatever office hours weekly, underwritten by being a successful local business owner yourself.
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An extremely common failure mode is running a business as a charity. This is self-evidently a bad business; it's also a bad charity. (If you were to rank order all people in the world in need of charitable help, where would local business owners in America be on that list?)
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"But I don't live in the big city." Yes, but you live on a big Internet, connected to all the big cities, and the viability of consulting remotely was fine in 2010 when I was doing it and has only increased since then.
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These days the work is less building custom sites and more like gluing together all of the various pieces. Shopify or WordPress + Facebook Ads + MailChimp + SEO + writing copy.
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You might say that the businesses should be able to do this themselves since the tools make it so easy now. But that’s like saying they should have written HTML themselves, since it’s so much easier than FORTRAN. Also, visitors’ expectations of keep going up too.
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My first customers in college were local businesses who paid me $400-1500 for a website Without them I would not have been able to build up the business owner skills or portfolio that led to my business having Fortune 500 customers later on A starting point but don’t stay there
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Absolutely. Without those small projects at a few hundred apiece I absolutely definitely would not have gotten my start in tech. I wouldn't have learned those valuable skills. I couldn't put my kids through college on that but I would want that same opportunity for others.
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Sounds like an opportunity for Shopify / site builder arbitrage
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Most just have the social sites (IG, Yelp, Goog local) as pages bc the ROI is so much higher than trying to run a ‘real’ site which defacto monetizes through SEO. Sidebar: checkout the weird r/wewantplates subreddit which is just IG bait from local cafes and restaurants
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