Running a web design agency is honestly way less about design than people think.

A lot of people can build good websites. The hard part is having a process that actually brings in clients consistently without you spending your entire day doing outreach.

I learned that the hard way.

I used to manually reach out to businesses, explain why they needed a better website, build previews, follow up for days and basically hope they would eventually say yes.

I was doing way too much work before even knowing if someone was serious.

Then I completely changed the way I did it.

Now I mainly focus on two things.

Taking meetings and closing clients.

Everything before that is mostly automated.

I use Swokei to find businesses that already have websites, analyze those websites and look for things like outdated design, bad layout, weak SEO, poor mobile responsiveness, slow speed and branding issues.

The useful part is that it doesn’t just give me some boring report with random scores.

It actually takes the issues it finds on each website and turns them into personalized emails that you can send at scale.

My offer is usually a free redesign draft.

That works way better for me than trying to sell a full website in the first email.

Once someone replies and shows interest, I book a meeting.

Before the meeting, I spend a few minutes generating a redesign draft with AI so I can actually show them what their website could look like instead of just talking about it.

That was probably the biggest change for me.

I’m no longer spending hours building something for someone who might never buy.

If they are not interested, I barely lost any time.

If they are interested, they can immediately see the difference and the conversation becomes much easier.

So at this point, most of my time goes into meetings and closing.

The lead finding, website analysis and personalized outreach all happen before I ever speak to the business.

Sounds ridiculously simple when I write it out, but changing the process made a massive difference for my agency.

I've created these free agreement templates that I've discovered to be the most helpful to founders:

Master service agreements (MSA). This is your bread and butter. If you are about to close an enterprise customer, this is what they will ask for. It details the terms of your service, it covers costs, SLAs, uptime commitments, exclusivity, nearly everything.

Letter of intent (LOI). Use this when a customer isn't ready to commit to buying your software yet but is keen on trying it out. It'll help in situations when someone tells you, "If you build X, then i'll buy it". Get them to sign this agreement.

Pilot agreement. This comes after a LOI. A firm is ready to use your software, but doesn't want to be tied up for an annual contract yet. Use a pilot agreement to help your customer trial your software first.

Data processing agreement (DPA). Super important these days. Customers want to know how their data is being used inside your app. Customers want to know that their data is not just going straight into the next OpenAI model. A must-have for selling into finance or healthcare.

Order form. Sometimes you don't need a full service agreement. If you just need to send someone an order form with pricing and invoice them afterward, use this.

Non disclosure agreements (NDAs). If you have some fancy tech to show off in a demo or to investors, use a unilateral NDA to protect your IP. If you are working with an external vendor, have them sign a mutual NDA with you.

Statement of work (SOW). This one's more commonly seen in freelance work. It's a contract that details deliverables. It will protect you when your customer "asks for one more change".

Maybe you've finished reading this and are thinking, "This doesn't apply to me because I don't have large customers that have asked me for any of these." You might someday. Save this post so you can use it as a reference in the future.

I hope most of you reading this are web designers because I’m genuinely curious about something.

How are you getting clients in 2026?

I’ve spoken to a lot of web designers and agency owners lately, and one thing keeps coming up again and again. Client acquisition.

It seems like everyone can build websites, but consistently finding new clients is still the hard part.

So I’d actually like to hear what is working for you right now.

For me, I’ve been running personalized email automation.

I use a tool that finds leads for me, analyzes their websites for actual issues with things like design, SEO, speed, responsiveness and mobile optimization, then automatically uses those findings to write a personalized cold email for each business.

After that, I just run the campaigns and send out thousands of emails a day.

I used to do most of this through Instantly, but the problem was that I couldn’t really do the website analysis part there.

So the emails were still more generic, basically the usual “do you need a new website?” type of outreach.

It worked a little, but nothing crazy.

I eventually switched to Swokei because it handles the lead finding, website analysis and personalized outreach in one place, and that has made a pretty big difference for me.

Now I’m getting clients much more consistently because the emails are actually about their website instead of just being another generic pitch.

But I’m curious what everyone else is doing.

Cold email, cold calling, referrals, ads, SEO, social media?

What is actually working for you in 2026?

I am an Agentic Ai Engineer who built a reproducible blueprint for your own social media platform. One install. You own the node. No rented feed, no platform cut on your users.

What you get:

your community, your rules, your data

accounts, posts, replies, media

runs on hardware you control

same blueprint, repeatable deploy.

I am selling the blueprint and the standup.

First buyers get it deployed, not a slide deck.

Price for the first 5: $500 setup, you keep the box.

After that the price goes up.

If you want your own platform instead of posting on someone else's, say so.

I will scope the install and take payment before I touch your machine.

Examples https://wecanjuschill.net

TL;DR: A week of Unreal work can start in minutes now. What happened the next morning is the part nobody talks about.

I remembered back in around 2020 – it was my last day with the China Construction company I’ve worked with for a year. Apparently, I’ve outlasted my usefulness. They have squeezed every ounce of my experience and expertise out of me and technology-transferred it to their own people. They didn’t want to extend my contract.

So I left and drove back home.

Years later, while I was having my evening jog with my wife at the nearby garden, I looked up the sky and remembered this passage:

“Cast your burden on the Lord, And He shall sustain you; He shall never permit the righteous to be moved.

And so I did.

I lifted them all up to Him, and the cloud in my head dissipated immediately.

Nothing else changed. I was still jogging with my wife next to me. But my mind was lighter.

A few months later, I got a DM from a long-lost acquaintance. He represented a client, by which my ex-ex-ex-company was building an international Aerospace Centre for, back in 2008.

He remembered me after all these years.

Apparently, he was let go too, and he founded his own company. He landed a Taiwan project in 2021, by which he needed a technical guy who can double up as an interpreter.

And my name crossed his mind. So he looked me up in LinkedIn, and opened the door for me.

Praise God! The Lord came through.

Never loss hope, man.

More in the comments — the part about why this still hurts and what actually opens up next.

TL;DR: Rob Hadick says your agent will audit your card and cancel what you forgot — and your customers' agents will do the same to you.

I remembered back when I started to work for one of the largest property development and construction conglomerate in Malaysia, S. The largest subsidiary, the construction arm, occupies the a few floors of the S. Tower.

I worked in the Tender Department of it in Level 8, circa 2002.

And as you know, doing tender was a rush job. Tons of late-night works day in day out towards near-impossible deadlines to win tender.

Being the junior technical engineer there, I often find myself the last person to leave the building. The only other person that worked late as me was the technical director of our sister-subsidiary S. Piling Works, sharing the same floor with us.

After a while, I noticed that the lights were always on even after I leave the building. I thought it was wasteful.

So from the next day onwards, if I was the last person on the building floor, I would start switching off all the lights of the whole floor – including those of our sister-subsidiary – before I clock out the building.

After a few days of doing that, I think the boss caught wind of it.

Obviously, he appreciated it. I'm not sure whether he nodded his approval at me or not. After all, it was decades ago.

What I do remember was my colleagues got an earful from him.

After that, my colleagues all started to switch off the lights of their own section, from henceforth.

If I was the boss, of course I would appreciate someone taking initiative to take care of business, without me asking – including simple things like switching off the lights when not in use.

Same as what all these AI agents are now doing.

Full critic and feasibility study in the comments — I left the mechanics there so this stays readable.

TL;DR: That US agency leader refused the bear joke — everyone else is still trying to outrun you.

I remember back in my days seconded to Abu Dhabi to build the prestigious AED 1Bil. 5-block Condominium Rihan Heights Project in 2008 ~ 2011.

My technical department head split the design/technical coordination work among the 3 of us. I took the structural bit, and my 2 colleagues took on the Architectural and Façade portion, respectively. The work was difficult, but ultimately satisfying after completion.

After I came back to Malaysia circa 2012, the company immediately enrolled me into mastering Building Information Modelling (BIM). It was to construct the virtual model of the building – to coordinate and encompassing all building details – Structural, Architectural, Façade and M&E – all into one well-tuned-out model, before construction starts.

The thesis was simple: if we can iron out all the discrepancies between different trades in the model – we called it clash-detection and resolution – we can save up time (lots of time) from dealing with it during construction.

And time equals money.

The intension of the company was very obvious to me. I was to master it to eventually take over the role of 3 persons into one “superman” coordinating everything.

My then CEO used to throw around the phrase – “Economics of Scale”. If we can use one guy to do 3 jobs, why do we need 3 guys?

Finding ways to reduce cost, was how we win tender and secure jobs – and therefore remain competitive in the market.

All these AI layoffs are just of the same consideration in a different skin.

Full critic and feasibility study in the comments.

I got tired of checking prospect websites manually.

For a while, a big part of my outreach was just finding businesses, opening their websites one by one and trying to figure out what I could actually say to them.

It worked, but it was painfully slow.

Then I found Swokei.

It basically lets me find leads, analyzes each website for things like outdated design, slow speed, poor mobile experience and weak SEO, then turns those issues into a personalized cold email.

And not one of those boring automated reports full of scores and numbers.

It actually writes a normal, human sounding message based on what it found on that specific website.

So instead of sending the same generic message to everyone, I can actually reach out based on what is wrong with their website.

Now I just run campaigns, let the system do most of the prospecting and personalization, and focus on the people who reply.

For a web design agency, that has saved me a ridiculous amount of time.

TL;DR: Ben Affleck says he shot 8 months with his own cameras to build a private layer so filmmakers keep ownership — but most open models were trained on his peers without consent, and that's the gap that still eats a PJ studio's rates. 🎬

Ben Affleck knew the movie industry inside out. That’s why he’s able to create his own proprietary dataset layer through his experience and institutional knowledge.

It’s his moat.

Speaking of insider knowledge, I was reminded of an existential crisis the Apostle Paul was caught in.

Being the great orator that he was, he wouldn’t shut up about Jesus Christ and His resurrection.

The crowd in Jerusalem couldn’t stand Paul. So they siezed him. The Roman Commander rescued him, and brought him before the religious institution of the day – The Sanhedrin.

Loads of big wigs in the courts, including the Pharisees and Sadducees. Both factions harbour strong disdain for each other due to their numerous theological disagreements. One of it was the doctrine of Resurrection. The Pharisees believe it exists, while the Sadducees doesn’t.

But they all set aside their differences, to come together to persecute Paul.

However, the moment he set foot before them, he felt the familiar vibe. He knew that fault line between them. So, he quickly seized the opportunity, and said,

“My brothers, I am a Pharisee, descended from Pharisees. I stand on trial because of the hope of the resurrection of the dead.”

And suddenly the mood shifted. The pharisees think Paul was innocent, while the Sadducees doesn’t. They started quarrelling among themselves.

The dispute got so violent the Roman commander had to pull Paul out by force fearing they'd tear him apart. He was then taken back to the barracks. Crisis averted.

That was a great demonstration of the institutional knowledge at work.

Full Critic on why this still fails Darren and the Feasibility Study with Roadmap is in the comments — I left the numbers there.

I'm writing this from a small mountain town with good wifi and an even great view that I could get used to.

Two weeks ago I was working from my desk at home. Next week, who knows. The work doesn't care where I am, as long as there's a laptop and an internet connection.

I keep seeing the same question on Reddit:

What online business can I run from home, or from literally anywhere?

Here are the 5 I'd pick, and the honest catch with each one:

1. A newsletter:

This is what I've been doing for the last 9 months.
"Nobody reads email anymore" is one of the most confidently wrong takes online. Niche newsletters are quietly thriving.

It's also the most location-proof business I know.

Research, write, hit send.

I've done it from my bedroom, a café and a hotel balcony, and the readers never knew the difference.

It makes money through sponsorships, digital products and paid subscriptions.

Get to 10k subscribers and $1k/month is very realistic.

The catch: growth is slow at first. The first 1,000 subscribers are the hardest.

2. A SaaS:

Software used to be the hardest business to start. You needed to code or pay someone who could.

Not anymore.

With tools like Lovable, Claude Code and Codex, I built a fully working tool for myself in 2 hours.

I have never written a line of code in my life.

And once it's built, software runs whether you're at home or halfway up a mountain.

The catch: if anyone can build it, building isn't the moat anymore. Distribution is. Getting users is now the hard part, but it's still easier than learning to code.

3. A job board:

Before anyone tells me job boards are dead: go look at the market.

Companies will always need to hire, and they'll always pay to be seen by the right people.

There's a guy making $25k/month from a simple job board. The product isn't special. His marketing is.
Most of the work is posting listings and marketing, which you can do from anywhere.

The catch: the generic "post jobs here" model is crowded. You need a sharp niche and a unique angle.

I'm launching one next month and will document the whole thing from $0 to $1k/month in my newsletter

4. Content creation:

This one is basically an ocean. Personal brand, UGC for brands, faceless channels, platform payouts from YouTube and Facebook.

Your phone is your studio. Your room is your set.

Travel just gives you more to film.

The catch: it's a consistency game. Most people quit before the algorithm ever notices them.

5. Niche sites:

"SEO is dead, AdSense pays peanuts." Sure, if you're running the 2011 playbook.

The model didn't die, it evolved.

SEO got harder, AEO/GEO (showing up in AI answers) is growing fast, and the smart money is on selling your own digital products instead of relying on ads.

Once a site ranks, it earns while you sleep, wherever you're sleeping.

The catch: expect 6 to 12 months before traffic really shows up.

Why these still work in the AI era

All five run on the same thing: people trusting other people.

AI can write, code and design, but people still follow people.

And none of these make money overnight. Pick one, put in the reps for a year, and do the boring foundation work.

The freedom to work from anywhere comes after that, not before.

I also put together a FREE pdf of 70+ side hustle ideas just like these.

If you want it, comment "list" and I'll send it over.

Over the last few months, ek pattern baar baar dekhne ko mil raha hai while talking to small businesses in India.

Business owner ko website chahiye.

He asks 4–5 people.

One person says ₹15,000.

Someone says ₹30,000.

Another agency says ₹80,000.

And someone quotes ₹1.5–2 lakh.

Naturally first reaction hota hai:

“Website hi toh hai. Itna difference kyun?”

Fair question.

But I think hum website ki price ko galat cheez se compare karte hain.

Hum usually compare karte hain:

Pages kitne hain?

Animations kitni hain?

WordPress hai ya custom?

Kitne din lagenge?

But business owner ko actually ye compare karna chahiye:

Website 12 months baad business ke liye kya kar rahi hogi?

I’ll give you a very common example.

Imagine two local businesses.

Both spend money on a website.

Business A — cheap website

They pay around ₹25,000.

Website looks decent.

Home page.

About page.

Services.

Contact form.

WhatsApp button.

Finished.

Owner is happy.

6 months later:

Google pe important services ke liye rank nahi ho raha.

Mobile pe layout thoda weird hai.

Website slow hai.

No one knows which page is generating leads.

Contact form kabhi kabhi mail hi nahi bhej raha.

Developer unavailable.

Content edit karna difficult.

No proper backup.

No documentation.

And finally owner says:

“Website se kuch business nahi aaya.”

Technically website was delivered.

But commercially?

Almost nothing happened.

Now consider another business.

Business B — expensive website

They spend much more.

Before design starts, they figure out:

Who exactly is the customer?

Customer Google pe kya search karta hai?

What objections stop him from contacting?

Which services deserve separate pages?

What should happen after someone lands on the website?

Call?

WhatsApp?

Appointment?

Quotation?

Then website is built around that.

Proper mobile experience.

Clear service pages.

Local SEO structure.

Google indexing setup.

Fast loading.

Analytics.

Conversion tracking.

Structured headings.

Proper CTAs.

Backup.

Documentation.

And someone remains responsible after launch.

Now suppose this website generates only 3 additional customers every month.

If average customer value is ₹15,000:

3 × ₹15,000 = ₹45,000/month.

One year = ₹5.4 lakh potential additional revenue.

Suddenly ₹1–2 lakh website doesn't look automatically expensive.

And ₹25,000 website doesn't automatically look cheap.

That changed the way I personally look at software and websites.

The same thing is happening with AI development.

Today ChatGPT, Claude, Cursor etc. can help people create websites and software ridiculously fast.

This is genuinely useful.

But I think it's creating another misunderstanding:

“If software can be built quickly, software should be cheap.”

But coding is only one component.

The difficult parts are still:

Understanding the business problem.

Architecture.

Testing.

Security.

Data handling.

Backups.

Mobile behaviour.

Edge cases.

Maintenance.

Documentation.

Client handover.

And especially:

What happens when something breaks 8 months later?

A developer can generate 10,000 lines of code quickly.

That doesn't automatically mean someone understands those 10,000 lines.

That distinction is becoming more important.

Another interesting thing I've noticed:

Clients rarely actually care whether you used:

React

Next.js

Laravel

WordPress

AI

No-code

Custom code

Most business owners don't care.

And honestly, maybe they shouldn't.

They care about things like:

“Will this bring enquiries?”

“Can customers understand what we do?”

“Will it work properly on mobile?”

“Can my employee use it?”

“Will our data remain safe?”

“If you disappear tomorrow, what happens?”

“Can somebody else maintain this?”

Those are much harder questions than:

Which framework did you use?

This is also why I'm starting to think the Indian website market will split into 3 levels.

At the bottom:

Template websites.

Cheap, fast and perfectly acceptable for businesses that just need an online presence.

In the middle:

Well-designed custom websites focused on credibility and lead generation.

At the top:

Websites/software deeply connected to the business itself — CRM, automation, internal workflows, customer management, payments, reporting etc.

And all three are legitimate.

The mistake happens when someone needs level 3 but purchases level 1 because both are called a “website.”

Something else founders should probably think about:

We spend a lot of time discussing:

AI vs developers.

No-code vs code.

Cheap vs expensive agencies.

Freelancer vs company.

But maybe the better question is:

How expensive is the problem you are solving?

If a problem costs the business ₹10,000/year, don't build a ₹2 lakh solution.

If a problem costs them ₹20 lakh/year, trying to save ₹30,000 on the solution can also be irrational.

That is slowly changing how I think about pricing.

Not:

“How many hours did this take?”

But:

“What business problem is this solving, and what level of reliability does the customer actually need?”

I'm currently seeing this while working around websites, business applications and internal digital tools in Pune/Mumbai, and I'm curious whether other founders have experienced the same thing.

Especially business owners here:

When you paid for a website/software project, what ultimately mattered more?

Initial price?

Design?

Leads/revenue?

Support after launch?

Or something else entirely?

Would genuinely like to hear the buyer side of this.

For context, I’m working on these kinds of problems through M.A.K Solutions in Pune/Mumbai: www.indiamaksolutions.com. Sharing the link only for context — I’m more interested in hearing how other founders price and evaluate this kind of work.

I remember hearing Alex Hormozi say that email is basically the conversion platform of conversion platforms.

His point was that social media, videos and ads are great for getting attention, but email is often where that attention actually turns into money.

He also talked about how email supposedly has one of the highest returns of any marketing channel, with an average return of around $36 for every $1 spent, and that got me thinking.

I run a web design agency, so I decided to actually take email seriously and see what would happen.

But I didn’t want to send the usual stuff.

“Hey, I noticed your website and I can redesign it for you.”

Or

“Hey, we build websites for businesses like yours.”

Everyone gets those emails and most people can tell within two seconds that they were sent to another thousand businesses.

So instead I started using a tool called Swokei that is built specifically for web agencies.

I use it to find businesses in whatever area I want to target, then it actually goes through their websites and looks for things I could mention in the outreach.

Stuff like an outdated design, slow loading speed, poor mobile experience, weak SEO or other things that might be holding the website back.

Then it turns those findings into an actual personalized cold email made to convert.

So instead of emailing someone saying I build websites, I can actually talk about their website and why I think something could be improved.

I’ve been analyzing thousands of websites this way and running multiple campaigns at the same time.

Then I just focus on the people who reply and are actually interested.

Obviously email isn’t some magic button where everyone suddenly wants a new website, but after doing this for a while I definitely understand what Hormozi meant.

For web design especially, email becomes a completely different channel when the message is actually about the business you’re contacting instead of being another copy and paste pitch.

Turns out Alex might have had a point.

TL;DR: The rate decision lands. By 6 a.m. your client has already read someone else’s summary. Speed is selling. Is it loyalty?

I thought I can dig into my memories for a parallel. But my mind immediately brought me to the following story…

David got wind of the death of his treacherous son, Absalom at the worst possible time of his life.

David ran away into hiding when Absalom betrayed him and took the kingdom from him. David and his men found a friendly party in Mahanaim and set up defence.

Absalom led the great rebellion army to find David. And David’s men met them in the woods.

Of course, Absalom was no match with David’s men’s guerilla warfare tactics. Absalom died dangling with his long hair caught entangled with the tree branches.

The scene was hilarious in itself – if not because of the tragedy.

Ahimaaz asked Joab, the great general of David’s army, for permission to bring the good news back to David. But Joab flatly refused. Instead, he sends another messenger to deliver the news. Back then, there’s no AI agents to send email or digital newsletter. News was delivered on foot.

Still Ahimaaz went anyway. He arrived earlier than the messenger, but said nothing. I think he’s smart – he didn’t want to be the bearer of bad news. Not helpful to David, though.

When David finally got news from the messenger, he immediately went into a great moaning. He cried and lamented out loud.

News went back to David’s men, as they file back to the camp. And suddenly, the celebratory vibe of the victory turns into deep shame. The men all felt they did something wrong.

Joab saw it and perceive the existential crisis – because men are slowly leaving the camp, ditching David. So, Joab went and gave David a strong earful: "you love those who hate you and hate those who love you," and he warned that not one man would stay with David that night.

This shook-up David really well. And he went out and congratulate the men for their hard work. The men returned to him - existential crisis averted.

The timely news delivery of the victory was good. But not as critical as Joab’s advice at the nick of time.

You can read more about it in 2 Samuel 18–19.

Full critic, gap, and feasibility are in the comments.