I need someone to build my website. My budget is $200 and I need it ASAP.

How many times have you been asked this by friends, colleagues, and referrals. The person generally continues to say...

"I really don't need anything too advanced. Just a simple ecommerce/wiki/forum/community website. With a blog. It shouldn't take you more than a few hours. I actually could even do it myself no problem, but its just not worth my time. You know, I used to be the #1 COBOL programmer in the 70s."

At this point, I sarcastically interrupt "Would you like me to program your website in COBOL so you can maintain it?" They never get the satire...

"Oh, and really important. I like this website (shows random crappy website) that my friend has. Can you make it like this? You know, but different? We're ready to launch, all we need is the website, and we need it done ASAP. If you say its going to take 8 hours, I expect that you could get it done by tomorrow."

I usually respond to this with "Sure thing, if you pay in full now, I'll have it ready tomorrow morning." I'm never serious, but no one ever pulls out their checkbook either. Usually this ends the conversation, as if the website were so trivial, it doesn't warrant compensation.

My Analysis:

This happens to me almost weekly. I never accept these jobs obviously, but I find the apparent, almost desperate, need fascinating. Despite the plethora of "do-it-yourself" website builders (weebly, SquareSpace, Clover, heck even WordPress.com) these "small business" minded people aren't having their needs met. In fact, they are generally so technology inept (despite their COBOL tenure) that they wouldn't be able to navigate the "3 easy steps of building a website" on any hosted CMS if their lives depending on it.

I think this is where the hosted CMS market is failing. These companies are trying to make a CMS so easy, it's like making a Facebook fan page. The problem is, these small business people can't even make those! They usually hire a student to do that as well. What they really need is someone to hold their hand through the entire process. They demand the service of a $10k+ project budget with a top design firm, but have a $200 "I can do it myself if I wanted to" budget.

If someone could figure this out, they'd be siphoning up a billion dollar market easily. I don't think technology is the sole answer. I think it's a combination of extremely lean business processes with technology. Get cheap labor to do the hand holding while using the 3rd party CMS solutions. The small business wants to send an email describing what they want the homepage to say. They don't want to use a website builder to edit text. They don't want to do anything but talk to someone. The cheap labor can do the transition, and margins can be high.

I'd REALLY love to hear your thoughts on this. I never leave a problem as big as this just complaining. I always race to come up with a solution, and this one is a toughy.

The margins are just too low on these, hell a decent copy writer is going to cost you half of that if not more. If it needs to have a polished look add a graphics person to that. And that's just to get all of the creative done. I just don't see how on the thin margin of $200 to $500 it can be done. Even with offshore labor the onshore management would eat it up to the point that it would not have a value proposition worth perusing. With canned text, stock images, and a stock template, sure it could be done. But these people never look for a just add water site. They want the "make it like x" twitter, Facebook whoever they want to knock off that week.

I have a friend who owns a vending operation and I promised to sit down with him and show him how to design his own site with GoDaddy's tools and how to use Ad Words to market his service online. He was actually surprised at how easy it was to do. Now he wont win any design awards but for his market something that disseminates some simple info is all he needs. $200 is really a DIY budget and that is all I could really see that someone could do to service this market. It took me 3hr to teach him how to handle it himself. And if someone where instructing people how to do it themselves with these simple site builders they could make a decent freelancing salary. I just don't see a product here that could do better than the existing watered down site builders. Without professional a copywriter and graphic design you will get the same results, offshoring copywriting seems like a bad idea and offshoring graphics requires some management oversight. Until these can be automated I dont see the margins.

The reality is $200 barely covers 2hrs labor for a good mechanic. Developers require a lot more knowledge and skills than mechanics. For some reason people get the idea that this should not be the case but $200 for professional services set's up unrealistic expectations.

In my opinion, SquareSpace (and others) is missing the boat by not having a white-label system for web developers to resell their services invisibly.

People pay web devs because they don't want to take the TIME to learn it and do it themselves.

The reason people offer $200 is because they really want to pay someone for 8 hours of work for $200, it has NOTHING to do with web design.

If you are starting a candy store, that's the business you are in. Candy. They don't want to be web developers. At the same time, they don't have much money.

A hired hand who can do the work, manage the content, setup the design, but still use the easy tools available would be perfect. Then we COULD charge $200, be done in a few hours, and have happy clients.

Most people won't care what you use to create their site as long as you get it done and it was affordable.

I like this white-label idea... It's essentially what most web designers do now for static websites, just using a 3rd party system. I'd bet money that most of the sites using SquareSpace, etc. have been sold BY the web designer. If you win over the hearts of the web designers, then you'll win the clients...

I am either giving up a huge secret or revealing how little I actually value my time...

You guys are giving up a huge opportunity.

It is easy to make a thousand or more per week from these types of jobs. A thousand isn't a lot, but it is easily done in a few hours.

If they are paying commodity prices, then you give them a commodity.

The key? Boiler - Plate. Have a standard contract. Have a standard website theme, perhaps with multiple skins. Make it easy for them to enter their own content. You can build a decent CMS in a few hours or a great CMS in 10-15 (for clients like this that don't need extensibility). Amortize it over the 5-10 websites you're selling each week and you're time costs go down drastically.

I stumbled onto this strategy accidentally.

I had nothing else to do for a few hours.

My BATNA was earn $0/hour. I wasn't going to let my pride get in the way of easy money.

So I took a small "build me a website" job. Knowing they had small requirements, it was easily done in a few hours. I kept getting more requests, I kept sending out virtually the same website, over and over. I was getting them onto the host I use also and making an additional $50-$100 for each client as well.

Eventually it was only a matter of explaining how hosting works and how to add new pages and content. After the 30-45 minute explanation, it was coming out to move like $400/hour rather than $200 for a website.

Big Tip: Record your phone calls and meetings when you're explaining how hosting works and how to work your CMS. Go over what you said each time and work to actively improve it. Take 30 minutes, record screen capture videos with voice over. Give these to the client when you give them the minor training required.