30 Business Truths Every Web Designer Needs to Hear
I have taught thousands of website designers how to build successful businesses. My students have done all of those sexy headline things you see in the Facebook ads — six-figure years, booked themselves in a matter of weeks, landed $25k dream projects. They've built incredible websites for clients, and they've generally built businesses that let them prioritise time with family, joy, and flexibility.
And I thought it would be fun to condense down 10 years of experience — 10 years of helping students do exactly that — into one single post. So here we go: 30 business truths, no fluff, all of it things I genuinely believe after a decade in this industry.
Prefer to watch? Catch the full video below, or keep reading.
On platforms, marketing, and finding clients
Truth 1: You can book yourself solid on any website building platform
It really doesn't matter which you pick from a "can I get enough clients" perspective. Every major website building platform — Wix, WordPress, Squarespace, Showit, Shopify — has millions of potential customers. If you're not booking yourself, it is not your platform's fault.
I see this all the time: "If I also offered Squarespace, or also offered Showit, that would solve my client booking problem." It won't. As a designer, you probably want 20 to 30 clients maximum in a year. That is an achievable number on any platform. Adding a second or a third just adds complication — more tech to keep up with, a completely overhauled website, confused marketing messaging — and it doesn't solve the actual problem, which is that you need better marketing, not another platform. Don't believe the lie that if you're not fully booked on one platform, you need to add another. You just need to get better at whatever marketing strategy you're currently doing.
Truth 2: If you hate marketing, it's time to find another strategy
The actual problem with designers not booking themselves is often not that they're bad at marketing — it's that they're doing marketing they absolutely dread. I have seen so many designers who hate social media posting on stories every day as their primary marketing strategy. That is not going to fly if you don't like it. Same for the complete introvert forcing themselves to go to local networking events that make them want to disappear.
If you're not sure what marketing method you could actually tolerate — let alone enjoy — I have a quiz for exactly this. It's called which client-finding method matches your personality type. Give yourself full permission to ditch whatever you're currently doing for marketing and switch to something you'd genuinely enjoy. It makes more difference than you'd think.
Truth 3: You can pick an offering that barely requires any marketing at all
If you've read Truth 2 and you still hate marketing, that's actually okay — because it's possible to choose an offering strategically that minimises how much you need to do.
A few of my past students are developers for other website designers. A designer might have 30 projects in a year and consistently work with the same developer each time. That developer doesn't need to constantly be marketing to individual end clients — they just need one, two, or three designer relationships funnelling them work steadily. Similarly, if you move into something like ongoing SEO services, you book a bunch of clients and they stay with you for months or years. That means far less ongoing marketing effort compared to one-to-one custom website builds where you need a fresh inquiry every few weeks.
Truth 4: A change in offering often requires a change in marketing method
This is the relationship versus mass marketing distinction, and I don't think enough people think about it when they pivot their business.
As a one-to-one service designer doing custom builds, you might fit 20 to 30 projects in a year. If you close one in every four potential clients, that means you only need to have conversations with 80 humans in a year to be fully booked. Eighty people. That's completely achievable with a relationship marketing strategy — individual outreach, referrals, networking — because you're not trying to reach hundreds of thousands of people.
But if you pivot to selling website templates or plugins or code snippets, your price point drops significantly, which means you need volume — lots and lots of buyers. That requires a mass marketing strategy: social media, ads, something that puts your message in front of tens of thousands of people at once. If you're making the switch from one-to-one client services to a more productised or lower-priced offering, you must also change your marketing method. The two are not interchangeable.
On goals, focus, and not letting the shiny objects win
Truth 5: If you're aiming to be "the best," you've handed someone else your finish line
I find a lot of designers — and honestly, business owners in general — are constantly looking at their competition and trying to keep up or get ahead. And the thing I've noticed about that is it's not actually the best way to set goals.
The people who are the most satisfied in their business long-term are the ones who set their goals based on the lifestyle they want and the income they want to make — not based on what someone else is doing. If you decide you want to be the best in the industry, then however far your next competitor goes is how far you need to go, and then further than that. You've given away your freedom by letting them define your finish line. Stay in your own lane. Set your finish line yourself.
Truth 6: You can niche or not niche and still be very successful
This is the thing new designers struggle with most: "Should I niche? Which niche should I pick? I can't pick one so I'll just never start my business." And this is not a good outcome.
I have seen students be hugely successful with a highly specific niche, and someone else be just as successful serving "creative entrepreneurs or business owners" — which, let's be honest, is not really a niche at all. Having a niche will help you grow faster. It gives you clarity on portfolio pieces, marketing locations, who your ideal client is, and where to show up. That specificity and speed is the benefit. But if agonising over which niche to pick is causing you more problems than it's solving, then pick no niche for now and get started. You can always niche later. An imperfect start beats a perfect plan that never launches.
Truth 7: There is no such thing as no time — only not a priority
When someone tells me they don't have time, I think: you have literally not watched Netflix or scrolled TikTok or Instagram for an entire year? You have not spent a single five minutes doing something unproductive?
I fully built my first website while working another job. I've seen people build successful designer businesses while juggling an enormous amount on their plate. They're just deciding this is their number one priority and finding every five-minute break or spare bit of mental space to put towards it.
That said — if the answer genuinely is no, that's also fine. There are different times and seasons in life where different things deserve to be your priority. You cannot have five priorities at once. And sometimes working on one high priority makes all the others easier anyway. Want to be healthier? Having money makes that easier — you can pay for the gym, the personal trainer, the meal prep. So think about which priority, if achieved, cascades into making all the others more achievable. Order your priorities accordingly, and stop beating yourself up for not getting to the things that aren't currently at the top of the list.
Truth 8: These are the most likely ways you'll kill your own business
Most businesses that go down — and I've watched this happen over the years with business friends and people I've known in the industry — are killed by their owners. Not by some external force. Almost always, it's internal.
The five ways I see it happen most:
→ Designing a business model you hate. If you hate dealing with humans, do not start a web design agency. You will have a lot of humans to deal with.
→ Too much pivoting. Constantly new ideas, constantly new offerings. Your audience gets confused about what you actually do, and whether whatever you're currently offering is even right for them.
→ Personal life meltdowns. Deaths, divorces, depression — some sort of significant life event. This is probably the most frequent one I see, and it's not something you can predict. Give yourself grace here, plan an emergency financial cushion, and accept that in those seasons it is okay not to be killing it in business.
→ Overwhelm from complication. When you offer 15 different things, hop on every shiny new object, and pile on more and more offerings until you literally cannot open your laptop and face the to-do list because it all feels like too much.
→ Losing trust or gaining a bad reputation. The internet seems vast, but within any specific industry, it's a remarkably small world. If you start getting a reputation for compromising on integrity, your customers and collaborators hear about it. Short-term gain, long-term damage.
Truth 9: Don't just focus on higher prices — focus on the efficiency of your offerings
Everyone talks about raising prices, raising prices, raising prices. And yes, getting into higher-priced projects is a good goal. But there's another lever people almost never think about: quicker turnaround times and better processes are just as powerful a way to increase your revenue.
If you get so efficient at your work — or you create some kind of productised service, like template restyles — that you can do significantly more projects in a shorter period of time, you can double your revenue without touching your prices at all. Both are methods of making more money. Most people just don't think about the efficiency route anywhere near as much as they think about price raises.
Truth 10: Don't jump on AI tools just because everyone's talking about them
The principle here extends to any new tech, any tool, anything shiny that lands on the internet and suddenly everyone has an opinion about.
Use AI — use tools — to speed up work you're already doing. If a new tool helps you implement the plan you've already decided on, or speeds up what you're currently building towards, brilliant. Use it. If a tool doesn't help with either of those things, you can actually ignore it.
I see designers making themselves make-work projects because they feel like they should be using the new thing that just came out. Sometimes you should — but ask yourself first: does this relate to the plan I already had for the year? Does it help me hit goals I already set? If the answer is no, don't go inventing work for yourself.
Truth 11: Focus like a maniac. Be ruthless in your no's.
It is the fastest way to hit your goals. Offer one thing to one person and scale it. Some of my most successful students do exactly that. You can make six figures, multi-six figures, or a million dollars with literally one offer to one person — and until you've hit a million dollars with that one offer, you really don't need to offer anything else.
Every time you add a new offering, a new niche, a new platform, you're complicating your messaging, complicating your marketing, and making the whole business harder to run. Harder to run tends to mean harder to hit your goals. Fewer things, done really well, consistently.
Truth 12: People have an irrational love of bundles
If it makes sense for your offerings, create some bundles. People love a deal. If you offer website design and copywriting, for example, you can offer each separately and offer the bundle at a slight discount. They go together naturally, and people who want both will almost always choose the bundle. It feels like a win for them. Lean into that.
On shortcuts, decisions, and doing good work
Truth 13: There is no hack to success and no shortcut
A business friend and I were talking about this recently. She said people come to her basically asking for the hack — what's the shortcut to the thing they want? And she's right that there isn't one.
The closest thing to a shortcut is better decision-making — being really thoughtful about what is worth your time and effort and what isn't. That's the actual leverage point. But if you're scouring the internet for the magic trick, I'll be honest with you: it doesn't really bode well for the business. The path to success is doing the right things, putting your time and effort into the right work, and doing good work. That's it.
Truth 14: The best time-saving hack is making better decisions earlier
Say you do get distracted by a shiny object. You add another platform, or 27 new offerings to your business. Then you realise you still can't book yourself or hit your revenue goals. Each one of those detours costs an unbelievable amount of time — learning a new platform, creating new offerings, redoing your marketing message, building a new sales page, trying to grow a new audience. If you'd made a better decision at the start, you could have reached your goals much faster by simply doing the right things.
It is very worth your time to sit and think deeply, strategically, and logically before you make a move. Run your reasoning by people whose decisions you respect. Because one better decision — "actually, I'm going to spend more time on this marketing method and not learn my seventh web design platform" — can get you so much further than a hundred actions taken in the wrong direction.
When I was just starting my business and went full-time, I remember sitting at my laptop thinking, "I don't have a client. What do I actually do with myself?" That was genuinely difficult to figure out with zero business experience. So I put together something to answer exactly that question — it's called the Dream Client Booking Blueprint, and it walks beginner designers through what to actually focus on and work on at the very start.
Truth 15: The most important business decision you make is also a life decision — who you marry
If your partner isn't supportive of your dreams or your business or what you want in life, it will absolutely hold back your business. You are the sum of the five people you spend the most time with, and your partner is the person you spend the most time with. If they are questioning your ability to do this, or holding you back from it, or simply not encouraging you — it is going to be near-on impossible to follow through on your dreams and do the work required, because you will constantly be questioning yourself.
I met Richard Branson on his island, and this came up in conversation before a tennis game we had. He's been happily married for around 40 or 50 years. His wife Joan was there — she is lovely. She is not the type who goes on all his business trips or is present at everything he does. He's very social; she's not as social. But she is very supportive of him doing the things he wants to do and not holding him back from it. You don't need a husband-wife business team. Your partner doesn't need to be involved in your business at all. They just need to be on board with supporting you towards your dreams. That's the bit that matters.
On hiring, business models, and building for the long term
Truth 16: When hiring, you need both a skill fit and an interest fit
Both. Not one or the other — both.
Skill fit means the person is actually good at the thing you need them to do. Someone who is remarkable at customer service might be genuinely awful at designing websites. That's not a character flaw — it's a seat-on-the-bus problem. Maybe there's a different role they'd thrive in.
Interest fit means they actually want to do it. If someone has no interest in marketing on social media and you've hired them to market on social media, you're going to have a problem regardless of their skill level.
Here's the thing I've noticed: if someone doesn't tend to be good from the get-go, they don't tend to get significantly better over time. So if you've realised you made a hiring mistake, it's unfortunately best for everyone involved — including them — to part ways quickly rather than waiting and hoping.
Truth 17: The most important choice you'll make as a business owner is your business model
Agency, solo designer, template shop, SEO agency, consulting — there are so many possible models even within just the designer space. And the thing to understand is that no matter how well you run an agency, you will always have more team, more expenses, and more complexity than if you stayed a solo business owner or sold digital products. That fits for some people beautifully. I have a good family friend who runs a very successful agency and is great at it because it genuinely aligns with who they are. I know with absolute certainty it would be the wrong model for me.
Before you choose your business model, think about what actually brings you joy in a day. How much team do you want — or not want? How much do you like interacting with people? Are you constantly travelling and don't want time zone headaches? What does your ideal daily routine actually look like? And critically — what is the actual work involved in each model? If you love designing but hate marketing, don't choose a scalable mass-marketing model that requires you to spend most of your time marketing and almost none of your time designing. A lot of designer burnout isn't about being bad at design. It's about picking the wrong model for who they are.
Truth 18: Templates are an incredible business model — if you have an audience
If you don't have an audience, build that first. Then build templates.
I say this every time someone asks about it, and I feel strongly about it. Two things need to be true for someone to buy your template: the design needs to be good, and they need to actually find it. You could have the most incredible templates in the world, but if you have a shop on a street with tumbleweeds blowing by — the most incredible store in the world doesn't sell anything if no one walks past.
Spending all your time making perfect templates and none of your time marketing them is exactly that scenario. And marketing templates is a mass-marketing job — you need to get in front of a lot of people. So before you go down the template route, really ask yourself whether you want to spend your time running ads or doing some form of mass marketing. If the answer is no, the template business model might not be the right fit.
Truth 19: You can offer complementary services like copywriting, branding, or CRM setup — or not — and be successful either way
This comes up in our monthly Q&A calls constantly. A client has asked for copywriting — should you learn it and offer it too? My answer is always a question back: would you enjoy doing that? Would it bring you joy to offer it?
If yes, brilliant. If someone says "CRM setup, not my vibe" or "branding — couldn't hate it more," then the answer is a clear no. There are so many potential clients out there, and so many designers and offerings for them to choose from, that you truly get to make this choice for yourself. You are right for one specific ideal client and not right for others, and that's completely fine. As a designer you can only take on 20 to 30 projects a year — so make that choice count. Offer the things you'll do well because you enjoy them.
Truth 20: Stop switching softwares every five minutes
It takes an extraordinary amount of time, and half the time, once you've switched, you realise there's some downside to the new one you didn't have in the old one — and then people switch back. That can be weeks of wasted work hours.
In 10 years in business, I've switched softwares exactly twice. We moved our email marketing from Mailchimp to Kit at the very beginning, and just recently moved our courses hosting from Teachable to ThriveCart. Both times there were genuine, unavoidable reasons. The Teachable switch came when they didn't have the affiliate programme functionality we needed — not just an inconvenience, an actual blocker.
Before you switch: weigh how many hours the annoyance is costing you against how many hours the switch itself will take. Sometimes a slight inefficiency in your current software is actually far cheaper than the cost of migrating everything. And if you do decide to switch, do a thorough test on the new software before you commit — switching and then switching back is the worst possible outcome.
On pricing, money mindset, and financial freedom
Truth 21: Your lowest-priced clients are your most price-sensitive clients
I see this with very beginner designers a lot. They charge $200, $300, $500 for a project, and every single client pushes back at the idea of paying even $50 more. The designer takes this as evidence that they've hit their maximum and can never raise their rates.
But here's what's actually happening: the people buying at $200 to $500 are, by definition, the most price-sensitive people in the market. Of course they're telling you your prices are too high. Meanwhile, there are designers successfully charging $10,000, $20,000, $50,000 for website projects, and those clients do exist and they do pay it.
If everyone is telling you your prices are too high and you're at a fraction of what others are charging, the problem isn't that the market won't pay — it's that you're serving a completely different tier of the market. The fix isn't incremental price increases within that same client pool. It's changing your messaging, your offering, and your marketing so you're no longer speaking to bargain hunters in the first place.
Truth 22: The biggest blocker between you and the price you want to charge is probably your mindset
When you run your own business, there is no boss giving you a 3% raise or a 10% raise. You are the one who decides. And so how you feel about pricing, what your experience of past price rises has been, whether a previous attempt went well or badly — all of that shapes what you're actually willing to charge.
If you want to be charging more, the first place to look is what's happening in your own head. What's the parade of thoughts that shows up when you think about raising your prices? Get honest about them. Write them down if you need to. Are they actually true? Talk to someone about it. Because the ceiling on your prices is usually not the market — it's the limit you've set in your own mind.
Truth 23: The second biggest blocker is probably your design skills
Sometimes people do the mindset work, raise their prices, and then nobody books — and they wonder what went wrong. Could be a marketing problem (not enough leads). But it could also be that your design skills aren't yet at the level that justifies the price point you're aiming for.
There is a real and significant difference in quality between the strategy, the SEO, and the actual design skills of someone building websites for $1,000 versus $20,000. That gap is learnable. Design skills are not something you're either born with or not — they can be developed, studied, and improved. So if that's the honest answer, don't let it be a dead end. Start identifying what needs to improve and working on it. Get feedback. Compare your work to designers at the price point you want to reach. And then make a plan to close the gap.
Truth 24: You will never be financially free if your desires always meet or exceed your income
So many people start a business wanting financial freedom, and then watch themselves make more and more and more — and spend every penny of it. That's not freedom. That's just a more expensive version of the same trap.
There is always someone who has more than you. Always. Unless you're at the very top of the Forbes list, there will always be someone with a bigger house, fancier car, and more exotic holidays. If your sense of self-worth is driving you to constantly want more, you will never reach financial freedom because there will always be something or someone to compare yourself to.
Ramit Sethi talks about this and I completely agree with him: identify what you actually value spending money on, and go spend freely in that area. But be ruthless about cutting the rest. Splurge on the things that genuinely matter to you; be frugal about the things that don't. That is how you reach financial freedom — not by making more, but by getting clear on what you actually want more of.
When I do my annual planning, I start here. I think about what the money is actually for. What lifestyle do I want? What does it cost? Then I work backwards to what the business needs to make. If the answer to "what's your financial goal?" is always "as much as humanly possible," that's a signal to look deeper.
Truth 25: If you can't stop comparing yourself, it's time to start unfollowing people
Get yourself off social media if you need to. I have an entire video about not being on social media for my business — worth watching if you're currently deep in a comparison trap. It is not unusual. Literally everyone who's on social media deals with this issue.
One of the most effective ways to stop making yourself golden handcuffs, or always wanting what someone else has, is simply to stop seeing what someone else has. Radical. But it works.
On investing in yourself and your business
Truth 26: A professional photo shoot is very, very worth the money
Stock photos are fine. A selfie will absolutely do for the very beginning of your business. But good quality photography is worth spending on — especially if you're a designer who appreciates good design, because the quality of your website imagery is inseparable from the quality of your website. You know this because you've dealt with clients who bring you terrible photos and you've thought, "How am I supposed to make this look good?" It's the same for your own website.
Truth 27: Investing in education when starting something new is genuinely worth it
But there's a condition: it has to solve an actual problem you have right now.
If you're sitting down to work on something and you don't even know where to start, or you're reading 27 articles and watching 27 videos and getting contradictory advice from everywhere and the pieces of the puzzle aren't fitting — that is the moment to go find one person whose approach makes logical sense to you, and take some form of education with them. Courses and coaching have been some of the best money I've spent in business and some of the worst. The only difference between them was whether the thing solved a real problem I had at that moment, or whether I bought it because it was on sale and seemed useful vaguely.
Truth 28: But you don't need to re-educate yourself every single year
I made this mistake for a while. Early in my business, I took a lot of courses because I genuinely needed to — I didn't know what I was doing. I kept doing it year after year because it had been so valuable at the start. Then I realised at some point that I actually knew my direction and my game plan. What I needed wasn't more coaching from someone above me — it was more support from someone below me, helping with the execution of work I'd already figured out.
At the beginning of your business, you'll probably spend a lot on education. Later in your business, you'll probably spend a lot more on support. Be really conscious about which one you actually need before you buy.
Truth 29: Read Profit First
That's all I'm going to say about that one. Your bank account will thank you. Find it on Amazon. Read it.
On your audience and who you attract
Truth 30: Your audience and your customers will be a scarily similar reflection of yourself
I was in London a while back and I went to two events in the same day — one from a business friend and one from someone I followed online who I admired. When I walked into the first room, my business friend was a British mum in her 40s. And who filled that room? A bunch of British mums in their 40s, all of roughly the same socioeconomic background, same style, same energy. Then later I went across town to Ali Abdaal's event. Ali is a former doctor turned YouTuber who has an Indian background and heritage. What filled the room? Guys who looked exactly like him. Very well-educated, scientific, medical-looking guys, typically of Indian heritage. Me and the one other blonde girl I sat beside looked at each other like, "Yep, we are not the norm in this room."
You will attract some people who are nothing like you. But your audience and customers end up being a remarkably similar reflection of yourself — your life, your story, your specific circumstances — 99% of the time. I notice it every time I do a student success story call for this channel: I meet the person and think, "I would absolutely get a cocktail with you." We tend to have similar personalities and life stories. Things that seem like they shouldn't matter in business — like the fact that you moved abroad for love, or that you left a specific career, or that you built your first website while working a completely different job — those things are exactly what draws your ideal clients to you.
Share your story in your business. Lean into the specifics. The small, seemingly irrelevant details of who you are are the most powerful marketing you have — because they're attracting people who see themselves in you.
Ten years of lessons in 30 truths — some of them practical, some of them uncomfortable, all of them things I genuinely believe. The next step is deciding which one actually applies to where you are right now, and doing something about it. Pick the one truth that most resonated and make one concrete change this week. That's how these things actually move the needle.
Watch this next — why you're not getting design clients and what actually works:
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- Web designers speak out: what I wish I knew about pricing & packaging my services
- How to charge more as a web designer: a guide to high-value niches
- How to land more web design clients
- Explore 2025 web design trends: pricing, niches, templates, and the impact of Square Secrets Business™
