From $500 to $6K: One Web Designer's Upwork Strategy (and the Referral Line That Changed Everything)
Shannon was charging $500 for websites. Then she added one sentence to an email — and everything changed.
Shannon is a past Square Secrets Business student and the founder of Luminary Studio. She's been building websites since 2017, ran the business part-time for years while living in Honduras, and in 2023 made the decision to go all in. Today she's consistently booking $5,500–$6,000 projects on Upwork — a platform most designers write off as low-budget territory — and her entire 2025 has been filled through referrals. From a single line in an offboarding email.
In this interview we cover the Upwork strategy she's refined over a decade, the tiered package structure that quietly builds its own funnel, the mindset around pricing that helped her stop negotiating against herself, and the investment decisions that took her from a one-page website with stock images to a fully launched, fully booked business. There is so much in here that is quietly, practically useful. Stay until the end.
Prefer to watch? Catch the full interview below, or keep reading.
From answering phones to "yeah, I can do that" — how it started
Shannon wasn't looking to become a web designer. She was working a job in New Jersey, hired basically to answer phones — which, as she puts it, did not suit her at all. Her employer gave her free rein to look through company files and get familiar with the business. She landed on their website and said, "Hey, should we redo your website?" They'd had quotes before and never committed to anyone. Shannon said she could do it.
She had never built a website in her life.
She'd recently heard of Squarespace because she had a nonprofit and someone had mentioned it as a place to build a site — but she hadn't even started on it yet. Still, she told her employer yes. They were paying her anyway. She built the site while answering phones.
From there, she went looking for tutorials, found Paige's content, attended a webinar, and — despite the fact that the $100 early-bird discount expired before she pulled the trigger — signed up for Square Secrets Business. She binged it on a plane. Then she started doing websites locally for free: a CrossFit gym, friends of the family. Getting the reps in.
The messy action phase, as she calls it.
Moving to Honduras, going remote, and the "recovering perfectionist" approach
Shannon's husband is Honduran, so when they moved to Honduras, she needed something she could do remotely. Web design fit. She'd already started the journey, already enjoyed it, and could see the potential — but for years she treated it as a part-time thing alongside other businesses she was running.
What she learned early about getting started: done beats perfect, every time.
Her first proper website for herself was a one-pager with stock images — she didn't even want her own face on it. One small square photo, somewhere down the page, taken on her travels. No proper portfolio section because she hadn't made the mockup graphics yet. A "coming soon" section for logo packages she didn't even offer. She calls herself a recovering perfectionist: she knows the pull toward making everything absolutely right before launching, and she knows exactly what that perfectionism costs you.
Taking messy action and building from something — rather than waiting until it's perfect — is how you get from zero to something you can actually iterate on.
The one line that made 2025 a fully referral-booked year
For about two years, Shannon was puzzled. Her clients loved working with her — she could tell. They'd get their first look at the finished site and say things like, "This is absolutely amazing, I don't even want to change anything." They were writing fantastic testimonials. And yet the referrals weren't coming in at the volume she expected.
She kept doing social media. She was active on Upwork. She was thinking about blogging. She was making it complicated.
Then she tried something embarrassingly simple. At the end of her project wrap-up email — the one where she sends final notes, keeps it to three points maximum so it doesn't overwhelm — she added one line. Something to the effect of: If you had a great time working together, referrals are always appreciated.
The response was immediate. Clients weren't just noting it passively — they were actively emailing back to say they already had specific people in mind. Not just "oh sure, I'll keep you in mind" — but names. People they were going to connect her with right now.
All she had to do was ask.
Her whole 2025 has been referral-based. Not because she built an elaborate referral programme, not because she incentivised it with discounts or fees — just because she put the ask front and centre in the one email clients are already reading and already feeling good about the project in.
If you don't put something in front of someone, they don't think of it. That's it. That's the whole insight. Go add the line.
The two-package structure that builds its own funnel
Shannon's current offering is beautifully simple, and the logic behind it is something I genuinely hadn't heard laid out this way before.
She targets two types of clients: people who are side hustling or just starting up, and people who are ready to grow or expand. The packages match:
→ A one-page website for the startups and side hustlers
→ A full build for the people ready for growth
The insight is in what the one-page package actually does for the business. Those startup clients don't yet have all their resources together — their copy isn't polished, their images aren't finalised, their offers are still being tested. A one-page site is genuinely what they need right now. But when they're ready to grow? They already know Shannon. They already trust her. They come back for the full build.
The one-page website isn't just a lower-priced entry point — it's the top of her own client funnel, actively filling her pipeline with warm leads who are already invested in working with her.
One important note from Shannon: if you're going to offer a one-page package to startups, price it accordingly. She started it at $500–$800 and then more than doubled it — because these clients don't come to you with everything ready. You will end up doing more than you expect. The copy isn't written. The images aren't right. The offer descriptions need work. Build that reality into the price upfront, rather than absorbing extra hours you didn't account for.
The pricing evolution: from free to six figures
Free. Then $500. Then aiming for $3,000 but negotiating herself down to $1,500 and feeling terrible about it. Now landing $5,500–$6,000 projects, with Upwork being a consistent source of them.
Shannon's take on charging for early work: even a small fee matters. Not because of the money, but because of buy-in. When there's no fee, the project doesn't get taken seriously — not by the client, and honestly, not always by you either. Even $250 changes the dynamic. The client shows up. They engage. They respond to your emails.
On the leap from $500 to $3,000: she set a goal that felt genuinely ambitious and found she kept negotiating herself down mid-conversation. The thing she learned from doing that? Every time you accept a lower price because you're afraid of hearing no, you've just blocked the client who would have happily said yes to the original number.
If someone says no to $6,000, that's not a failure — that's just a client who was never going to be a great fit. Holding your price leaves room in your calendar for the person who will say yes, and who will trust your work from the first day rather than pushing back at every stage.
She also makes a point that resonates: the clients who try to negotiate your price down or make you feel like you need to give a percentage off are almost always the projects that go longest, require the most rounds of edits, and leave you feeling worst at the end. The clients who say yes and put a cheque in the mail? Those are the ones you want.
On Upwork specifically: the platform has a reputation for being full of low-budget projects. Shannon calls that a lie. Her average project is $5,500–$6,000 and she lands those consistently. The key is in how you use the filters.
The Upwork strategy she's refined over ten years
Shannon has been on Upwork for a decade. Here is exactly how she approaches it:
The filters: She uses two filter combinations. For hourly work, she sets a minimum of $60/hour — that's where the higher-quality clients start appearing. For fixed-rate projects, she checks both the $1,000+ range (where her one-page website clients live) and the $5,000+ range (where the full build clients are). She applies to both simultaneously because her business serves both.
The proposal: Always personalised. Never mass-applied. She reads what the client actually needs, finds two or three sites from her portfolio that are comparable to what they're describing, and links those specifically rather than just dumping her full portfolio URL. It shows she's already thought about their project — before they've even responded.
Her proposals lay out: what's included, the timeline, and her next available dates. All of it upfront. The client doesn't need to follow up with five questions before deciding — everything they need to say yes is already there. It's an indicator of how she works, before they've even booked.
The price: She pitches at the price she wants, even when the client's listed budget is lower. If someone posts a job at $4,000 and she'd normally charge $6,000, she pitches $6,000. She gets responses regularly that say something like: "Your price is a little higher than the others, but I love your work and really want to work with you — let's figure it out."
Those are the responses to look for. Not the ones trying to get 20% off.
She also recently invested in working with Remote Oliver, who specialises in optimising Upwork profiles — because she's always refining the profile alongside the proposals, treating it as an ongoing asset rather than something you set up once and forget.
The diversification mindset: Shannon treats Upwork as one channel, not the whole business. Same reason you wouldn't want all your clients coming from one social media platform — if something goes wrong with the account, you need to have other avenues active. Referrals, in her case, are now the primary one.
What makes clients say yes at $6,000
Shannon credits a book she came across — Don't Make Me Think by Steve Krug. She says the title tells you everything. The more you make someone think, the less likely they are to take the action you want them to take. She applies this to every client touchpoint: the proposal is clear, the process is clear, the pricing is clear. There are no unanswered questions left floating.
That clarity reads as professionalism. The client knows what to expect, knows what they're getting, and trusts the person they're about to hand money to.
Then the portfolio does the rest. Not just screenshots — proper mockups. Shannon has a Canva file set up with pre-selected stock images (front-facing, no angles, because angles create extra graphic design work) and she drops new site screenshots into it after each project. If it's a bigger project, she sends assets to a graphic designer and gets a zip file back. The point is that the portfolio looks considered, not thrown together — and that visual polish is what closes.
Going all in: what 2023 actually looked like
Shannon was part-time from 2017 to around 2022. Part-time in Honduras, she notes, meant making an income that would have been full-time money in New Jersey — so she wasn't struggling, just not running at capacity. But she could see what the business was capable of, and not fully committing to it started to feel like leaving something on the table.
At the end of 2022, after long conversations with her husband, she decided: 2023 is the year she goes all in.
What held her back wasn't skills or clients — she had both. It was the excuses she kept putting in front of herself: the copy wasn't quite right, she didn't have good photos of herself, she wanted to rebrand from the Canva logo she'd started with. All legitimate things, but used as reasons to delay.
Her solution: hire out all the things she was using as excuses, and remove the excuses entirely.
She hired a copywriter (Jess) for $6,000. She flew to Austin, Texas for a brand photography shoot with Alicia Lee Photography — $3,000 plus flights and Airbnb, which she logged as a business retreat. She hired a branding designer for around $2,500–$3,000 (in British pounds, which she cheerfully describes as "not real money, conversion rates not my problem"). That's roughly $12,000+ invested in getting the business ready to launch properly.
She didn't have all of it sitting in a business savings account. She had the branding and photography funds, then stretched for the copywriter because her photographer referred her and she trusted the source. The logic she used: if I don't do this, how many clients am I losing while I keep not launching? The 6K copywriter fee was less than one project. The return on investment made itself.
She set herself a one-week build window — treating herself as her own client — and launched in April 2023.
What changed after the launch? She didn't overhaul her marketing. She didn't start new social media channels. She just looked legitimate on the internet — and booked out.
The packages were already refined. The process was already in place. The systems were running. All the business needed was a website that matched what Shannon was actually capable of. Once it had that, everything accelerated.
On templates, delegation, and only doing the things that excite you
Shannon watched Paige's video on the realities of selling templates — the customer service overhead, the need to keep tutorial videos updated every time the platform changes, the marketing force required to actually sell them — and decided templates weren't for her. Not because the business model doesn't work, but because the parts of it that aren't the design work didn't excite her. She'd rather offer one thing and offer it brilliantly than offer five things she's not fully behind.
That same principle shows up in how she runs everything else. She has a social media person who she sends long voice notes to — sometimes seven to ten minutes, once a month — and that person turns it into content strategy. Shannon talks through what's on her mind; someone else processes it into posts. The output is hers; the labour of producing it is delegated.
She has other businesses in Honduras alongside Luminary Studio — including a nonprofit that runs service learning group trips — and manages it all through time-blocking, knowing when in the day her creative energy is highest (mornings), leaving afternoons for the more mechanical tasks like blog uploads and mobile optimisation, and cutting herself off from screens at 7pm.
The other thing she's gotten good at: vetting before hiring, and then actually trusting the people she hires. She picked the most expensive copywriter of all the options she was quoted. Partly because she wanted the best, and partly because — as she points out — that's exactly the thought process her own clients go through when they're choosing between designers. Higher price signals expertise. It signals confidence. The people who understand value don't run from the higher number; they move toward it.
On the course, and what she'd say to anyone on the fence
Shannon's take on learning from someone versus going it alone: why live through someone else's failures when you can just learn from them directly? The foundations she took from Square Secrets Business are still the foundations of her business today — the two-week project structure, the client process, the way she thinks about packages. She's adapted them and put her own spin on things (the one-page site, for example, is structured from the two-week framework, condensed to five days), but the core hasn't changed because it works.
She paid full price for the course after the early-bird discount window closed — because she'd missed it by deliberating too long and wasn't going to miss the course itself. She describes the investment as a no-brainer in retrospect, and says the course is worth considerably more than what it costs.
Her advice to anyone building this kind of business: your journey is your journey. She was part-time for nearly six years. That's not a failure — that's building context, building confidence, building the experience that made going all-in in 2023 so effective. You don't have to go full-time from day one. But if you know your business has real potential and you're not testing that potential at full capacity, at some point you owe it to yourself to find out what it can actually do.
Shannon's story isn't one of overnight success — it's one of sustained, quiet accumulation. Years of refining proposals, tweaking packages, building a portfolio one project at a time, and then making the decision to commit fully. If you're somewhere in that middle stretch right now, wondering when the right time to go all in is: it's probably sooner than you think. The foundations you're building right now are exactly what will make the leap worth it.
- Booking out your web design business months in advance with Mariana Durst
- 8 ideas for more dreamy client referrals as a web designer
- I doubled the prices of my services. Here's what happened next.
- 6 ideas for creating the ultimate client experience as a web designer
- How To Start A Successful Web Design Business (IN 3 MONTHS)
