How to make a website and make money on it (for performers)

In the last article titled “How to order a website and not let money down the drain,” we gave recommendations to customers of websites. In the same article, we promised to give recommendations to the developers - we actually fulfill our promises.
At once, this article is not about business plans, marketing, or sales plans. If you do not have all this - we are sorry, but you will have to read about it in another place. This article is about the organization of work within the company. However, if now you do not have these things and you are not going to do them - you can no longer read, but simply find a normal job.

So, to the point. The main task of customers and developers is very similar and it sounds like this: "Earn money on the site." However, for customers this means - to make money on their business, which the site will help, for performers - to make money on the very production of the site.
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Now in the world there are so many different business related to the web. Therefore, we immediately identify those who may be interested in our article.

So, it will be interesting to you if:

• The company employs less than 15 people;
• You do not sit on the same product, but constantly carry out various, relatively expensive projects (above 150 tons of rubles);
• Your personal income is comparable to the wages of the ordinary, albeit a good specialist.

If the first two conditions for you are not met, then in your business the laws are different from ours. Therefore, our article may be not only uninteresting to you, but also harmful. However, decide for yourself.

If for you, as for a business owner, the third condition is not fulfilled (that is, you earn at least twice as much as an ordinary specialist), then everything is fine with you. And perhaps we need to consult with you, and not vice versa.

What you need to do to earn good money to create websites?

As always, Mother Teresa will help us in the hard work of making money.
This undoubtedly wise and strong woman says the following:

What does this mean? And this means that you need to finally stop posing as frightened ostriches, pull your head out of the sand and take responsibility - the responsibility for the client’s business, for its sales and the quality of service via the Internet, and not for the jumble of HTML and PHP that it by itself is not needed. Not needed at all.

"What? How so? Why should we be responsible for someone else's business? ”- many will ask. And we will repeat, especially for those who are in the tank, because nobody simply needs your website by itself. Not to mention paying good money for it. Remember this.

Believe me, as soon as you get away from formal requirements in the style of “The site should be located on the first page of Google and Yandex” and proceed to the requirements in the style of “The site should attract 5,000 customers per day. Conversion should be 500 orders per day, which for a year should be a profit of 100,000 bananas, provided that blah blah blah ”you will be much easier to push your price tag. Why? Yes, because the same year is a very good payback period. In serious, large companies, a project payback period of less than 3 years is considered a miracle. Any businessman is able to calculate that if he receives 3,000,000 bananas in a year, then paying 500,000 bananas for the site is a damn direct benefit.

If you feel that your team is not ready to be responsible for the client's profit, go to low-budget sites up to 50 tr. There, for the most part, the client is perpendicular to everything and it is possible that there you will occupy your niche.

Also, do not forget that the main way to make monthly income more or less stable is to re-sell well-established customers. If they are not there, you will guess every month whether you have enough money for rent. And you can re-sell something to a client only if he earns real money on your work.

In addition, Mother Teresa says:

There are no keys to happiness. The door is always open

And she damn right. Because there are a bunch of obvious things that are simply ignored in the hectic balancing between income and expense. But this just leads to the fact that income is less than or equal to the expense. Which again forces you to hammer on these things. And you as a squirrel in a wheel cannot escape from this hellish circle.

The cost of the project should not be calculated from your expenses on it.
"How so?" - you ask. “This is such a simple, obvious, convenient scheme. I consider how much I spend, put on my profit and voila! I'm in the black! "
If you think so, then you look like the long-sighted gnomes from the TV series "South Park". They also had such an up-to-date business plan:

• Collecting pants
• ???
• PROFIT !!!

By the way, it is very difficult to calculate the real cost of the project. Are you taking risks? A depreciation of technology? And vacation? And sick leave? Do you know how much it costs one day of illness for your employee of your company? Unhappy 150 rubles, which you pay him under the labor code? Yeah of course.

Considering that, most likely, in your web studio the posts of estimator or economist are absent as a class, then you consider the cost of the project with a certain margin of error. And then voila - like you have a good income, the cost of the sites is high, and the studio earned money and a little.

But learning how to count the real cost of a project is half the battle and we don’t talk about it in this article. So wait, do not run until the economist, we have not yet revealed to you one important secret. When your clients see the cost of work, calculated according to the rules, they will bleed from their eyes and they will jump into the nearest window.

What do you ask? Unfortunately, there is no universal solution. In general, selling your services at the price you need is business, and if there were some simple formulas here, everyone would be successful businessmen.

But do not be discouraged! We know what needs to be done to find exactly your secret formula:

1. Find a normal estimator and find out the real cost per hour of your specialists. Thereby, you will do a good deed and stop dumping prices at last. Give it to yourself and to others;
2. Determine the average cost of the project. And to do it based on how much you can sell your services to the client. Or from market prices in your price segment. But in any case, do not proceed from your project costs!
3. Sit down and finally do business. So you just have to figure out how to make the difference between your project costs and its cost really interesting for you.

Actually, the recommendations to business owners are over. However, we still have something to say to the performers. We have a warm word for almost every role. Readers! Do not forget to make a discount on the fact that each company has its own structure, so the roles and their relationships are abstract.

Salespeople and project managers

Gentlemen, stop shoving your nose where you don’t need and put pressure on the performers. Start using the weird substance that is between your ears to do your work. You have to use your communication skills to good advantage, and not to go with stupid attempts at the already difficult time forecasting process.

Why are you really going to do this for a whole week? You're a cool specialist - you can handle 100% of the day! C'mon, it's just one button. We did it in the past project - you just have to transfer!

The case of a technical executive competently and efficiently perform the task. And only he can determine the potential deadline for its implementation. Your job is to sell the service or manage the project effectively, and not to bother your colleagues.

Not qualified to sell the service for its real value? Or to build work so that the project was completed on time? Well, the “great” idea is to force the contractor to understate the deadline, deceiving himself, and thereby deprive the company and the contractor of the justified income.

However, it is normal to discuss with the performer the reason for one or another deadline never hurts. Because any person can make a mistake or forget about something. But do not dare to push and go beyond their competence!

Technical specialists (Maker-up, Programmers, Integrators, main, leading and ordinary, and to everyone who estimates deadlines)

Guys, please take your pride and stick it where no one will see. Seriously. All perpendicular to how much the task should be done. Or for how much it can be done. It is important how much you actually make it. Feel the difference?

Come on, it's simple, I quickly bahn. According to the method of herak herak and in production.

Yeah of course. It is because of this attitude sales managers and other managers are forced to multiply your terms by two or even three times. Do you know what this leads to? In addition, when you calculated the deadline correctly, the manager multiplied by two, and the client saw the price tag twice as large as the market price. And ran away in horror. Well, cool, when the company without interesting projects? Probably, from this your salary grows.

Somewhere you have to have analytical thinking. Break the task into components. A small task can always be fairly accurately estimated. Add deadlines. Take time to organize the interaction between the parts. And so on and so forth. And yes - check your deadline with the assessment of a colleague, if your manager is not smart enough to do it yourself.

Designers

But for you, you are our creative, we have two secrets. Here they are:

• You design interfaces, not images. Remember this as it should.
• Your profession is no less technical than creative.

That is, any designer who utters phrases in the style of “I don't care, I drew, you do it. I do not have to understand your typesetting "let him go to draw Chinese porn movies. They say they pay well for it. Why? Because you drew some wildly beautiful crap, and with this then suffer in turn:

• A coder who is looking for non-standard solutions;
• The integrator which then integrates these non-standard solutions;
• A tester who finds a ton of bugs for various browsers in these non-standard solutions;
• Salesman, who therefore increased the real cost of the service by two to three to four to ten times;
• PM, whose timelessly delayed release of the project;
• The director, whose business is not going well now.

In short, one such designer, without proper control and close interaction with other specialists, is able to lay the whole company very quickly on its side. No matter how beautiful he drew. Even if his pictures will want to lick.

If what he draws will be very difficult to implement and in the end you will get a very inconvenient interface that the customer will not accept, you will have to lick his work with the whole office. Instead of salary.

Analysts and other technical writers

Do not write in one. Seriously. If you do not know how to work with a group, this position is not for you. Be sure to approve all solutions and concepts with designers and technical performers. And better invent them with them. Why? Because bad shit TZ, difficult to implement, where it is not necessary, put on the side of the whole company even faster than an illiterate designer, immensely puffy programmer or salesperson-hack. Even faster than a non-business director.

Because even if the awesome, worked-out team, led by a seasoned director, will start working on such a TK and she is laying it on to the project. And the shoals will have to be fixed on the go. And then you will not find the ends. Unless, of course, they don’t have enough brains to just throw your TK in the garbage bin and sell the customer a normal service.

Conclusion

We wish all web studios to eliminate internal conflicts, to establish links between specialists and to make a lot of high-quality and mutually beneficial projects!

Good luck, colleagues!