This story is about how two guys from Novosibirsk decided to open a website development studio and try to keep afloat.

Introduction

My name is Roman. The last couple of years I have been working in the field of website development. During this time, he has gone from a site sales manager to a project manager (a great achievement).

My colleague Dmitry is a seasoned designer with 8 years of experience.
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Having worked for the last year and a half on the web-studio of Novosibirsk, we opened our own business.

His own business is also a studio (a terrible word).
The market of competitors in Siberia is full, so we decided to anchor to do one service - design.

I will not mind if this blog leads customers, but this is not the purpose of my presence here.

I want to describe the stages of the formation of our small business, showing all the ins and outs of a small business, namely:

• how will we look for clients without a portfolio (90% of work is the property of employers),
• how we will lead projects (Rework and Resource to help us),
• how we plan to select performers
• how, ultimately, go to profitability.

This blog is not for customers, they do not need to know our internal affairs.

Think of it as a kind of reality show.

As always, things will not go according to plan, but so far such plans.

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Series 1 - Customer Search

Office, opening of entrepreneurship, Elba, business plan, buying furniture: everything took 3 weeks. May 8, 2015 we went to work in our company.

On word of mouth they found one large project and a couple of small ones.

Large - an adaptive website for the sanatorium: work until October 2015.
Small - development of corporate sites and prototypes.

Workload - on average 50%.

According to the plans with so many clients, we will be able to work without loss until October, limiting ourselves to the minimum wages.

To develop professionally and financially, you must look for customers

Cooked up a website. Identified the key problems of the situation:

• the lack of a high-profile name and an intelligent portfolio (upon request we can show projects in which we participated, but we cannot upload it on the site);
• competition in Novosibirsk (453 organizations in 2gis under the heading “website development”);
• Summer - steadily inactive demand for many services;
• unstable economic situation: according to rumors, many studios hide behind, projects are frozen;
• there is a small demand for website design services (there is no exact statistics, but according to WordStat, out of all requests for design and prototypes, there are at least 100 targets for all Yandex).

A little more about positioning yourself in the market

We worked in different studios and saw situations like the need for customers forcing the studio to accept unprofitable projects. 90% of the clients we worked with were only interested in the price issue.

To keep the order, discounts were made on projects, having only a half-empty brief from the information. As a result, they got a lot of work and little money.

We do not want to work this way. Therefore, the project cost is determined only after the development of the prototype. And then the client himself decides to work with us or look for other artists.

So correctly, fairly and financially less risky.

But, unfortunately, there is no such client in Novosibirsk (sad smiley).

We somehow decided that our clients could be web studios and various internet marketing agencies.

Do the following:

1. Chose 120 studios of Novosibirsk medium and high price segment
2. They sent letters with a partnership offer, assigning a UTM tag to each studio. The essence of the letter: a description of the services and the benefits of cooperation; if you want to know the conditions, please reply to the letter
3. After any response, a response letter was sent to the KP.

Results:

Stage	Time spent	amount	Conversion
1. Search for studios and collect e-mail	5 hours
2. Drawing up the first letter and KP	6 h.
3. Mailing letters (individually, not in bulk, with UTM tags)	5 hours	120
4. Transitions to the site		65	54%
5. Requested KP		25	21%
6. After receiving the KP consider the option of cooperation.		four	3%

Thus, the cost of 2 full-time working days of one person led to the prospect of cooperation with 4 studios, if, of course, there are tasks for us.

We rated it as a bad but promising result.

We did not disturb those who answered “no” (9 studios).

Then we sent to all uninterested KP studios (95 studios): 10 transitions to the site, not a single answer.

Conclusion: it is not necessary to demonstrate need: this is written in many books. If you are not interested, then it is not interesting.

So far this adventure has not led us to projects, but we are not planning to stop.

Our further actions to attract customers:

1. Get answers from the remaining 80 studios, so we will continue to spam.
2. Distribution to the largest studios in Russia (the result is very interesting)
3. Improving the proposal (if there are people who are ready to evaluate its quality, I will be happy to provide)
4. Directly we do not plan to launch it yet (our site is not exactly “selling”)
5. Active sale to those who, in our opinion, need design services.

I am counting on the further stages of reporting in this blog. And also I will write about our developments directly on project management and interface design.

The nature of this post, please do not consider advertising.

End of the first series