Starting a Small Business as a Web Developer

[Music] hey what's going on guys so in this video i want to talk a little bit about starting a business as a web developer so this applies to freelancers as well as people that want to start a company from scratch and i don't claim to be any kind of like you know business mastermind or business advisor or anything like that i've just done this myself and i just want to kind of share some tips and and some guidelines to how to get started if you want to start a company or if you want to start you know promoting yourself as a freelancer and we're going to talk about things like starting a business plan we're going to talk about the different legal structures like sole proprietorships and llcs and s-corps and then also like branding your website your portfolio taking payments from clients and creating client proposals stuff like that all right so we're going to look at some slides and just i'm going to give you some information that i think can be helpful so let's go ahead and jump in all right so we're going to jump right into it and start at the very beginning so the very first thing you want to do is find a place to work and many of you probably already have that but just make sure it's a quiet place where you're not going to be bothered for the most part i think if you're doing web development you're probably going to start off in your home so a home office i have a finished basement that's where i set up my office my studio you could do the commercial space thing but i think most of us don't have that type of money when we're first getting started and i don't even think it's worth it especially now with covid you know having people come in when i was when i started out i was doing computer repair as well so people would bring their computers in i'd fix them and they'd come pick them up i'd also do consultations for web development but like i said with covet i don't know if that's such a good idea there are shared spaces as well again probably not the best thing to do right now but hopefully you know once all this crap clears up and and life goes back to semi-normal you could look into a shared space it's much much cheaper than a commercial space and it gives you a place to go out of your house if that's what you're looking for you want to get all the supplies that you need for your business we're pretty lucky as web developers it's not like being a landscaper where you need a truck you need a you know a trailer a lawnmower all these tools and stuff we just basically need a laptop a decent laptop a desk and maybe license some software so there's really not much that we need to get started now every business should have a decent business plan that helps guide you through each stage of starting and managing your business you can kind of think of it as like a road map to get your business to where you want it and to just describe what it is you offer and i had some trouble with this because i when it comes to this type of stuff i'm not very organized but i did find a lot of resources online to help me create an easy to understand plan that i could follow because one big mistake that you don't want to make is just jumping in too quick with little to no thought about you know where you want this business to go and what what you're going to offer how you're going to get paid things like that so there's traditional plans that are many pages long but i would probably suggest a lean business plan that contains pretty much the key elements things like the company description and mission statement any one you have anyone you plan on having working for you uh your legal structure like a sole proprietorship llc et cetera and i'm going to get into that in the next slide services that you offer pricing the type of customers you're looking to acquire so you know small business owners whatever and maybe some market analysis now this site here which is sba.gov it's the u.s small business administration and uh and this this can pertain to anyone in any country creating your business plan but this is a really good resource tells you a lot about creating a you know a business plan and it has some examples and i'm pretty sure that this andrews plan is the one that i used many years ago as kind of a template so i'm going to pull that up real quick just to kind of show you what that entails so this is a lean business plan i think it's like six or seven pages so basically we have an executive summary with the product that they'll be selling in your case it's going to be probably services the customers that you want to acquire the future of the company where do you see the company in five ten years company description including the mission statement anyone you have working for you the legal structure such as a sole proprietorship or an llc market research of your industry um the advantages to you to your company the service line so basically the services that you're gonna offer the pricing structure you're gonna use you wanna just you know you want this stuff uh established before you go and start actually running your business so marketing and sales growth strategy how are you gonna scale your business so stuff like that and that's the end so this is very clear and concise so i would recommend using this as a template or something like this all right so you want to create a business plan you also want to define which legal structure you're going to use now there's there's different options here there's a sole proprietorship there's an llc limited liability company and s corp and there's other ones as well but these are kind of the most common for small business now when i'm talking about this stuff keep in mind i'm in the us i have no clue how other countries work and in terms of their their business structures so this part of this video might only pertain to the u.s now i'm going to give you kind of an example of of what i did so i started as a sole proprietorship which is what i would recommend and depending on where you live that might entail certain things you have to do i live in massachusetts so i had to just register for what's called a dba which stands for doing business as and all i had to do was go to my city hall i paid i think it was like forty dollars this was many years ago so it's probably a little more now but uh once i got that dba for my company which at the time was called tech guy computer services i could then go and go to my local bank and open up a business checking account that way i could have checks with my company name i could have a a debit card with my company name as well and i could take payments from people which i'll talk about in a little bit as far as you know what you want to choose this is a pretty good website this is legalzoom and has some descriptions of each each business type so sole proprietorship uh right here so easy but risky there's no no liability protection um one owner so you know only one one person will run and own the business you're the only investor but you can have help from family and friends now there's also llc which is limited liability company so it's flexible it offers liability protection great for new businesses if you're going to hire people you might want to look into either an llc or an s corp which is what i am now which i'll talk about in a minute um when you file taxes you separate the legal entity filing required with the state so if you're going to go llc or s corp then i would definitely definitely recommend finding a good accountant to help you out or some kind of advisor my accountant has done everything for me in this in this aspect of my business he does everything if i have a question or i need something done i have him do it so my advice pretty much to everyone starting out would be sole proprietorship get a dba if your state requires that and then when your business grows a little bit if you want to hire people and stuff move to either an llc or an s corp which is what my company is now and there's going to be different factors that go into you know if you should choose llc or s corp my accountant recommended s-corp mostly for tax reasons in the way that it works so basically i get you know i have my business checking account every anything that traverses media makes goes into that account and then i have uh a salary that i take from my business so basically it's set up so every week my salary which which i i chose and of course you know you have to make enough money to fulfill that salary that comes out of the main business account and goes into my personal checking and then when tax time comes around i have to do taxes for myself my personal taxes for my salary and then i have to do my corporate taxes so we basically filed two sets of taxes and it sounds complicated but if you have a good accountant it's it's not bad you really don't have to do much i mean i just go in and sign papers it's important that you trust your accountant um you know find someone that that has a lot of good recommendations and reviews uh because it's it's priceless to have a really good accountant that you can trust that uh you know doesn't charge you an arm and a leg so like i said i i would say sole proprietorship you know if you're starting by yourself you don't have employees or anything like that and then once you start making a good amount of money and your business is growing move to either an llc or an s corp and find a really good account all right so next let's talk a little bit about payments and invoicing because you want to have a way for your clients to pay you obviously and it might be multiple methods especially if you're doing local work like if you're building web apps and websites for local local businesses they might pay you with a check they might pay you with a physical credit card or maybe you'll invoice them online so you need to figure that kind of stuff out at the very least i would say get a business checking account at a local bank and look into your your banks around you and you know find ones that have good offers that don't have bad penalties and stuff like that create a business checking account get a business debit card then set up a paypal business account and i believe for both for both your business checking and the paypal business you need some kind of proof of your business and the dba should do it that's what i used you know back many years ago so paypal allows you to take obviously paypal payments and as well as credit card payments online and you can integrate it into your website you can also send invoices invoicing is very important you want to give every client an invoice you want to have a copy of that invoice for you know tax reasons or whatever and you should have your services that you provide the the cost the company info so your company info on it as well as the client's company info or individual if it's just an individual and there's different services i mean you have stripe you have you have square i actually used authorized.net back in the day but they're not as popular now and i could charge credit cards online but they also gave me this virtual terminal that i could actually type physical credit cards into and charge them that way but like i said i don't think they're as popular anymore so paypal is really good stripe you know there's some other invoicing software you can use i created custom invoices because i got paid multiple ways some people would pay cash for computer repair some people would write checks credit cards online payments so i just set up simple invoicing with and make sure you always have an invoice id so you can identify each invoice all right so once you get all the logistics and stuff handled now it's time to start the fun part which is creating your your branding your website your your company identity so for branding what i mean is anything that identifies either your company or you as an individual if you're working under you know your own name a specific color scheme a logo fonts image styles on your website and promotional material these are all characteristics that identify your company your products and your services so your brand should be the same across your website your social media any physical like business cards or pamphlets that you create vista print is is a nice place to to get stuff like that physical flyers and stuff that you can create and customize and it's really cheap social media is really important as well so you definitely want a company twitter account a facebook page an instagram account share your work network with other people it's really important to to you know network with people in your industry linkedin and all that stuff now once you've established somewhat of a brand for your company or you as an individual you'll need a website and in most cases these days less is more you want a nice looking clean website with just enough information when i was doing this you know 10 years ago or so it was popular to have a ton of pages and content on your site but i think over time we realized that people don't really have that much patience they're not going to read over 10 web pages with 10 paragraphs each so i know you feel like you might want to explain everything you do but that's not really the goal of your website you can do that when you actually start talking with a potential client i would suggest doing either you know a nice landing page with multiple sections or maybe a three-page website including your portfolio okay you want to introduce yourself or your company let people know what it is that you do what kind of services you offer and of course you want to include some of your work so they can see what you've done and what you're capable of now i realize that when you're just starting out you might not have a lot to put on your portfolio in terms of client work however you should have some personal projects you shouldn't be starting a business if you haven't really built anything yet and even if you have like a family member or a friend that needs a website or some kind of of application those are great to put on your portfolio if you don't have any client work yet and i do have a separate video on creating a good portfolio and if i remember i'll try to link that in the description all right so once you have a website with some branding and some projects in your portfolio you want to come up with some kind of pricing model and i'll talk about this a little but i can't tell you what to charge this really varies a lot depending on your experience where you live you know what you offer just so many different factors in in pricing some developers charge by the hour i didn't like to do this because to me if you have a specific skill that allows you to do something really fast that really benefits your client you're kind of jipping yourself if you're try if you're charging hourly my pricing basically depended on two things how much i thought the work that i was doing was worth for me and how valuable it is to the client so even if it's some kind of feature or something like that that took me three hours if it significantly improves my clients workflow or or gains them more customers or makes their their lives easier in any way then it's it's worth a hell of a lot more than three hours of labor um another thing you could do is have fixed services for very specific tasks maybe you have some design skills and you can create packages where you design a website with a set amount of mockups you create the html css maybe you use something like gatsby or wordpress or whatever it is it doesn't really matter the the actual technology um include a contact form database functionality you have a fixed price of of like three thousand dollars or something like that you're very clear on on what you're giving for that set price back when i was creating wordpress websites i would do this and if they wanted special features like maybe membership functionality with payments or something that would be added on to the base price so i i mean that's really all i'm going to say about pricing because it can just vary in in so many different areas so just try to do some research see what other people are doing and make sure that you charge what you feel you're worth although keep in mind if you're just starting out and you don't have much to show for your past work you might have to you know lower your prices a little bit temporarily now it's really important that you and your client are on the same page when it comes to how much they're paying what are they paying for what are the exact services you're offering i've had some pretty rough experiences with clients due to bad communication so the best thing that you can do is create a clear proposal of what you'll be doing and how much they'll be paying so include things like you know are you doing the design are you providing you know what types of functionality are you providing for this project are you offering support and how long are you offering support hosting and domain if you're including that or not some clients just expect that a lot of people that aren't web developers or aren't tech savvy they don't really understand how this works they're paying you to build a website or some kind of application for their business and a lot of them expect that a domain in hosting is just free forever so you have to explain that it's it's an annual fee maybe you resell your own hosting maybe you use a specific hosting uh provider maybe they have their own so you have to establish all of this stuff before you do anything because if you don't it's going to cause a lot of headaches and it's going to cause a lot of conflict with your client which which you don't want so i would say outline all the work with an estimated timeline and always give a longer timeline than you expect because it's way better to deliver earlier than you say rather than later also have an exact quote for the exact work this eliminates any confusion on what should or should not be included in the price if they decide that they want to add something else later which many clients do then create a new proposal and of course have them sign these proposals as well and you can find proposal templates online but you'll probably want to create your own so you can tailor it to your services i just created mine with uh with like microsoft word back in the day and just added all the services the pricing and terms and all that okay so once you have everything set up you have your website you have some portfolio projects payments taken care of you have your your legal type you know legal business entity and so on you'll need some clients so you'll want to you'll want ways to get your name out there i think the first step is making your website seo friendly i personally hate seo i used to offer it as a service and i just i hate it so i would hire someone to do that for me but at least make your you know have good page titles and clear content just the common sense stuff when it comes to seo local businesses are a great way to start i used to contact businesses that had either no website or an old crappy website and write up a custom proposal of what i could do to improve their web presence don't just email them and say you know your website sucks i can do better let them know how you can make their business better whether that's a better design maybe accepting online payments adding a blog to reach more more people whatever it might be whatever you can come up with that you think would make their business better so research their business and create a plan rather than just sending out these pre-made templates to every business because that usually doesn't work too well online ads is another way to go it can get pretty costly but maybe look into you know google adwords and facebook ads you can apply for freelancing gigs online for as yourself but you can also apply as a company i did this with upwork which back then was actually called odesk so you can get work that way although it's not usually that great paying but it is something you know you can add to your your company portfolio and of course word of mouth is is the best type of promotion but it's something that takes a while to build up to i would say most of my best clients came from word of mouth but again it takes a lot of work to get there so the last thing i'm going to suggest is scaling your business at some point not you know right when you get started and this may include adding new services as well as maybe adding new people because if your client load is becoming too big for for you to handle alone you'll probably want to either find some good freelancers that you can have help you you can outsource to or even hire someone in-house i started with freelancers from upwork and some other sites as well i had i did have a few bad experiences with people that just sucked but i did end up finding some some good developers that that did some really good work at a fair price you don't want to go with the cheapest you can find because chances are their work will be crap but also make sure that you're actually still making money by outsourcing so it can be a little tricky but you can find good help i also ended up hiring two employees in-house at a certain point when i had my storefront and this allowed us to take on more clients uh you will need to have either an llc or an s corp to do this and you also need to set up payroll so again find a really good accountant that can help you with this stuff and you could also add new services if you're just doing web apps and websites maybe you could offer uh mobile apps or desktop apps or maybe sell a certain type of product like a software as a service or if you can do design you can do logos and business cards or maybe even hire someone to do that stuff or outsource it you could resell hosting you could do seo what i used to do is hi i i tried doing seo on my own which i just hated so i found someone that could do it and would do it for cheap so i would just offer it as a service and have that person basically help me out with it and just kind of upsell it you know and i did the same thing with digital marketing i don't know anything about digital marketing but when i was running my business i had that as a service that someone else would help me with so it helps to really find other people to work with as well and again this is not something that you're going to do right away this is if your business is becoming successful where you're getting so many clients that you're having to turn them away because you i mean you're one person you only have so much time so if you're at that point you want to start looking for help and looking at other people you know that can help you scale your business and and you can always raise prices as well because you're getting more work and you have more experience so there's different things you can do but again this is something that is going to be you know happen later on down the road it's it's fantastic if you can get to the point where you actually need to scale all right so that's that's going to be it guys and keep in mind this all of this is from my own personal experience i'm not someone that um you know gives business advice for a living or anything like that i just i had a pretty successful small business for a while and now a successful uh content creation education business whatever you want to call it so take it with a grain of salt this is from my own experience and you definitely want to look into other resources aside from this single video all right but i hope you guys took something from this so thanks for watching and i will see you next time

Channel: Traversy Media

Views: 140,168

Rating: 4.969624 out of 5

Keywords: starting a small business, small business, web development business, freelancing, llc, s-corp, sole propietorship

Id: qn6OhK_Irm4

Length: 24min 10sec (1450 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 02 2020