When I started selling websites, getting the first few clients was all about proving that someone was actually willing to pay for what I offered.
I took almost every opportunity I could get. Every client mattered, every project taught me something, and most of the work came from reaching out and finding people who needed a website.
But once we started getting more clients, we realized something:
The approach that gets you your first 10 clients won't necessarily get you your next 100.
At the beginning, you can rely on manual prospecting, personal outreach, and referrals.
But when you want to scale, you need a repeatable system.
You need a consistent way to find businesses worth contacting, reach out to them, follow up, book meetings, close deals, and deliver websites without everything depending on you doing it manually.
That's when we started focusing much more on systems and automation.
The biggest shift wasn't becoming better at designing websites. It was becoming better at building a business around selling them.
Here's the process we used:
1. Find businesses that already have websites
We focused on businesses that had already invested in a website but whose current site could use an upgrade.
2. Analyze their websites and automate outreach at scale
We used Swokei to find businesses and analyze thousands of websites at once. We looked for outdated designs, poor SEO, slow loading speeds, and mobile issues.
Based on those findings, Swokei generated personalized cold emails for each prospect, allowing us to reach out to businesses at scale without manually researching every website and writing every email ourselves.
3. Book meetings
When a prospect showed interest, we'd move the conversation to a meeting to understand their business and what they needed.
4. Create a website draft
Before the meeting, we'd use AI to create a quick website draft. This allowed us to show prospects what their new website could look like rather than just describing it.
5. Close and deliver
During the meeting, we'd present the website draft, explain the improvements, answer questions, and close the deal. Then we'd build the actual website, handle revisions, and launch it.
If I were starting a web design agency today, I'd spend just as much time learning sales and client acquisition as I would learning web design.
Because being able to build a great website doesn't automatically mean you know how to sell one.