Can you Make a Million Dollars as a Web Designer?

Introduction

If making $100,000 a year is a comfortable living, then making a million is… extremely comfortable.

Getting there isn’t going to come about without a lot of hard work, but more importantly, a plan, some sort of strategy to get there, and today we are going to be looking at exactly that, different strategies and models that we can use to get there as a web designer.

We’re going to look at studios, products, templates, courses, and a couple of other things, and we will be looking at some real life examples, and a lot of calculations.

Everything that I’m going to cover are just ideas. Ideas to get you thinking and to see what ideas you gravitate towards the most.

This isn’t a step by step guide. I’m not making a million dollars, and frankly, I might never get to that point, but I’m thinking about how I might get there all the time to figure out what makes the most sense for me to spend my time on.

“What’s the best way I can leverage my time to spend less time to make more money?” That’s the true question that we should all be asking.

If you’re a tinkerer, an experimenter, someone who’s constantly exploring new ways of doing things, then you should keep thinking about all of these options, the best way to use your time to make money doing what you love.

Anyway, let’s jump in.

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Working Hourly as a Web Designer

To start, let’s keep in mind, we’re not talking about making a million in year one, we’re going to look at the models to make a million in a year, but that system is going to take a lot more years to set up. So whatever you decide to do, you’ll want to make sure that you’ll be happy to do it for years on end.

The plan is to find systems that show linear or exponential growth is possible, and if our work is tied to our hours, then finding that growth will be much much harder.

For example let’s say we freelance, we do work for other businesses, and let’s say we only work 40 hours a week. Out of those 40 hours, we’re probably only going to be able to bill out for 30 hours at most. So that’s about 1500 hours that we can bill in a year, and so to get to a million we would have to charge out at $666 an hour. Spooky.

Now you don’t need me to tell you that charging that much per hour is going to get you zero clients unless you’re ultra famous, and even then it’s still pretty unrealistic. But, if we disconnect our hourly rate from the work itself, then things start to look a little more promising.

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Charging a Set Monthly Price

By charging not at an hourly rate but with a monthly set price for an unlimited amount of designs, Brett from DesignJoy has managed to scale his one person business to a million.

So if we charge $5,000 a month for unlimited design, that’s $60,000 per client per year, which means we would need just over 16 clients to get to a million.

Now managing 16 clients in a 40 hour work week every week for years on end provides a completely different issue, not to mention that this recurring income is still tied to you having to do the work every day, which means it’s definitely not 4-hour work week friendly, but none of these options are going to work easily, and this is just one option we have.

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Growing a Design Studio

The full web design studio model; completely different system, completely different responsibilities. When you build up a full studio with multiple employees, your job is going to shift from doing the work, to managing the work, and depending on the kind of work you love to do, this could be a way that makes sense to scale.

I’m not going to focus too much on the studio model because it’s a massive topic and there are already a bunch of great people who talk about how you can grow a studio like that. Finsweet has a whole podcast about web design studio growth, and John D Saunders shows you how you can create SOPs standard operating procedures for studios.

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Charging Value Pricing

Now we are going to look at the Alan Weiss model, who is the author of Million Dollar Consulting. Alan’s model, simplified down, is to charge value pricing for projects, and then outsource if you need to. Value pricing is when you’re charging not for your effort, but for the benefit for the business you’re working with. So if you can show that the work you’re going to do should result in a million dollar difference in the organisation, you could charge $100,000 for that project and both parties win.

For example, let’s say you do website work for Intercom to increase paid account sign-ups on their website. They charge between $59 and $999 per month per account and get 5 millions website views per month. So, if you can improve their website so that they get just 500 more sign-ups a month, just 0.01 percent of traffic, that can result in about a million dollars more in sales.

Not bad at all, but getting these kinds of deals means you have to be very well known, and know how to sell to massive companies, and implies that this company would rather look for outside help rather than do it themselves, which is what they will usually do. So there’s a lot of hurdles to cross with this one.

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Building a Tool

Let’s move onto products, starting with digital tools. Now we’re not looking at massive tools, because we can’t build Slack with just one or two people, so we’re going to look at tools that connect into pre-existing tools. and I’m going to work with numbers from tools that I’m familiar with, so keep these numbers in mind when you think of a digital tool that you’re more familiar with.

Relume library is a component library for Webflow that you can get access to for $19 a month, but because of the yearly option let’s call that $18 per user per month. $18 a month * 12 months, which is one user, * 5000 users = over $1,080,000. Only 5,000 users isn’t too bad at all to build an empire of cash. Now for this to be, in my eyes a true million dollar product, you have to do that without funding.

So you’ll have to bootstrap your product from the ground up. And not everyone can get through the process of building a product, but it can take years before it’s ready for launch, and then who knows if people will even pay for it. But if people like your idea, if you actually have a great product, then you can get far past a million.

Selling Website Templates and Other Digital Products

There are plenty of other things that you can make to sell online that doesn't involve putting in years of effort into a tool without knowing if it will pay-off.

A common one is website templates, which you can make and sell on any of the template marketplace available to choose from.

So far I’ve made about 25 Webflow templates, and this brings in a consistent income for when I'm not working on client projects. Now this is nothing close to a million, in-fact using my number I would have to have about 250 templates to get to a million. But if I were to dedicate myself to just doing this, including building templates for other website builders on other marketplaces, I could eventually get there. So could you.

And this doesn’t even start to mention other types of web design that people will pay for, including illustrations or graphic packs. So there is a bunch of different digital product ideas to think about. You might be able to get some ideas by looking through Creative Market.

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Web Design Courses

Next we move onto courses, I’m talking gurus teaching you how to become a guru. Not really though, but anyway rather than focus on Udemy courses that sell for less than a hundred a pop, I’m talking about niched courses, the kind that you buy off of someone's website for between 200 to 500 bucks. Let’s call that $400 a sale.

To get to a million off of courses this way, you need 2,500 sales, and the only way to really do this is have a course that niched in a specific topic, so it makes sense for customers to buy the course even at that price point because you’re the top expert of the topic, and the course it’s specifically for them and their situation.

Since we are talking about web design, and there are only so many web design courses that can be made, but that’s where you have to get really niched and build a following for that niche, such as specifically a course on building a certain kind of website, or the business of web design, maybe web design around NFTs, so on and so on.

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Content and Affiliations

And finally let’s talk about content, and affiliations. Now there are many different streams and channels that you could make content on to make money, but with most of them, you’re not going to make tons of money unless you’re an affiliate, unless you’re using the videos to sell something else. If we’re talking about Youtube, with just videos alone as a generalised answer you’ll need about 100 million views on videos to make a million.

But of course there are plenty of social streams that we could choose. Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Pinterest, your own blog, and the way to make money off of these is through affiliation, by selling products through the content.

So the question is what product do you want to sell through the content, and how much of that product would you need to sell to get to a million, and there is a million answers for this depending on what were trying to sell, but as a web designer it probably makes sense to affiliate a certain platform, or platform plug-in, web design product, hosting, stock images, the list is endless.

‍You can find a list of all the web design affiliate programs here.

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Summary

So that’s just a couple of different ways that you might make it to earning a million a year as a web designer, but any of these you can take and just do 1 tenth of the effort and still make an extremely comfortable living.

But what’s the takeaway? What can you actually be doing right now to work towards making it to a million? Well out of all these options that we looked at, what one are you most curious about trying? And realistically, what one are you going to the most likely to stick to long term? Because there’s no rush to get there, and you want to be able to get there at your own pace while enjoying the ride, and without losing your soul.

Naval Ravikant said

You have to do hard things...to create your own meaning in life. Making money is a fine thing to choose. Go struggle.

So let’s get back to struggling.