How I built recurring revenue with web design

0:00Hi, I'm Lauren from Square Kicker. Joseph Mumbre, founder of Square Design, runs his business design a bit differently with a clever subscription model. So, he and his team get reoccurring revenue rather than never knowing when the next project comes. Let's hear how he does it. Oh yeah, my business model um and the new one that we started actually is a subscription business model. Uh and we

0:25so we we have given it a little name. It's called Square Plus and uh it's a subscription where we want to offer our customers a um no hassle. Uh we take care of it all and and they just pay a subscription. So we we we do create a professional Squarespace website and we are specialized here as at doing a um a like designer designer websites and we offer that this as a subscription and the problem is that you always you never really know uh what you're going to be living on in the next three four five months. So we have this problem of uh having big waves of sometimes way too

1:15much work at once and sometimes nothing at all for a few weeks and that that can be stressful especially when you start having employees. And so it was really interesting to think and develop this business model called Plus because now it allows us to have a stream uh a steady stream of income. we know exactly how much is going to come uh monthly and we can just have a goal of having that many subscription going on and for the customer side what they are taking into this is they don't have to manage all the different subscriptions they don't have to pay Squarespace then their domain name then Square Kicker then many

1:58other you know apps we we pay for everything and they just have one monthly subscription with us and we take care of their website creation but also managing the websites on the long run. Yeah. So for our subscription of course the pricing can be can be scary and we had a a lot of thought into this at first because of course we don't want to have um customers who have a 100page website to do and do a um a subscription

2:30based on you know 180 or €200 a month. So we've put uh a little tier like some tiers of websites of pricing sorry. So SML and Excel. So it's just based off of the number of pages that are in the in the website and that would be from a fivepage to a 15page website. We have the signature um websites which are we create everything from scratch. We don't use any templates of Squarespace. And so those websites are um they have an engagement of subscription. So the customer has to pay and and stay with us for two years at least. And also we have another uh price which is really to an

3:14appeal price. It's it's the flex um uh pricing. And on this one you don't have to you you're not engaged at all with us. You don't have you can stay for just like two or three months if you're if you want on the on this flex thing. Um we don't start with a blank canvas. We usually use a a Squarespace template and we replace the photos, the text. So we still have a beautiful website, but

3:41it's a lot less work for us to do. That's the like the very appealing thing about it is you don't pay the 23,000 upfront to create your website. This is all included in the monthly subscription. So yeah, the way that we manage expectations and keep the project on track um is that we always first we always start with a I don't know what's it called in English. I say I'd say a brief. So we have a a big um how do you call it form to fill in from our customer uh to ask all the questions and everything is very clearly written. Um we use notion for this actually it's a

4:26very very great tool to um manage work and so their replies go directly into our workflow into notion with a lot of processing inside. It's it's so amazing. So they know uh we know what to do. They know what what their what what their expectations are. Usually when we do a full custom website um we will share with them a

4:51um a mood board. We show them examples. This is what it will feel like. for scope creep. Um we make sure that um yeah we we we do when we do the quote we actually write on the quote how many pages there will be and what the pages are and what they will include um so that the customer is not adding too many things on top and in the end we figured out there was always one tool that the customers didn't want to use and so we just use WhatsApp everyone has WhatsApp and for us internally we use notion um from the first step of the CRM. So,

5:28notion is our CRM and when it's assigned project, it turns into a project and it's still managed in notion. It it takes notes for you and it does it very very very well. So, uh we couldn't work without this and it we record all the meetings that we have our with our customers. It takes notes. My employees know what to do. Um and everything that is kept and written. That's um really

5:52useful. Yeah. So the way we use Square Kicker, we usually we look at um what we've first what we've agreed with the customer. Is it going to be a simple website? In that case, we just we don't use Square Kicker when it's a small price simple website. But when the customer expects and has looked at our templates and maybe our what we've done so far, when they're expecting those nice animations and split scrolling and things like that, we know we won't be able to do it without Square Kicker. So, we use Square Kicker. We have the higher highest tier of the of the plan in at

6:32Square Kicker. So, it allows us to have 25 simultaneous um uh websites um being managed. We pay for the subscription and we only impact that on the customer when it's um when they've taken the option to have the the animations. So we use Square Kicker for anything that we wouldn't be able to do with Squarespace. We used to do a lot of custom coding with CSS and now we love that we are able to use cracker to having a nice UI and those this interface makes it so much easier to do things that we would otherwise have to do with CSS. So it's a lot of it's it's

7:14really timesaving for us. We love the presets as well that we have in square kicker. So the advice I'd give to someone who would try who wants to try uh and find a subscription model and specifically for our case here which is creating website on a subscription um first of all make sure that your pricing works for for what you want to do. We figured out based on the type of sites that we do uh a two-year engagement is necessary with a €200 euro price and that suits us uh in terms of uh what work is going to give to us. Of course, you'll be you'll have a steady

7:54income, a steady stream of income, but at the same time, you'll have a customer who expects you to make changes on your website regularly. If you want to keep your customers happy, you have to call them. you you can't just make a subscription and and say, "Oh, goodbye. I'll see you in one year." You have to keep them happy. Yeah. Another one would be make sure that your terms and conditions are on point and that you worked on them because um it's it could be also a source of complications. We haven't had this so far, but I'm expecting it to happen someday where a customer stops paying while they still

8:31have the engagement going. So you have to make sure that u everything's clear here on what happens when they stop paying. Are they getting their website back or do you stop and and cancel it? What happens? Um yeah. So be clear on this things.