5 – More Money, Less Hustle: Multiple Revenue Streams for Web Designers

What’s up y’all. Welcome to the web design empire, where we share stories and strategies to help you build your web design empire from a side gig to multiple six figs. I’m John, this is Kelly. We’re full time freelance web designers who’ve escaped the real world, Broke up with our jobs, our bosses, our cubicles, and our commutes over 15 years ago, and we haven’t looked back.

We’re also course creators, web design store owners. Kelly owns Airbnbs, and I’m a touring professional musician. All that to say, We are building our empires. Aren’t we, Kelly? Yeah. Constantly building building. And you know what? There’s more than one way to build the empire. Indeed. Indeed there is.

I’m segwaying early. A little too early. How’s your week going? How’s your week? Your week has not been great, right? It just started. No? Why? Well, end of last week wasn’t great. [00:01:00] Oh, OK. Well, this WordPress drama, let’s not even go into that. I’m hoping by the time this airs, like this won’t even be a thing, but probably not.

Yes. My host doesn’t have access to WordPress currently, but we’re going to save that for another day. No, my my husband and I went to the mountains this weekend to spend the weekend at our condo, enjoying the fall colors and it was glorious and we went on a hike. I’m not a big hiker, but I was like, whatever I’ll go exercise outside.

And we ran into this mama and baby mountain goat and it was really, really cool. Kind of scary, but really cool. They were super chill. Have a great video. It was awesome. And then I’d search afterward, like they came within five feet of us and I search afterwards and it’s like, make sure, mountain goats can be quite aggressive when they are protecting their young.

Make sure you stay 50 yards away. And if they approach you to yell at them, I was like, well, we did all of that wrong, but [00:02:00] we’re still standing in a really cool video. I’m just glad we didn’t see a bear. That’s all I think about is getting eaten by bears and mountain lions.

How was your weekend, John? It was good. What do you do with the kids? Well, since our oldest is 16. Okay, yeah. And we invited them. They were welcome to join us. Not one of them wanted to come. They don’t want to hike. They don’t want to hike. They don’t want to see trees. Like they don’t care.

So yeah, it was just us, which was fabulous. That was the first time we actually stayed there just us two. And it’s this particular condo is just a small, it’s one bedroom, one bath. We can all fit, but it’s squishy. So it was great. And we have, it’s right on the blue river. So we just stayed in the patio and watch the river and it was great.

We have a bunch of elk and there’s like the the daddy elk the one with all the antlers there’s one in Estes Park this guy and he’s the daddy elk and I don’t know his horns must go back More than half his body like [00:03:00] this.

It’s it they’re huge and I’ve ran I feel bad. Yeah, he’s got to hold his neck But I’ve got a couple of videos of him, one we’re driving and he’s just walking on the sidewalk. This is up at YMCA National YMCA the Rockies. And then this last time I was there, he walked right in front of our car.

I swear he was like three inches from scraping our car with his antlers, That’s awesome. Weekend was good. Yeah, this WordPress stuff got me back on Twitter which can be a, a scroll trap for sure. Yeah. And then I actually went through and, scrubbed my Twitter a bunch of posts cause they were, a lot of them would be dumb, like finally home period, you know, but, it was good to read some Fighting with Internet Explorer 6, hand to hand, hand to hand combat.

Oh, that was one of your posts? Yeah, from 2008. Just heard As Long As You Love Me by the Backstreet Boys. I miss those guys. What [00:04:00] happened to them? They’re still there. They’re still touring, yo. I’ll do a couple more. Starting a new WordPress site today. WordPress, how did I ever make it without you? 2011. Anyway,

I remember IE six, issues for sure. , but this whole thing got me back. On Twitter, and even though, the WordPress world is in chaos right now, it’s not gonna dissuade us from keep building our web design businesses, and today we’re talking about creating multiple revenue streams as web designers, and the various different revenue streams that you, can make.

Some of them are recurring, some of them are not. Some of them are one time type stuff, yeah and what inspired this topic was just today, we hit our, we made, we’ve officially made our money back on a business we purchased, I believe, 16 months ago, which was Superfly. So, very cool, very,

celebratory worthy, but it is one of our [00:05:00] many, revenue streams. So we wanted to talk about some more of those today and cheers, John. Way to go. We did it. It was such a, it was such a 16 months. That’s not bad. We finish each other’s sandwiches. That’s a Frozen reference. I’ve watched the movie a billion times.

I know exactly. I could sing the whole song with you if you want. That’s what I was gonna say. That’s another episode. . Yeah, I remember, being unsure of buying this business like I know and it’s just like if you’re unsure then And now how many months later 16 months later Now I’m like good now, I’m like, let’s do it again.

I know I know Now it’s like what was I what was I worried about? But things can go, things can go wrong, but if, but not if we’re at the helm, duh. Nice. So yeah, that’s, I guess we could talk about that one first. That’s our first, one of our many, revenue [00:06:00] streams is a digital core.

Well, it’s a digital product. It’s themes and plugins that we sell on besuperfly. com. It’s a wonderful stream of revenue and mostly because it’s subscription based. So it’s, Memberships that are repeating, hopefully. And yeah, so far so good. It’s been a lot of fun to take on and watch it evolve.

And we have, we always have big plans for it, but we’re always busy. And so they move slowly, but they do move. Yeah. My introduction to Superfly was, it I guess it’s narcissist narcissistic for sure. Oh. But any artist though is a little narcissistic.

You have to be right, because you’re like, oh, this looks great. I bet people will pay for this . But before Superfly, I had tried selling, some Photoshop files on Envato,

but there were just so many, and you’re listing them for like nine dollars, we have a couple designers, that we’ve worked with in the past, Artillery, that sell a collection of, oh gosh, [00:07:00] like wedding, here’s everything you need for your wedding.

Invitations, yeah. All designed out and some of them do okay on there. Yeah. But Superfly, I had made this child theme, for this framework we use called Divi. So it’s a very niche market. WordPress plugins and child themes that will only work if you have this one other theme one theme installed so very yes.

So the business hinges on the success of this theme, and we are aware of that, that was my only. Reservation when purchasing I don’t want, a business I own to completely rely on this other business. I have no control over. But, since we are, we’ve basically devoted our businesses to this theme at this point.

So yeah, we’re all in on it anyway, so if it goes down, we’re going down with it. Yeah, the theme is called Titanic and it’s floating just fine right now. I mean, right now it’s okay. It’s a very nice ship. That’s right. That’s right. Let me ask you this.

What percentage of Superfly’s revenue is subscription? The vast [00:08:00] majority. Like 80%? 80%? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. What if it was flipped before we bought it? What if it was 20 percent is subscription and 80 percent is one time purchases? I don’t think I would have done it.

I’d have been like, oh, I don’t know. I know you were really, you were all about that. Well, at the time we had a monthly subscription, that we’ve now switched to just the annual subscription. But yeah, I know you were all about that and I agree. Yeah, I think I’ve said this before, but even in investments that my husband and I look at, if there’s not some sort of recurring revenue involved Not interested, not interested in this and this business opportunity.

So yeah, absolutely. That’s how much recurring revenue has changed our lives for sure. And starting with web design but yeah, that was definitely, that was clutch. That was a big, big factor in the decision. So that method of a revenue stream is a little rare, I think, for most web designers.

Yeah, I think there’s others that have, that have tried to [00:09:00] sell, themes and you could, there’s other marketplaces that you can sell them on. I know some graphic design, like I, one of our students who’s, who graphic design is her main thing. She had a very successful store on Etsy for a long time and then she switched it to its own website, because Etsy’s fees just got out of control.

So yeah, if you’re a graph designer, she does like t shirts and stuff. And yeah, she has a nice chunk of, revenue from, designing these things one time and selling them for eternity. It’s a pretty sweet business concept that the digital product. I know others, I know people who have done like icon sets there’s Plenty of options in that graphic y kind of area, or even like stock photos, if you’re into photography or videography, but yeah, I don’t know a lot of web designers besides her that have done a digital product store.

Graphic y, I like that. Graphicy Graph Graphicy. Well, since we’re on kind of rarer ones that we are rarer that we’re participating in, you mentioned a student of ours. Student what student, what are we talking about here? Well, [00:10:00] John , yeah. Another revenue stream we have is our course Breaking the Web, that teaches aspiring web designers, how to build websites.

And build a business out of building websites. And yeah, we’ve had that for a while, and, it’s been more of a passion project than anything, but it’s been a lot of fun. We’ve certainly helped a lot of students, do some pretty amazing things and it continues to evolve as well.

Yeah, because we keep giving it love. But yeah, courses. Gosh, I think there was, isn’t the copywriter that works with you guys? Doesn’t she like have a one off course that she sells? Like how to build the content for you? I think that’s really smart. Even as a web designer, you could build just a mini course on people who maybe want to DIY or, just some other one off mini course like that, that you could just sell right on your site for people who come upon it.

I think there’s lots of options for courses and it is a popular, it’s probably a little I don’t know. I feel like [00:11:00] courses are, there’s a lot of courses now. But then there’s whole sites dedicated to it, like Udemy and whatever. A lot of courses. Let me tell you, uh, Now that works well for her because she’s got her higher dollar offering which is like hey I’ll do custom copywriting for your website for four grand Well, we aren’t sure if we need a copywriter or not we have a couple people on staff that have written things before Okay.

Well, here’s this like nine hundred and some dollar course that kind of will walk them through how to write right You Website copy. So yeah, that works out well for her. Yeah, for sure. It gives folks an option, a little off ramp. But again, with courses, same thing as digital products. Like you build it once.

And then you can sell it a billion times like that’s the idea. So it’s a solid use of time. You know, we actually thought, so speaking of, on this, , we were almost going to add [00:12:00] artillery. So artillery, everything is not everything, but a lot of stuff is kind of military themed, right? You know, arm up, arsenal, stuff like that.

And we were going to have this, more advanced website tutorials. So all the sites that we launched come with like, here’s your basic, how to hop in and edit whatever. But it’s not here’s how to build a landing page from scratch and here’s some other stuff. So we almost made this, collection of tutorials, advanced tutorials called flight school.

And we were going to sell it as a monthly. to the clients that wanted to do more with their website, but They didn’t want to keep hitting support and paying three, four support hours a month, getting these new landing pages spun up.

But we, anyway, we never did it cause it just felt like, there’s only like maybe three or four people that would do this. It’s a lot of work. So anyway, that was one that, yeah, but depending on the type of clients you have, I mean, maybe that would make sense. But yeah, courses are. Solid concept for a revenue stream for sure.

We got to hit the [00:13:00] obvious ones, you know, the monthly recurring revenue, the maintenance plans, reselling, hosting, like that’s kind of a bread and butter. That’s a big chunk of our income. We’ve never mentioned it before.

And if you’re not doing it, you should. Okay. Soapbox over. What are some other not so obvious, revenue streams that you got anything else on your list? We might as well spell that out though, by hosting and maintenance. Oh, are we? Okay. She means website, website hosting and then what maintenance, what do you do for your maintenance?

Maintenance is things like plugin and theme updates, WordPress core updates, but those are pretty much done by the host at this point. Uptime monitoring maybe, or maybe not. And then I do things like malware scams once a week. It’s stuff like that. It’s additional, it’s like advanced security.

And then just the maintenance guts that is required to keep WordPress safe, [00:14:00] like those updates. Yeah, that’s. Let me ask you this. Cause you’re, let me think, I’m thinking on our, I think our hosting plans, yearly revenue is probably a third of, or a quarter of our overall revenue.

Revenue, I think. Mm hmm. Yeah, about a quarter Because we got to sell a lot of websites because we got employees, but for you, what do you think? What do you think that ratio is? Half. That’s great. So that’s how important it is. Well, there’s no way I would have gotten to multi six figures without it because it’s a solid six figure chunk.

Yeah, and then on the totally agreed as a solo. Yeah. Well, and it’s gonna be the thing that you know, a Buyer someday will pay multiple for that part of your business because it’s correct It’s just the monthly just like we did we probably wouldn’t have bought superfly without all that month, subscription Same thing.

For sure. Same idea when someone goes to buy your web design business someday. And so speaking of [00:15:00] hosting, I have hosting add ons. So Artillery, we have a few add ons. I don’t know if you have add ons. That’s right. But we have a few. I do not. We have a few. We have a website speed add on, 29 bucks a month, a Google search console management.

Oof, I wouldn’t want to do that. But we have, so we probably have, I think, five clients on the website speed. On the Google search, it’s probably have another five on there. And then I put AI, we have an AI integration for text and images. No one’s done it. It’s 5 a month. No one’s done that one yet.

Because you can get it for free off, chat GPT or whatever. Yeah, this is built into the, but yeah, it’s, and the image generation is not great yet. It’s not quite there. I’ll tell you what I have had I’ve had more cry laughing moments with Photoshop AI than I can remember.

Oh my God, I have belly laughed at the stuff this thing comes up with. And it’s fantastic. When it works well, it works really well. But when you try to get creative with it, Oh my gosh. For [00:16:00] example, I have a client that is a bunch of running hats. And so we have a photographer take, great photos and it’s just on a white background.

But then my contact was like, I really want, model shots in these hats, but she’s like, can’t AI do that? And I was just like, okay. So I have this hat in Photoshop, but I’m trying to tell Photoshop, put a runner in this hats, outside. And anyway, I don’t know if my prompts are so bad or what, but the, Oh my God, the things that can, and then she was like, make sure the runner has tattoos.

I don’t know why, but there’s just this random arm like coming through the photo with the tattoo. And then the fingers are always wonky. And there was like a two headed person. Like he had another head coming out here. And then, oh my God, it’s a masterpiece. It’s good for a laugh.

But it also does do. Things, well, fingers, anything, anything spelled in the background, like any, Oh yeah. It all looks like Russian or something. I don’t know any, any text on any kind of sign. So fun. The best experience I’ve had [00:17:00] with it. Has, is, was just this past week, so we’re working on, the band I’m in we’re working on a kickstarter to raise money for this music video, there’s this movie ranch in Southern California where they have an old school diner, they have an old school motel and an old school gas station, and the premise of it all is that we work at the gas station, so we got these, I just actually have, I have a My overalls came in yesterday.

We’re gonna spray paint this big logo on the back and Brian and I work at the gas station Anyway, there’s a zombie attack on the town but not not more like walking dead zombies Like the eyes are a little off in the walk not like not like they’re missing limbs or whatever and so and so We worked up a kickstarter video and using pictures from the movie ranch.

The place looks amazing. i’ll be sure when we release it To link it up on the show. Yeah But I asked mid journey, which is an ai image generator to like hey I need two guys that work at a gas station and coveralls. I want it 1980s vibe. I want it at [00:18:00] golden hour at night, Kodak film, and there needs to be, a shadowy zombie, approaching them.

And it actually did. It actually did pretty well. So yeah, I’ll send you a couple of them. And then I asked it for A desert scene with a movie clapper. That’s a stay wild on it. And it really, didn’t do well but my point being is when you want that third arm growing out, it’s like, Oh yeah, it actually all on Photoshop for the, actually.

I’ve had really good with it extending images. Yeah, no, that’s the bread and butter in Photoshop is like, Hey, this is only 400 pixels wide. It needs to be 2000. Help me out. And then it’s perfect. But when you try to generate human beings, it’s something else. That looks really cool, John.

He showed me the pictures. Okay. We’ll have to post these. All right. Okay. We just went way off topic. Yeah, but that was fun. That was fun. We do need an episode on AI because I think I’m using it more and more and it’s fun. Okay. All right. Other things. I think, as far as. Revenue [00:19:00] streams for web designers.

There’s stuff like, I’m a big fan of upsells. So adjacent service upsells, whether that’s, maybe you have some writing experience and you can sell like a monthly blog or like an email series. If you have graphic design experience, you can, have a branding upsell or, there’s social media, there’s SEO, digital marketing, all that crap.

But the, I think like The warning here would be, don’t spread yourself too thin. And also pay attention to make sure you’re tracking your time versus the revenue, because a lot of those things might not be worth, like when you’re, doing the reports to see how much time you’re spending versus what you’re making.

Like that’s why I know you cut out print design and I did as well, because on my reports, I realized, Oh man, I’m spending way more hours on this. So yeah. Just pay, yeah, exactly, just pay attention to, well, some of those things, I think some of those that I listed have an opportunity for recurring.

And again, if you’re using tools like AI, like it might be more doable. But yeah, the [00:20:00] print stuff was a loser back in the day for us. Some other ideas would be, like I’m just getting into reselling, or White labeling type stuff with SEO, and ads just because I have so many clients ask for it and I’m sick of turning business away.

But yeah, reselling, and white labeling, whether, we resell hosting, and domain type stuff, but then, again, looking into white labeling, SEO and ads. And then I remember at one point I was reselling a leads, like a review management type system. Which was all the rage for a while, but then Google just got so picky about how those things worked that it kind of went, I, there’s still some systems that work okay, but the one I was using doesn’t.

Then another big one that I like is paid referral partnerships. So it’s like a referral partnership, whether it’s a bigger agency, like for me as a solo person, I would refer like bigger sites to them. They would refer smaller sites to me. And then you can have a referral fee attached to that, which is nice.

Same thing with any adjacent [00:21:00] industry to web design. So, logo designers, branding, SEO, digital marketing, social media. photography, copywriting, all those things. It’s great to have a partnership in place so that you guys have, a referral network. And again, where it wouldn’t make sense to have those fees in place as well.

But the warning there is if you’re making money off a referral fee, you better be dang sure that that’s an Awesome referral partner because otherwise I can come back to really bite you You don’t want to be making money off of people who suck at what they do. Yeah, your clients will tell you they will yeah, i’ve been betting on that and in the seo Area, yes Seo is tough man.

It is tough. That’s why i’m going rogue because i’m sick of sending clients to crappy People what do you mean going rogue the white label deal? You Well, yeah, that’s why I’m just, I’m gonna take it on myself in some form or fashion. I would love to like I have like concepts of like a [00:22:00] SEO specifically for small, our type of clients, which is a very specific niche.

It’s like really small businesses by small business standards. And then it’s, or solopreneurs, it’s people with small budgets who still want to reach more than one town, which is like, if you want to reach more than one town in SEO, it, your budget has to triple. So it’s, again, I would love to be able to create something that works for these people specifically.

But in the meantime, I’m testing out a few different white label companies right now. And it’s an adventure. We’ll see what happens. I’ll come back and let y’all know what I discover. Yeah, I feel like most web designers, their main revenue stream is going to be, self building the website, getting paid to build the website.

And then after that, it’s going to be your hosting and maintenance plan. Yeah. And then after that, it’s probably going to be the SEO thing. And it’s just a big one that I’ve kind of always ignored, just send them to, there were three different, [00:23:00] we’ve gone through three different S, four, we’ve gone through four different SEO partners.

I’ve gone through more than that. Yeah, it’s bad. And my clients have gone through more than that. Like I have a client who was on their fifth SEO company in three years which doesn’t say great things about my client, I understand. But, it was truly like a performance issue with, they make these big promises and they do not deliver.

And it gets old fast. Yeah, you’re at the mercy of Google’s algorithm or whatever which will change, you would just have to set clear expectations with the client, like, Hey, look, here’s, this is what’s working now, but Google’s going to change the game at some point. And I think that’s a good point.

I SEO companies do such a garbage job at setting expectations. They just promise the world, they get that contract, and then, when it doesn’t deliver the world, everyone’s unhappy. It’s a bummer on both sides. Like, [00:24:00] cause at first, at first it can be amazing for both sides, right?

Like let’s say there’s a company that’s not doing, anything at all, let’s say. And so then they find a decent SEO person or company. And it starts working and awesome. Now they’re getting an extra, I don’t know, let’s say 50 leads a month. And it’s amazing.

But eventually on the provider side, algorithms are going to change, or there’s going to be more competition coming in or who knows what. It’s going to get tougher to maintain that rank and without raising the price or whatever. And then on the customer side, 50 leads is great for, four or five, six months.

Now it’s like, Hey, why aren’t we getting 75 leads? Yeah. Why aren’t we, why aren’t we, why? And so you just, I know it’s just this, it’s this never ending moving target. You just got to, that’s right. The proverbial goalposts are moving. And I think you just have to really be if I was selling SEO, I’d just be really up front with people and being like, here’s, things are going to change.

Okay. They’re going to change. Never once has being [00:25:00] honest and straightforward, with the business plan, never once has that bitten us. Like that is by far the best policy. Yeah. Just set those super clear expectations. But yeah, again, like I don’t think I’ve worked with an SEO company yet who has been super.

honest and clear on those types of things. It’s sad. Yeah, a big thing for me overall is being able to stand behind the work that you do. And being able to, being like, Hey, I don’t, whether, Hey, company that we’re doing a website for your product or service is on you, but the website we’re going to build for you, no matter what is going to be an improvement over what you had before, no matter what, you know?

And so I can, I feel good about that. I feel like the price we charge is fair. And then a rule that we used to have that we’re now breaking. We used to only work on revenue streams that were recurring. And if they were non recurring like print, we wouldn’t do them.

Well, now we offer. Two things that are non [00:26:00] recurring, but it helps the website project go better. One of those is in house junior copywriting with AI assisting. And then the other one is we have a gal who, works for us who will do logo and branding for your project. It’s not all out like a full time logo branding person would be, but it’s not as pricey as that.

But in the end it helps the website get moving and get done, especially the copywriting side. So those are two non recurring things that we now offer. No, it’s great. Well, and you guys have the resources to pull that off. No one’s getting spread too thin for that. And those are solid upsells that are that makes super sense with the website.

That’s, yeah, no, that’s that makes a lot of sense to me. Love it. Yeah, there were just a couple others that I had here. One is, affiliate income, right? John and I are affiliates for hosts, for our students and for, some plugins. Email marketing, ConvertKit.

Oh yes, and email marketing. It’s [00:27:00] called Kit now. Yeah, kit. So yeah, if you are, constantly sending, clients or users, to certain resources, most certainly sign up as a affiliate for that resource, whether it’s a host or a plugin or some kind of tool, another one that I’ve done in the past, I wonder if you have ever done this, John, is like a, Yeah.

Yeah. Another revenue stream is like consulting or just strategy work. I used to just offer like a website analysis, where I did just like a video review of the website and what I would change. Any more, I kind of do that anyway with my projects. And so that’s just gotten absorbed into my custom website projects, but I did have a few takers on that back in the day when it was, they had an in house team and they just wanted an outside opinion on, how to update their site.

Is that something you guys have ever offered? No, not for paid, not for, not for paid. Trying to win a site, but that, that jogged my, [00:28:00] that jogged my memory, on another revenue stream that you and I are doing right now. What? Oh, oh, two of them actually. This podcast could be a revenue stream someday.

Oh yeah, that’s right. If it went well. Knock on wood, like yeah. That’s, that’s one, like, Yeah. Because we’ve paid to be on a podcast before. I mean, that’s true. We have. That’s a thing. The other thing, which kind of goes with today’s sponsor, today’s sponsor, no surprise is break into web, break into web dot com starter scale, self employed web design business and lifestyle that you love.

But a new thing that we’ve rolled out at break into web is a masterminds mastermind. And we’re in the middle of the master right, right now. When you said give the last one, you just mentioned consulting strategy, it’s all things strategy. One of our masterminds, all of it.

Yeah. One of our mastermind students right now, we’ve talked everything from website and pricing, what hosting companies [00:29:00] having babies while building low design income, financial planning. We’ve talked health insurance. Oh my gosh. All over the place. Rentals, Airbnb rentals. It’s really life coaching.

It’s what’s turning into, which it’s great. I think we’re old enough that it just turns into that, but that’s a, that’s another revenue stream that we now have. We are mastermind coaches. And it’s. I love it. I absolutely love it. Super fun. It is so fun. And I wish I would have had it.

Oh my gosh. To this stuff because the things that we’re telling, the mastermind students are hard earned lessons, you know? Yes. Well, and some things that have gone great. Some things that in our, some experiences that we had in our life that have gone really great. It’s a lot of life advice and business advice. Yeah. And it’s over Voxer. So yeah, the students get like direct access to both of us, to ask like literally two on one type of questions. They get both of our [00:30:00] perspectives on every question, which is a lot of times they’re quite different.

Sometimes they’re very similar. So it’s a well rounded, consultation. We talk logos. If you will. We talk logos on there. Oh, yeah. And then we share our network with them. So the folks that we’ve, we know this gal does killer logos.

You can use them. Or here’s a couple, here’s a couple of our other students that would do subcontract work for you. And it’s been a lot of fun. And agreed. Yeah, I would like to do more of that. You know what I want to do less of building new sites.

That’s why we have these other revenue streams. Speaking of, okay. My last two are fun because, it’s way off of web design. And the point being like, John and I have used our recurring revenue and our profits to dip our toes into other adventures that aren’t necessarily web design related, even though we have those as well.

But yeah, something that John’s working on is, [00:31:00] SAS platform, right. Something that they’ve been raising money for and working on and it’s super cool and it’s kind of related to web design because it is a website after all. Well, I mean, it’s like an app, but, um, but yeah, tell us a little bit about funnel.

It’s very how you got into it. Yeah, it’s definitely different because I’ve never fundraised before Yeah, it’s a totally different business. So you really got a you really got to believe in it number one It’s kind of work because you’re taking other people’s money and I’m trying not to, and it, you know what, it’s a catch 22 with your friends and family because on one hand you don’t want them to throw in money that they maybe can’t afford to lose.

Yeah. And so I don’t pitch it to them too hard. But then let’s say it goes really well. Then they’re going to be like, why didn’t you tell me about it? It’s the classic multi level marketing pitch, right? No, it’s a unique VIP ticketing system that has an auction based element that allows fans to determine [00:32:00] the final ticket price of an experience that they are bidding on.

And, we’ve done probably almost 20 of them now. And we have some, a lot of exciting ones in the works. There’s a, there’s an Instagram, artists who’s got like a million followers. He wants to do one this year, a couple more from a couple of larger Christian artists that want to do them.

And then there’s talks of them doing it on their tours next year. So it’s starting to become like a thing. So yeah, it’s made money. It’s made money. Success. Success. It’s and it’s also interesting too because like we don’t even have a home page right now

there’s no marketing site right now. There’s just the app that’s running it And it’s beyond my skill set as a developer. So i’m working with a with three developers. Isn’t that funny? How’s that? They’re very they’re very developer like they’re hardcore developers and i’ll be like hey this You see how this looks here in figma and here’s what we have online.

Oh, it doesn’t look like that here, but you did. [00:33:00] No, no, it’s, it’s been fun. But if it was my only, if it was my source of income, right? I don’t get paid from it right now. So it would be scary not having, Artillery and super fly. This is why you diversify. So, yeah, that’s, that’s kind of my outside the box, thing that I’m working on.

That is somewhat web related and you have one, you have a website for it too. It was not, I did not work hard on this website, so please don’t hunt it down, but the pictures on it are fabulous. No, it’s, does every web designer give that caveat before they, yeah, like, let me handicap this quick before I put it out there.

But no, my off road adventure has from web design has been, real estate, and so that’s something that we’ve taken some of the, Profits from these other adventures and invested it into some real estate stuff. And it’s been a lot of fun. Well, like I said, we were just in the mountains staying at our condo.

We sold another property, earlier this year. And did very well on that [00:34:00] sale. So well that my husband quit his soul sucking job in healthcare after 15 years. So yeah, it’s been a great adventure and yes, it makes money. And no, we don’t take anything from it yet. Because we’re hoping to just take all the profits and put them back into additional investments.

It’s a fun, little game, fun, big game, I should say. But yeah, it’s been a cool adventure and I don’t think we would I’ve been able to do it without, the other revenue streams that we already have. Well, empires is what we’re talking about. Empires is not one thing.

One town is not an empire. You know, one country might not even be an empire, right? It’s usually a multiple thing approach. And you know what? I think when you’re working on multiple things. So there could be an argument of like, man, John Kelly, like you guys have your website businesses, you got breaking the web, you got super fly.

You got your Airbnb, you got your SAS service. You got your band, you got your kids that you’re raising. Imagine how much better your web [00:35:00] design businesses would be if all your energy was like, On that right, and there’s some there’s there is something about spinning too many plates at once but a couple things number one, I didn’t start freelancing to Build websites eight to five every day That’s not why I got into it, I got into it so I could play music and do other stuff.

And I think when you are balancing three, four things, you know what it prevents. It prevents burnout, it absolutely prevents burnout. I still like building websites. I still like designing, every now and then you get that county hospital website.

Not to be too specific here. Which I didn’t say, I didn’t say which one, but I did one of those too, but you might get one of those and you’re like, Oh, good grief. Why are they paying for custom? They don’t need custom. You know what? Healthcare is great. Clients are right. They pay, they let you do your thing.

They do. And then every [00:36:00] now and then you get like a really fun, unique project, but I’ve never, struggled with burnout and I think the reason why is these other things that I’m always trying to do alongside web design. I think once you get bit by the entrepreneur bug, it bites hard.

I don’t know a single entrepreneur who only has one iron in the fire. Like there’s always multiple projects going on. And, that’s just what keeps it all interesting. And yeah, you see what sticks and what you enjoy and keep doing that. Yeah.

That’s the point. So if you like this podcast, please like it, rate it, and share it with others. Leave a review. Share it. We’d love to know how we’re doing. We’d love to know what you like about the podcast so far and any topics if there’s any topics, yeah. Let us know. I think we hit a few today that we need to cover in more depth, like AI and SEO.

I think we could have off shooted those for a while. Went [00:37:00] off on some tangents. When we do the AI one, I’ll ask AI to write me a script for it. Oh, there you, I like that. That’s smart. And then I’ll have to rewrite it like creatively. And write a headline and it will most certainly say the word Unleash in it at least.

Oh man, and in today’s online marketing world, that’s Unleash, Unleash, Unleashed creative prowess. That was the one that was the one who says that. Who says that? You know what my strength is? Unleashing my creative prowess. Unleashing my creative prowess. You know who says that? The people that photoshop puts into hats with weirdly formed hands with tattoos on them.

Agreed, agreed. Our framework that we use, their AI image generation is oh, it’s so bad. It’s so bad, but the text It’ll get shockingly good pretty fast. I bet. I [00:38:00] hope. It will. Or maybe not. No, you’re absolutely right. It will. Okay, fine. Well, eventually we’ll do one on AI, even though I’m kind of anti AI right now, maybe I’m just anti change. Maybe that’s what it is. Oh no.

Oh man. All right, folks, thanks for tuning in and joining Kelly and I today on the Web Design Empire. Bye! Also, check out breakintoweb. com. Learn how you can break away from your daily grind and become a freelance web designer and create the empire you’ve been dreaming of. All right, y’all. Cheers.