Talk: Side hustle to Squarespace Expert and everything in-between

 Transcript:

So building a business going from a side hustle to full time Squarespace expert what does that look like? So here's a little story of how that happened. So back in 2014 Made by Dave came about it.

To give you some context, Squarespace 6 was out. Mostly you had a visually pleasing portfolio to choose from and otherwise blogs was the key part of the audience. What drew me to using Squarespace was that the design was the primary driving factor for building it and user experience.

And then that it was just simple and intuitive to go and use.  Back then Canva had only been out for about a year and was hardly known design tools such as Adobe XD and Figma didn't exist. And so then  built the first eight sites completely for free. Now you might think, why on earth would you build sites completely for free?

That sounds absolutely bonkers. So at the time I had a full time job and so in that sense, so financially it didn't make a difference and it was just more of my time as putting into it.  

What it did do is it helped built a portfolio and it then gave the opportunity to showcase work that I could do.

It was mostly for people within my network that I just wanted to help out.  They were people that couldn't afford a web designer and others that had like a brilliant idea but no skill.  Finally, there was one one client that had paid over the odds for a site that when I looked at it, just looked old and dated and needed a freshen up.

With those eight sites and others going forwards, I'm definitely made some big mistakes on those things like not even charging. So when I first started to charge people I didn't take a deposit at all. I just got started building the site and thought, Oh, I'll have something to show you and I can prove what I've gone and done. 

However, there was one client that said, actually don't like it at all and just walked away and I was left feeling like, oh man, I've spent far too many hours putting into this site and it's just totally gone. So now a 50% deposit is asked for upfront before we even start and touch project that guarantees that in that sense we're only going to do the project with that.  

So then came building a team. There was basically enough sites that I couldn't do it all by myself and so then bringing in freelancers from 2016 to work on sites just adhoc. There might be one site that I didn't have the capacity for so I passed it to someone else They would go and do the design.

I would sign off and check it and then off we go. Then at the beginning of 2021, I then received an invitation to join Marketplace, which then grants you quite a scary badge, as a Squarespace Expert but that was a complete game changer, which I'll come on to that in a bit.

So since then things have only accelerated and we've added our 8th team member this year. So, the start there was a need, to have this creative outlet that I needed to do something with.

I was working in a job for an international not for profit. I was running the digital side of their organisation and as a global business, they had 60 offices worldwide, but their websites were built on a variety of different platforms and all looked completely different. So Squarespace basically was my introduction via that.

What we did is then set up a custom built sites for all of these offices and they were translated into their own different languages. They were fully customised beyond a typical Squarespace site and I then thought, hang about, this seems simple enough, I can probably do this myself.  So the platform itself, Squarespace, from what I was seeing back then and still remains today, just super clean, clear, straightforward, easy to use and haven't looked back. 

People have approached us to say, can you do other types of sites, WordPress or Shopify or other things like that? It's basically been a flat no, because for us, we want to pass the sites off to the client, hand it back over to them and I don't want to pass something that we are then going to be needing to do lots and lots of follow up with.

So Squarespace has remained number one front and centre and it even remains today, head and shoulders above the competition, primarily for the fact that you're building design rich sites. 

So where did the name come from? Why Made by Dave? Typically web designers would put their name in the footer and so it was basically a playful take on that and it just naturally came about. It's professional and informative and basically does what it says on the tin. 

So the side hustle. What I created is almost something totally accidental that kind of happened to work. So what happened is we basically had too much work that I ended up turning off the opportunities or services that came through. It meant that I was basically booking myself up far too many weeks in advance and that it, I was using all of my spare time, my evenings, weekends taking calls and essentially just doing far too much. 

Then my wife and I, we were expecting our second child and I needed to keep this beast running. This is where one of our team members, Ian came along and essentially he took the projects and proved that we didn't need to turn off the leads, then we could build way more sites than I actually thought might have been possible. 

So it grew organically beyond the people that were in my like initial network, the friends, family, friends of friends, people just say, Oh, I know such and such, you need to talk to them.  We met international clients and so therefore the art of juggling time zones definitely was taken into consideration  and with all of that was the invitation from Squarespace to join marketplace. 

It meant that there was a lot of leads that were coming in for us to, to go and do, but the journey itself definitely was definitely a bit of a challenging one. So it had meant lunch breaks, evenings, weekends were totally committed to the side hustle. 

It meant that it was just using up loads of my free time then I'd stumbled across Ghost Plugins. If you're not familiar with what Ghost offer, it's essentially a lot of primarily free plugins that you can add onto your site and be able to just make them enhance and look so much better than the original stuff that you get “out of the box”.

As a primarily a designer it meant, it was like, Ooh, actually I can go and do this and I can go and create all these different things that people were going and asking for then. 

I came across community Facebook groups and others on LinkedIn, and there was just a real buzz and vibe that was taking place and lots of ability to connect with people and find out where they were going, what they, what their challenges were, what their, questions were. 

It always seems, even to date that when when trying to answer different people's questions, having learned along the way that people will come up, come from all different perspectives, it's super interesting to see their take on things.  

The next part of the journey is essentially that, yeah, there was way too much work, which is a real nice to have but I needed help from others. 

So therefore building a team and getting into it and just passing other people projects to go and freelance was was definitely  the just a real interesting one. I never saw when I set out that I was going to build a team but as I look back, it's absolutely the best thing that's ever happened because you can  bounce ideas off other people and you can you can take their design style as well so that you're not always churning out things that either look very samey samey or you can just  make a difference to, what people are doing.

It then gave the opportunity to basically quit full time day job and fly completely solo and  haven't looked back since, and it's absolutely brilliant. But it came at the cost of trying to do way too much, essentially having two full time jobs, which was never going to be the it's never actually going to be possible but the rest is history. 

So lessons in terms of what have I learned and if you're thinking of going full time in this and it currently is a side hustle and what could you, what could you do to take those next steps in going completely freelance? 

So the first was to help others.

As I said at the beginning, I did the work for eight clients completely pro bono. Why? To get a portfolio that truly demonstrated what I could do, but it sought out to offer services that for people that I never that were never able to afford to pay for a site those that were not for profits.

One in particular was an author that was looking to exhibit their work and in return was able to create a project, a portfolio of work that showcased design, technical ability and then ended up leading to first paying clients.  

Seeking help. 

When I didn't have the bandwidth to deliver client projects solo, asking others to design and work and assist me was the best thing that I've ever done. It showed what's possible. A collaborative process is always super insightful. You pick up tips, tricks, and gain from others, new perspectives and approaches to how you'd go about what somebody is actually after, plus it's always fun.  

Prioritizing time.  

However busy or pressured work gets, for me, family must come first and that you can definitely learn the hard way with trying to put all your energy into into running a business.  And it's almost flipping it on its head in terms of saying, okay, what is your priorities?

It does take a lot of hard graft and setting up a business, so it can be so tempting to keep driving and forgo other commitments. 

Having fun along the way. 

Don't take things seriously. When you're having fun, it brings freedom. It allows the creative juices to flow which essentially turns into opportunities to go and create sites. I think we've worked on in excess of 350 sites, which is absolutely wild, but it means that you can just have fun with building it. Learn from what you've gone and done and learn those lessons, but people think that working like a 50+ hour week will bring them happiness, like financially, etc it won't I'll just be frank with you, it would just end up leaning into burnout. 

Being part of that supposed ‘5am club’, honestly, isn't cracked up to what it's meant to be in terms of just spending way too many hours, you would end up, if you totted up the number of hours that you might spend times, the supposed hourly rate, do you were like charging yourself out at, you'd probably find that you're not actually making that amount of money on what you're up to then dreaming big.

So I'd say go for it in terms of you never know what's around the corner. Honestly, I didn't think the day would come where Squarespace would approach me and say,  Hey, we'd like you to become an expert on their marketplace, but it did. And I couldn't believe a little, little old me gets to play on the international stage.

So anyway, those are a few thoughts in terms of  how the side hustle ended up turning into a full time job.