VIDEO: What Makes a $100k Website?

This talk was given by Victor Ramirez and took place at WordCamp Madrid in 2019.

Summary

We’ve built almost a dozen websites valued at over $100,000 each. Many people asked us how we did this and what we included. They’re surprised to learn it wasn’t just code.

From speaking to hundreds of biz owners we have created a blueprint for building sites that have $100k in value (that they have not even thought of).

In 2019 at WordCamp Madrid, we shared the blueprint in a non-technical & technical way.

This is for people trying to sell these sites or business owners trying to understand what a $100k site looks like.

Highlights

Includes case studies from MakerBot.com, TodayTix.com, Wibbitz.com.
Website support feedback loops. Immediate feedback on support submissions, ticket tracking, CRM integration, & More.
How to build & sell websites beyond just a WordPress install and deliver up to $100,000 in value.

Transcription (via Otter)

Victor Ramirez 00:03

Thank you. I’m from New York. So I speak kind of fast. So I’ll try to speak slowly. If you start, if I start to lose, you just kind of fall asleep, and I’ll see you. And then I’ll know that I need to go a little slower. Cool. So this was already covered. I’m a lead software engineer at Dow Jones. And we’re currently building our whole new editorial system in Gutenberg. So that’s really exciting. And yeah, I am the founder of abstract up. But I also mentor, teaching people to code at thankful and I like to share that I give back by I run the WordPress NYC Meetup. We have 7000 members, and I teach people once a month, how to use WordPress. So that’s how I got where I am. If you want the slides later, just tweet at me. Or if you’d like something that I said, tweet about it, I like Twitter. I like Instagram, too. That’s my handle. And the hashtag Debussy mad. I like encouragement, it lets me know that you guys like what I’m saying. So this is irrelevant, because I didn’t get to update that. But just again, follow on Twitter, and I will drop the slides in there. This was marked as an advanced talk, you don’t have to be an advanced developer to know what I’m going to talk about today, or know how to build a $100,000 website. But you should know the basics of WordPress administration. One of the problems that I find is that a lot of people who try to sell WordPress, they actually have never used WordPress as a software. They’re a developer, they come in and they try to build their own custom user roles, instead of building them in the WordPress way. So I recommend that you really understand how to build custom user roles on WordPress, how CBTs or custom post types work in WordPress, knowing how to do a proper development process. And again, if if you guys are here, I’m assuming you’re advanced, if you’re not advanced, you should know this stuff. And if you don’t know, it’s all right there. And again, these are in the slides. As of WordPress five in December, LinkedIn learning which used to be Linda has the WordPress five training for free. And I really recommend no the code. Second, these are both free courses that will get you up to speed. They’re phenomenal. And anyone that wants to go into WordPress are recommended to them. And then finally, I have to say this now that I’m at Dow Jones and The Wall Street Journal, this is a big red alert. This is 100%, my personal and professional opinion, anything that I say has nothing to do with Dow Jones, or The Wall Street Journal or any other subsidiaries, corporations, etc. And if you explode your website or your business, it’s not Dow Jones fault. So yeah, there’s just one for the lawyers. All right. Moving on. So building $100,000 WordPress websites. Let me talk about how I got there. First, I was recruited by Dow Jones about a year ago. And in the negotiations of being recruited, I said that I wanted to keep my business abstract. And I had a friend who left a startup in New York City, and he was a very successful react developer. And the only problem was that he and the other person I brought on, they didn’t know how to sell WordPress. So what I had to start doing was thinking about how to break down WordPress into really simple packages, that I could easily not only communicate to my team members, but communicate to anyone I met. So with this, hopefully, not only is it going to help you you may not sell $100,000 worth of WordPress websites out of the gate. But you’ll be able to better communicate different packages and different ideas. Instead of just speaking like a developer or speaking sometimes we get in this. I call it like a bubble in WordPress where we think everyone should know how great WordPress is, or how great these things are. We have to remember that we’re only 33% of the internet so far, right? There’s another 67% who don’t know about these things. So we have to communicate in the language they speak. So here’s what I’m going to cover. First, you’re thinking about who needs a $100,000 website? It’s not going to be everyone. You can’t just expect and not everyone has $100,000 spent on a website right? To I’m going to cover why they’ll pay for it right? Why are they going to pay for this site? And I’ll show you that they’re willing to pay $100,000 for website. Three, I’ll show you what makes a $100,000 website. So what can we sell these people? How can we fulfill their needs? And then finally, I’ll go over some real life examples of $100,000 websites around that ballpark that I did.

Victor Ramirez 04:44

So excuse me, sorry, who needs a $100,000 website, right. So when I first started this process, I identified four different types of organizations that are using WordPress. The first are soloists and di wires. And there’s that’s fine And there’s hobbyists, I would say that our WordPress meetup 90% of people who work in WordPress are soloist or DIY errs. They’re using something like a page builder. They’re using something like WP Engine. And I use WP Engine to, but they’re using things that take care of all of the logic for them. They’re not doing any advanced development, everyone that uses their site, if it’s like them, and their spouse, they’re both admins, right? They don’t use the custom user roles. And that’s fine. Number two, are those not using WordPress yet? So we have to think about how do you know that people who they don’t understand the value of WordPress, right. Three, I would say is organizations, WP leads, these might be a nonprofit, these might be like a hospital or an organization. You know, it’s interesting to me how many lawyers, law firms, hospitals, etc, they use a WordPress website, but they have that one key person that manages the WordPress website. And a lot of the times that person is overwhelmed, and they need someone to help them to take that website to the next level. And then finally, this is like the, this is the best type of person that needs $100,000, WordPress website multiuser, WordPress, and what I mean by that, and I’ll give some more examples of that in the next slide. So these are the examples of those four organizations. The first one we’re not even going to cover this is they’ll never buy a $100,000 website, because they’ll never see the value of hiring someone to build it for them. It’s the site owner or the DI wire, right? They’re always going to try to find a better plugin, they’re always going to try to find a snippet, they’re always going to try to find someone just fill in the hole, fill in the blanks for them. They don’t need you. And that’s fine. And that not everyone’s a perfect customer, right. The second one is people using Squarespace people using Drupal, people using things like craft CMS, I get a lot of advertisements for craft CMS, because I guess I have WordPress as a keyword and my Twitter, bio, or whatever, if you ever mentioned if you ever see on Twitter, where someone says, I need a new website, would you guys recommend a craft CMS has a bot that just tells people crap CMS crap CMS. And so, yeah, so those people, they don’t really, they may not understand the benefits of open source, they may not understand that Squarespace isn’t a CMS, it’s just a website builder. And I’ll get to that a little bit. The third is, again, like back to the organizations of the WordPress lead. It might be a nonprofit with a single WP admin, or small agency they’re working with, that’s not really a WordPress agency. They’re like a marketing agency that happens to do WordPress sometimes, right. And then fourth, and again, like this is the most important are publishers or multi-role stores. And so the real beauty of WordPress, and you see this a lot with WooCommerce. A lot of the times people build a WooCommerce site, and they’re like, Well, I paid a guy $500 And just doesn’t work. And I think what they don’t understand is that if you think about the way a store works, even physically outside of, you know, a digital space, there’s a lot of different things, there’s the person filling the inventory, the person filling the orders, the person doing credit card processing, the person doing the invoices, the person designing the emails are really great competitive. And if you want to be Amazon, I don’t know how it is here in Spain. But that’s your number one competitor, if you want to sell online, in the United States, it’s Amazon. If you want to be Amazon, you have to create such a great experience. And so that’s like why I think number four, that’s really great. And the same thing, publishers, the Wall Street Journal, and Dow Jones and other publishers, we have multi user roles, we have no one as an admin except for the devs. And we don’t even have admin role on the production. It’s only on dev and QA. And so there’s editors, writers, photojournalist, all these different roles. And those are gonna be the focus for the talk. We’re not going to talk about di wires.

Victor Ramirez 08:46

There we go. Okay, sorry, I’m hitting this thing really hard. All right. So how do we find the people that need this $100,000 website, right. And these are, there’s a bunch of different indicators, like one of my indicators is never work with a business owner, don’t work with an individual owner, target a CMO, targeted marketing manager, target a CTO target those people, because if you work with like, an individual business owner, I’ve even found organizations where there’s like, 20 people, but the business owner is so close to those 20 people and micromanaging them, that he’s so close to the wallet, that when He sets aside a $100,000 budget, he’ll start to say, well, how can we get it down to 50,000 when something else starts to hurt, right? Whereas a CMO, they’re given like, you know, a $1 million budget 100,000 are a budget, they have a budget to spend, and they will allocate resources towards you, if you can show them the value of those resources. So revenue threshold is one of them. And I’ll get into those regularly updated content. So they’re regularly updating their content if you have someone with a website, but they never post anything, or they never share any content. They’re not going to value a CMS right? And it’s not just blogs, it could be are they adding product regularly updating prices? Are they doing sales? Are they doing promotions? Um, Third is organization size, right? So how big of an organization are they? Fourth, and this is a big one, industry compliance. So if you can find a niche where you can find some kind of industry compliance, and I’ll give a great example of that after. And when I get to next slide. It’s almost like you just can, it’s like shooting fish in a barrel. Because once you get that first person who realizes they’re getting sued for something, all their friends are getting sued to, and they’re gonna call you up. So here’s a quick revenue Value Indicator, there’s many different ways to find out the revenue business. For some reason, when you ask people, What was your revenue last year, people get real awkward, and Ooh, we got to talk about that. But I think they forget that there’s math. And so you can just say, Oh, they have 10 employees in New York City, and employees in HR and this etc. And they might have an average salary of one or $2,000, I could go on Glassdoor and find out their average employee salary. And I would assume that if they have 10, employees are paying an average of $100,000. They’re not spending more than 50% on labor costs. So we can see the $2 million in revenue. Another thing you can check out is CrunchBase. CrunchBase, keeps data on a lot of different startups, funding rounds, etc. And there’s another great company called data and eyes, and data and eyes, it merges data with LinkedIn, CrunchBase, tax data, a bunch of different things. I don’t know if it’s available here in Spain, but it’s a very high quality product, it starts at like $1,000 a month. But it is it’s like that’s if you if you’re like a larger agency trying to sell what am I doing wrong here? There we go. Okay. So content value indicators? Do they regularly update their site? Again, I spoke about this. But if you have someone know if they’re regularly updating, and that’s what’s kind of funny, you’ll find these bloggers are these like stores, and they’re updating their Instagram every five minutes. They’re updating their Twitter every five minutes. And why? Because it’s so easy, yet WordPress isn’t there, right. And so if you follow, and you can create a great user experience. And that’s what we’re trying to do, you know, in newsrooms and Dow Jones, and hopefully, so they’re trying to do with Gutenberg, which is that it’s a user experience, that is simple. And so for example, like, you know, get rid of the clutter in the user interface and make it so that someone can just like log in post a photo, one of the best examples that I see if anyone follows any kind of publications, I think, Vice magazine does it in New York Magazine does it, they all say click the link in the bio to see the post, right? That would just be setting up a custom post type that links to the article. And they all do that in Instagram. And that could even be done for a store where you feature a product. So if they’re updating their content outside of WordPress, you can sell them and say, hey, look, we’re gonna make it just as easy as your Instagram, or even using the API to tie them together.

Victor Ramirez 12:50

organization size indicators, larger organizations have larger needs, right? So for example, there was a publisher that I recently spoke with, and they have their own API for all their books, and their books, API’s. And then like, hundreds of 1000s of books. And they did not want to create a custom page for each of these. And they understood the value of can we have a CMS dynamically populate every single book as a post or a page in our website. And so once they understood that, then it was more of a story of St. You know, and then saving the labor costs, because once I had the conversation with them, they were having people manually add every single book, and I think they had stopped at 3000 when they realized it was just too big of a job. And they were like we have an API Can’t you know, people use API’s for Instagram? Can we use our API to populate books, and larger organizations for larger needs. You can also when I get into some of the case studies, you know, there are organizations where it’s not a one man show entering content. And it might be someone who needs to hire contributing writers, they want to hire freelancers. And you as the WordPress expert can educate them, how you can use custom post statuses, custom posts, custom post types, and custom user roles to control the workflow of those users. industry compliance is another huge value. And so are they devs schools or medical? Right? This is huge. This is this is a big thing going on. In the United States, we have something called the American Disabilities Act. I’m not a lawyer. So I’m going to paraphrase this. It essentially says that any public property that is fair use of your business has to be readily accessible to people with disabilities. There is a large grocery chain in the United States that spent $7 million on a brand new website. And a federal court ruled that that website because you need to use the website to get the coupons. You need to use the website to get the prices you need to get used the website to get the newsletter that is now fair and public grounds and therefore it must be ADA accessible, and they got sued. They had to pay $500,000 to the guy who couldn’t use the site. And they had to pay $500,000 To fix the site. And so now the big thing is all these art galleries, they all have websites to sell their art. Well guess what? The Art Gallery website is an extension of their art gallery. And so they’re having lawsuits like crazy in Los Angeles, New York, Minneapolis, very hot art scenes. And that’s been a great lead driver for us. And also thinking medical in the United States, you have HIPAA GDPR is a great thing going to these businesses and saying, Hey, I noticed that you deal with data. And those are different value cells. And so they’re looking for experts, right? So the kind of people the people that are listed before, they’re not looking for an implementer. And you can also educate them, because one of the problems and again, it’s not a problem. So Louis de wires, there 90% of people who come to me meetups, and that’s who helps build the WordPress space. But the people that you’re trying to sell these $100,000 websites to, they don’t want this implementer workflow, I installed it, it works. Thank you. That’s like a 30 minute install, right. But it’s a professional developer. This is a professional developer workflow, discovery, development and unit testing, quality assurance and integration, testing, deployment, and monitoring. Right? If no one’s familiar with that, by the way, it’s just a standard development workflow. Again, the slides will be there, you can look it up. But I want to get to the stuff that you guys probably came for. There we go. So let’s price via developer workflow. This is just a quick salary calculation that I just did for myself. It’s essentially my desired annual salary plus my costs with weekly hours times the working weeks. It’s it doesn’t it’s not really important, again, like this, these will be on the slides. But knowing that I live in New York City, I need to make $100,000 Yes, it’s unfortunate just to afford a studio apartment $24,000 for my medical costs, and maybe my hardware, and only working 25 hours a week, because 25 hours production, I need another 15 hours to go and sell right. So you have to be realistic, you can’t freelance 40 hours a week. So I have to charge 103 an hour. So knowing that I charged $103 an hour, right?

Victor Ramirez 17:14

Let’s think about, again, we’re not doing the 30 minute install, we’re doing a proper development workflow, because of compliance reasons. We can’t look what happened with PIP dig, right? We can’t just go and install a plug in and expect it to be all great with our business, right? We should be using things like Query Monitor, you should be using things like if you don’t know what this is, you can look it up load balancers that go and check what call outs are being made from the DNS, right? And so those are the things you can talk to your client about. But these are things that you can easily sell knowing if you follow the development workflow, they should take at least five hours, custom user roles, who are your users? What are their capabilities? What will they do? Not everyone’s gonna be an admin. So who will be an admin who will have these capabilities? Will you have SSO? That could take a whole nother five hours? Are you gonna use G Suite? Are you gonna Okta are gonna use often zero form integrations? What’s your CRM? Is it an API? Do you want to connect via Zapier, if not, Zapier, do you want to use this, all of these different things, mail sent via SMTP if everyone’s not familiar, there’s something called a dead man snitch, you can’t just set up mail SMTP, you got to set up something to make sure that the mail sending Gravity Forms had an update. And you know, it wasn’t sending email from MailChimp. And people only found out when they got a complaint from their customers. But you can set up different things and sell those as value adds. And one of my favorites. This is like an old this is like one of the coolest things ever found. You can brand all of your for your error pages, not just your 404. You can drop an HTML file for your error establishing database connection, and for your update in progress. So when you’re updating the website, people get that white screen, you can drop an HTML file, and that’s a value add for your customers. But there’s more right, so what else can we do? Now let’s talk about knowing that we’re doing a developer workflow. These are things that should take I would argue at least 18 to 20 hours. And again, we didn’t get into design yet. That’s I think too many people are like, I’m competing against Elementor and pinions, page builders, all of those things have nothing to do with page builders. And that’s the stuff that all the Page Builder people forget, we’re building a custom CMS. So custom element from design Sure. CRM integration with lead scoring, if they visit certain pages, score them as a hot lead, custom Gutenberg blocks and API’s feedback loops support and presale there’s nothing I hate more than visiting a website filling out a form and nothing happens. Did like they just send my email to How did it go? Like where did it go? Right? And I want a receipt. And so that’s something customers your customers may not think about. And one of my favorite things to sell now is like I worked with a beauty salon, and we sold an affiliate linking system. They were like, oh, we can’t get our people to buy a product because they just buy it on Amazon. And we said well, you’re on the you know, Good Morning America every morning. Why don’t we just have your Ah, stylists list their favorite products and will auto affiliate link using something like 30 Thirsty affiliates. And I’ll get into some of this in the case studies. These are items easily worth $5,000. And someone just if you guys were at the talk before this, that mobile application, integrating with a custom REST API, I’d argue that’s 10 to $15,000, Project minimum, Amazon Pali integration. So free, that’s a huge thing. Voice is going to account for 30% of internet searches soon. And so getting your customers ready for that selling them on something exciting, advanced content types of the user journey, ongoing accessibility, testing compliance, again, thinking about the art galleries. Accessibility is not just set it and forget it. It is something an ongoing process that has to be done over and over and over again, as web standards change. And then finally doing multilane implementations. multilane implementations are very complicated. It’s not just creating duplicate pages with matching content. There’s SEO stuff. And there’s accessibility usability features in there. And this is everyone always says to me, what about Squarespace. Again, forget about Squarespace, because it’s not even the same thing. Once you start to understand your client understands that, hey, look, Squarespace is a page builder. It doesn’t have REST API integrations, you could build it custom, and it would cost you hundreds of 1000s of dollars. But WordPress comes with the rest of the API’s. WordPress comes, you can get again very easily do link masking, do a lot of different interesting things. So I’m going to share two case studies. Where I and again, I fell into this more just because these clients, they essentially told me their problems, and I productized what I thought they needed.

Victor Ramirez 21:45

So this startup called today ticks, their $90 million Broadway ticketing startup in New York City. And what happened was, they have an iOS application, an Android application, they had a Windows Phone application. And they have a website. And the website is built in React. And they said we don’t want to build a whole new WordPress website. Can we just get the blog post into here? But we’re hiring all freelance writers in 30 Different countries in 30 different locations. How do we get them all onto the same site, and they can’t edit each other’s posts? Okay, cool. We did custom REST API integrations based on location. And we did custom user roles based on location and based on different teams, it was very easy. And they were you know, the master person who was in New York City was able to add and remove street teams as needed. We set up a landing page module for AdWords, if you ever want to sell like a quick 1000 to $5,000 product to your customer Unbounce, the trashiest version of Unbounce. Physical Unbounce announced their landing page builder elite pages, they’re 1200 to $2,000 a year. So you just see your customer, you set up a custom post type of promotions, with a page builder with a pop up thing and a couple other things in there. You can recreate Unbounce since your WP Rocket on there and say hey, now you just saved yourself $2,000 a year. And by the way, it’s fully custom with unlimited capabilities. We set up multilingual, English and Spanish. And again, integration of the iOS and react custom CMS dashboard. So again, making it so that every person saw it differently. And then ruffling internationalization. You got some Google that after that’s more like just making it so that there’s no SEO penalisation for duplicate content in different regions. And that’s why I didn’t do this in Spanish. Even though I speak Spanish a little bit. I have no idea how to say that in Spanish. Okay. So with it’s an AI startup I worked with, we did landing page, similar landing page modules for ads. It’s an easy sell. Everyone’s running Facebook ads, everyone’s running Twitter ads, their landing pages are garbage. And all you have to do is sell them a better option. We did GeoIP content planning for us, Israel and France. They have an office in Israel, they have an office in Paris, and they have an office in New York, we’re running into at a 50% drop off rate on our signups on Marketo forms. So we used on WP Engine GeoIP to target and, you know, and serve different forms by different regions. So we still we didn’t get the drop off in our signups in certain regions. But of course, the GDPR we did do some. We also did speed optimization and training. And then we did I think like five different custom post types. And each custom post type is managed by a different team, because they have a lot of divisions of people are doing different things in different countries in different regions. So I have five minutes for questions. I went through that fairly quickly. Again, this is just tweet at me. I didn’t get a chance to do this. I was at another conference speaking yesterday too. So this will be live but I’ll tweet the slides to you guys. This I’m actually turning this into a mini course. But I just have not had time to work on it. So yeah, questions. I see a hand up there. It’s really there’s a light my eye is so I’m gonna get him a microphone. Oh, is he 40 In were Hi there. Thanks. Thanks for the talk. Best talk for me so far. I think a lot of what you covered, obviously very, very relevant. But I think one of the main challenges is getting in front of these clients in the first place. Right? So do you have any feedback on how to get in front of those clients? So it’s a long journey. Because one of the things I tell clients before they hire a developer is to Google people. If you Google Victor Ramirez, WordPress, I rank like for the first two pages, that was very hard to do. Victor Ramirez, the John Smith, Latino names, there’s 3000 of them in New York City. He’s also a very popular salsa player and the senator, so I had to beat him. But I beat him for Victor Ramirez WordPress, not normal Victor Ramirez, right. And the way I did that was speaking at events like this, and getting you know, this is a high value link, someone mentions my name, and it shows up, you know, I run a meetup, I contribute. So make sure that you’re, you know, you’re involved in the WordPress community. And that’s like a badge. And people will find you that way. Another way, too, is, you know, there’s an actual amazing book I recommend. It’s called get leads now. And it’s about, it’s about making sales a habit, where essentially, every day you should be reaching out, like, you know, when you have a meet up, or you have an event, or you have contacts, reaching out to those people, and just, you know, having some, again, not selling essentially saying like, Hey, did you know about the GDPR thing? Here’s a great article on that, hey, did you know about this, and just being consistent, it’s not something that’s going to happen? That’s why I said before, it’s not going to happen in one day. It’s not gonna happen in one month, so I can’t see. I’m gonna hide over here.