Unvalidated Ideas #047

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Here's a fresh idea you can take out there and validate.

FrontendExperts - Custom sites, fixed price (🗒Raw Notes)

Companies don't want to pay for workers, they want to pay for results. Recently designed flashy landing draw in potential customers -- it's the equivalent of a fresh coat of paint.

You'd think the problem of building a custom site is a solved problem in 2023, but it's not.

While the fixed price project is less-than-ideal for contractors (if a project runs over, extra time is "paid" by the contractor), it's perfect for companies because it minimizes risk.

The hard part about this (i.e. why companies would pay you instead of surfing UpWork themselves), is the unaccounted-for cost: project management.

The reason this business works despite the cost of project management:

• Scoping down the work to frontend websites ("productized", i.e. repeatable service)
• Using pre-existing websites as a templates (no designer required!)
• Utilizing the sea of frontend developers ready to work

At scale, there's also the prospect of having multiple customers come in for the same style of website. If a particular website is particularly popular, many companies will opt to have a similar design. If you're intelligent with IP assignment, every new customer that requests the same website is an instant sell with zero work.

There's one more pre-requisite to making this work: no rework can be accepted. If re-work is requested, the process becomes messy and devolves into ongoing liability/responsibility -- this needs to be ae pre-pay.

So why wouldn't someone just us a drag and drop page builder? Well a ton of the business world has better things to do. While page builders are very easy to use, they still represent a barrier to getting a website made, published, and visible on the internet.

What was in this week's uncut edition?

Like being teased? I hope so, because here's what was in the uncut edition this week:

Ideas:

• █████████████Market
• FrontendExperts - Custom sites, fixed price
• █████████Spread████

Bonus:

• The ML/AI revolution is being televised

Don't forget, there's always money in the banana stand 3x more in the uncut edition.

Thanks for reading!

If you liked this letter feel free to criticize, comment on, remix, and share these ideas with your fellow builders and entrepreneurs!

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Check out the archive for access to editions that have been previously released.

Victor (victor@unvalidatedideas.com)

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