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Comment by n_ary | Hacker News Reader

Disclaimer: Unpopular advice.

Seek out local folks who wants to go online selling their tupperware, tobaco, small services, books, photos, small mom-n-pop coffee/fastfood shops etc and offer to build them a site they can maintain.

Then buy them a subscription on no-code sites(wix, weebly, squarespace etc) and get a commission for the initial setup. Worked for my nephew who just wanted something he could do on the nights to save up some money for his summer vacation. He still gets referral offers from folks who are happy with their sites and their friends also want similar sites.

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Not sure why would this be an unpopular advice. I think it's a good advice.

I tried this before, but the problem is, the reason many people/businesses have shitty websites is that they are not willing to spend money on it. I approached a few local shops (e.g. a comic book store) to create a cool website for them for a few hundred bucks, but they wanted it for free. If I would be a junior developer looking for stuff to my portfolio, sure. But I'm not, and not willing to work for free for anybody.

However, I might have given up too easily. I think I'll give this another shot

> to create a cool website for them for a few hundred bucks

I think this price range will push away serious businesses. I knew a consulting company that had hard time getting customers when they were charging under $1000 for simple WordPress sites. They had better luck when they raised their prices to $5000. It was 10 years ago for simple WordPress sites.

That is interesting, thanks for sharing. I guess it makes sense, if they think I am cheap they might also think I produce low quality.

Oh, they -know- you produce low quality. Either you are spending no time on it, or you value your time very little (and if -you- value the time so little, imagine how weak your skills must be.)

Providing a cheap service yo a business -requires- that you deliver a cheap product.

A much better approach us to do the website for free, but get paid commission on its value. Take a tiny piece of online sales, run specials on the site and measure foot-traffic in the store and so on.

People get paid to -add value-. To get easy money you need to figure out what the customer values (for a shop it's usually sales) then figure out how to increase those sales, then take the risk, and actions, to accomplish that.

Each of these businesses get tons of serious and not serious offers to build them a website. The reason they don't have a website or have a crap website is because they don't want to spend or are in other ways impossible to work with. It is possible, but usually if you're related to these people or already an established big actor.

A much better return is expected by building a web site to sell the product or service yourself. Wether it's tobacco, tupperware, books etc.

I know a guy who has done this and this model turned out to work much better, because the competence stays in right hands. He simply walked around muslim/halal-oriented shops in the city and said: I’ll take your hassle with online orders for some margin. That resulted in a relatively successful webstore.

The reason these shops couldn’t do it themselves is not in software expertise. They just couldn’t work properly. Not all people are successful merchants. When I learned how they did accounting, it made me laugh: they simply called the guy and asked for money. They didn’t know how much money there is, most of them simply relied on the guy’s accounting, trusting him absolutely. He took not only web expertise from them, he took everything except producing or importing goods, including pricing. This worked because of his religion, he was very serious about no mistake in accounting, cause they are basically his brothers under god. Both sides were happy about that.

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