Part 1 – Web design niche

Hey Prompt Entrepreneur,

In this playbook we’re looking at an exciting opportunity I’m seeing for AI entrepreneurs right now : Starting a web design agency with AI.

The value you create here is as basic as it gets:

Small businesses need websites, but don’t have the skills or time to build them themselves.

This is where you come in. With AI tools like ChatGPT and 10Web you can fulfil the customer need easily and at scale.

Here’s a quick summary:

1. Choose a niche like local service businesses.
2. Use AI tools to quickly mockup site designs and content. No coding needed.
3. Offer packages – Basic, Pro, Premium tiers. Focus on recurring revenue above all.
4. Outreach directly to niche businesses through emails, LinkedIn, Twitter. Offer a free audit.
5. Build the sites with AI web builders like 10Web. Fast and efficient.
6. Upsell clients on ongoing maintenance plans, content creation, marketing services.

There are minimal start up costs on this one – basically a computer, internet connection and your time. And even time required is low thanks to the new batch of web design tools. The heavy lifting is done by AI.

We’ll cover:

Part 1: Web design niche

Part 2: Finding web design clients

Part 3: Building sites

Part 4: Packaging your services

Part 5: Scaling your web design agency

Let’s get started:

Your ideal customer in web design:

• Has been in business for a long time but hasn’t adapted to the digital age. Their business relies on word-of-mouth, referrals, and older advertising methods.
• Their customers are large companies, organizations, or wealthy individuals who pay high prices for services.
• Currently uses ineffective marketing materials – cheap business cards, dated brochures, yellow pages ads.
• Tried making a website themselves or hiring their nephew. The site is ugly, hard to navigate, not mobile-friendly.
• Has an established base of loyal customers but growth has stagnated.
• Has a lot of industry expertise and great service/product but outdated brand image.

We don’t want to be approaching companies who are up to date, tech savvy and already do digital marketing. We want old rich fuddy-duddy companies primarily.

Here’s a niche to start brainstorming:

List out industries that match these criteria:
Traditional
Affluent clients
Outdated marketing
Service or non ecom based products, not ecom based
Poor digital presence

Prompt Output:

To make this even more lucrative and old school add “B2B” into the prompt:

B2B (business to business) tends to be larger but a harder nut to crack into.

How do we know which of these niches to head into?

First up, if you have any experience or knowledge of a particular industry this will always help. You’ll know how to speak their language.

Second, take your whole list and in ChatGPT web mode ask for the average company revenue for companies in each niche. Ask for a general revenue range estimates otherwise ChatGPT will not be able to give specific answers:

Third, use ChatGPT in web mode and ask “who are the top web design agency in [niche]” and check their sites. If both the agency site and their client portfolio sites look old fashioned, especially on mobile phones, that’s gap for you.

Fourth, perform keyword research on terms like “web design agency [niche] using Google Ads or a premium keyword tool to check both volume and competition. If you don’t have access you can get this work done cheaply on Fiverr.

These are quick and dirty checks you can perform but in general I’d say you cannot be certain until we begin outreach.

In the next part we’ll be testing outreach receptiveness before committing to building in a certain niche. We’ll lock down demand first and then work on supplying it.

For now just keep a shortlist of lucrative niches.

Premium Prompt – Directories

A super helpful tip when building a service company like a web design agency is to find niches where there are professional bodies.

Why do we care about this?

Professional bodies keep directories. And directories are full of contact details – email addresses, telephone numbers and physical addresses.

These are super handy for outreach – we can scrape directories to extract information and then en-masse reach out to our potential clients. This is especially easy now thanks to AI being able to personalise cold outreach.

How do we find these lists?

We can use ChatGPT web or simply Google.

In order of preference we’re looking for:

1. Directory of companies with full contact details
2. Directory with at least the website
3. Directory with at least the name

Full contact details means we don’t have to do anything smart – we have the contact details right there for us.

Directory of websites means we can visit all the sites to gather up contact information.

Directory of names means we can find the websites and thus find the contact details.

Here’s an example for freight forwarding companies in the US:

Freight forwarding companies in the US make between $1m and $20m revenue a year on average. Decent prospects.

This website lists 3240 freight forwarding companies in the USA with their names and contact details. There is even a nice “download to excel” button for us – that’s abnormal and absolutely fantastic.

A quick check of one of these companies (12 to 12 LLC) turns up that they don’t have a website. This will probably be the case with a number of freight forwarding companies.

Right now just be looking for niches that have this sort of directory in existence. How we get the information out depends on how it’s displayed. Generally though we use a process called scraping. It’s low cost to hire someone to do this task for us when we’re ready.

The more open the data the better. And the more companies in the directories the better for us.

Pulling it together

Now that you have a list of potential niches we’re going to start outreach to test the market demand. We’ll cover that in the next Part, keeping nice and lean.

Staying lean lets us plan and build without any expenses. And also means when we’re ready to launch we’ll have a much higher chance of success.

A reminder of what we’re covering this week :

~~Part 1: Web design niche~~

Part 2: Finding web design clients

Part 3: Building sites

Part 4: Packaging your services

Part 5: Scaling your web design agency