
Attracting high-paying clients to design and development agencies - ministrator
https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/6ztybx/how_i_attract_high_paying_clients_to_my_design/?15
======
speps
From 3 months ago:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15237398](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15237398)

------
michaelbuckbee
If there's one consistent issue that plagues startups, consultants, and even
large established business it's marketing.

And that whole thread touches on a subject that I wish would get more traction
here on HN: content engineering.

Content Engineering (building tools and useful online software projects) is an
incredibly effective way to build an audience and awareness by helping people
instead of writing yet another 500 word blog post or dumping six figures of VC
money into FB or Google ads.

It honestly feels like cheating. I think tools just occupy a different part of
people's brains than articles and certainly a different spot than ads.

This is a hot topic for me as I was looking through the analytics for my site
yesterday and found that our Subject Line tester [1] was driving about 10x the
traffic of our dozen 2000+ word carefully crafted and educational blog posts
[2]. F'ing ridiculous

1 - [https://sendcheckit.com/email-subject-line-
tester](https://sendcheckit.com/email-subject-line-tester) 2 -
[https://sendcheckit.com/blog](https://sendcheckit.com/blog)

Here's some other good examples:

Clearbit's Logo API [https://clearbit.com/logo](https://clearbit.com/logo)

ForAGoodStrftime
[https://www.foragoodstrftime.com](https://www.foragoodstrftime.com)

Atom [https://atom.io/](https://atom.io/)

Golden Ratio Typography Calculator
[https://pearsonified.com/typography/](https://pearsonified.com/typography/)

~~~
laktek
This is also a great way to understand your target market (rather than sending
out surveys and creating landing pages).

I built [https://page.rest](https://page.rest),
[https://screen.rip](https://screen.rip) &
[https://pdf.cool](https://pdf.cool), in the last 3 months which gave us a
great understanding of our target market and problem space.

It's also a way to win trust. If you can solve a small problem well, people
will trust you with their bigger problems.

------
peterburkimsher
Marketing is not: "Spending money on ads, Spending years building a social
following, Going to networking events, Cold calling"

but is: "posting it on relevant forums, sharing it with bloggers, sending it
to journalists to potentially write about"

Isn't that sort of a contradiction, if the thing I want to market is a side
project in itself?

I guess I'll try his strategy of talking about one of my side project's
outputs instead of the side project itself: Learning Chinese with movies and
music.

[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIUS5dz58-4i1ZQF0qouSaQ/vid...](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIUS5dz58-4i1ZQF0qouSaQ/videos?shelf_id=0&view=0&sort=dd)

------
throwaway00009
I can't seem to find it but I think unsplash was a similar side project that
was used as marketing for a different company.

~~~
lukechesser
You're exactly right!

Unsplash [1] was a side-project for our company freelance developer and
designer platform, Crew [2] (Crew was later sold to Dribbble; Unsplash now
operates independently).

We knew as creators that finding beautiful, useable imagery was one of the
hardest challenges in any creative project, so we decided after shooting some
photos for our homepage header image, to give the rest of the photos from the
shoot away for free for anyone to use.

We setup a $19 tumblr theme, a domain, and posted the site to here.

What happened next was amazing: the site was flooded with traffic thanks to
trending on HN, thousands of photos were downloaded on the first day, and most
shockingly to us, other creatives began submitting their own photography to
Unsplash.

Fast forward a year later and Unsplash was the main source of traffic and
revenue for the parent company Crew. I think it peaked at around 60% of our
monthly revenue due to customers finding Crew from a simple 'Made by Crew'
link on Unsplash. At the same time, Unsplash was doing around 1M downloads a
month.

We eventually sold Crew to Dribbble to focus full time on Unsplash, so it's no
longer a side project. It's grown a lot since those early days, with more than
20M photo downloads every month, half a million free-to-use photos, and is
integrated into thousands of applications, including Trello, Adobe, and more.

If you're interested in more about Unsplash, we've got all the main milestones
here: [https://unsplash.com/history](https://unsplash.com/history)

1 - [https://unsplash.com](https://unsplash.com) 2 -
[https://crew.co](https://crew.co)

~~~
aerosmile
That history page is very clever - never seen anything like that before, and
it's such a great way to build a brand.

