Why Web Development Should not cost more than $500

You have a great business idea and all that’s needed to get started...except the web part.

Be it a website, application or any other kind of software – even having a good team of programmers or outsourcing a project to a professional web developer does not guarantee fast delivery of your project.

What to do if you don’t have a lot of funds to invest in a website?

Odesk or Freelancer may be the option then; however, that requires technical knowledge to manage the project and to evaluate time and cost.

Even if you have the necessary expertise, managing Indian or Filipino programmers is a cross-cultural challenge.

We have interviewed a new dynamic agency, ROI Express, that has revolutionized web development for entrepreneurs. Andy Taylor the founder of ROIexpress.com answered our questions on how to start your business on tight budget

INT: Andy, tell us how to start a web business without investors’ support?

AT: Being on budget is not an automatic disqualifier - it is a great motivator to move forward,push yourself to continue to survive, grow, and evolve

And getting back to your questions about web development - as long as you do not expect your web part to be a custom development anything can be built. I believe that in this fast-changing world when technology is growing and evolving every single day, an entrepreneur cannot afford to spend months on development. Either your idea or your moment will be gone. I think of it this way – the moment when you had your idea, another dozen people had exactly the same idea.

INT: How did you arrive at the concept of such “$500 projects”? How did it all start?”

AT: My partner and I started a digital agency back in 2009. Even at that time, that was a very competitive niche, but over the years it became even worse. Thousands of conceptual digital agencies arrived on the horizon. Many of our potential clients started gathering quotes and constantly claiming that somebody offered a better deal or had a better presentation. By that time we had thousands of websites and apps developed, so we never tried to buy our clients with presentations rather than portfolios and excellent feedback.

However, in a world where hipsters rather than IT experts are running tech companies, we have started to lose clients because others were showing beautiful demos. We rethought our strategy with that particular client and offered to finish their project on a budget but on our conditions...

We decided to run an experiment and build a $30,000 project for $500 – just to demonstrate that

we have an effective way of building things, when we don’t spend our time on sales, presentations, reporting, etc.

Of course that project was a loss, but we killed the competition and realized that working with

smaller clients will save us from long and difficult “arrangements” and we will be able to build working websites for a greater number of businesses without dealing with corporate sales.

INT. Assuming I have a business idea how do I move forward with it?

The most important step is finding a need and then filling it. Write copy that sells, design and build an easy-to-use website. Use search engines to drive traffic to your site.

INT: What would be your advice for aspiring entrepreneurs?

AT: Concentrate on the speed of execution. Fire you tech team if they say that launching your idea may take a while. There are plugins, extensions, frameworks - all kinds of solutions that can put your idea online in no time.

No matter how great and original your idea is, start its execution immediately! Each time a new entrepreneur asks to sign an NDA, it makes me smile because most of the time, his idea is not original. We almost certainly worked on it before. So don’t think you and your idea are the only ones like that. Go and make it work as soon as you can!

Another important moment is having a proof of concept stage. Start small, bring part of your idea to the market to have some feedback before you go full throttle.

The investor and owner of the Dallas Mavericks once told me about the best advice he has ever got “Do the work. Out-work. Out-think. Out-sell your expectations. There are no shortcuts.”