I'm unemployed and want to start a B to B service I can start from home and someday grow where I can hire some help. When I think of my skills I've built quite a few Wordpress Woocommerce sites for myself and friends. I've done everything from register the name to create everything and the site comes out pretty nice. Not award-winning but I'd be proud to make them for others and the feedback has been good. When I talk to my techie friends about starting a Wordpress business they are *all* negative on it because there is so much competition who, they say, will do it at a lower rate. They tell me to pick a different direction, even like HTML/ CSS front end development will have lots more opportunities. However I would have to go to school and train to do it. Not to mention everyone expecting Javascript/Jquery which I dont have yet. My goal is a small service that is low stress to me (low stress is important to me). I would be happy charging $25/hr to start and work my way up to $45-55/hr. Do you think a Wordpress consulting business could support this or do you think that the competition is too high and I should look at a different skill I can offer, like learning Html5/css3? Maybe if I focused on just Wordpress Ecommerce would be better? I'm worried to build a business only to find 3 years from now that competition is brutal and Im struggling to survive. I want to build something where people are coming to me for help and i can make those mid-range rates easily. Thanks for any feedback.
Long story short first: I'm not a developer, yet I've built a Wordpress development digital agency that now has 5 full-time freelance developers and repeat clients from 9+ countries.
Some of my thoughts:
There are people that can set up Wordpress, install a theme and couple of plugins and sell that as a service. Such a service has a very small value though, high competition hence very limited yield.
There are people that can not only set up Wordpress, install a theme and couple of plugins, but also make tweaks to the theme. This requires front-end coding skills, which can easily be learned for free by taking some awesome courses, example: codeacademy. Demand for front-end developers in Wordpress area is huge and even though there is a large competition, there is a large demand, so yields are pretty good.
Next level is Wordpress back-end development, this requires knowledge of PHP, SQL and JS/Jquery. The value you can provide with such knowledge is the ability to custom code plugins or custom fields, integrate site with 3rd party APIs etc... Being able to provide this service makes pretty much anyone "always busy" with clients in pipeline.
My agency provides all three types of service I mentioned, yet I am not a developer myself. How did I do this? I hired developers and found clients. My value in the package is the ability to sell value to a client, translate client requirements into an effective project plan and effectively use agile project methodology in working together with the developers to deliver the project and make the client come back with more projects.
If you're interested in learning more about what tools, methodologies I used to build my agency, hit me up.
Answered 8 years ago
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