let’s kick it off! I’m 2 years into running Weichie.com, a digital agency that I started with Yannick Van Meerbeeck last year (2022). We’re currently a team of 3 full-time employees – including me and Yannick – and work with a few contractors and vast partners for design & branding.
We work with many European organizations and all types of different brands to help them with their marketing efforts across the web, email, social, and search! We hit the €350k in revenue last year and I would like to pin down the adventure of owning a digital agency. (inspired by Peter Kang, founder of Barrel)
I want to keep track of our journey as we always have exciting ideas. This blog will help document everything to see which ideas took off and which ones did not. We learn the most from our mistakes so this blog will not only cover our wins but also our losses.
Even in a small business like ours, there are countless new challenges, conflicts, wins, learnings, and inspirations. For me, the personal flaw that bothers me the most is that I look way too much at competitors and compare myself with other agencies. I’ve benefitted immensely from reading and listening to founders and business operators share their stories. I’d like to think of this series as a way to hopefully help other business/developer enthusiasts as well.
Most of the agency journey blogs will cover the following:
Q1 of 2023 was actually minor chaos. We had a few peak moments where it’s all hands on deck and we’re looking for additional employees, and on the other hand, we also have a quieter period where I’m stressing out about having any work at all. This might be the casual small business lifecycle but currently this is how it’s rolling. In our search for a new employee we also change our search for profile every month. That month we need an additional PM, the next month we urgently need a new back end developer, now it’s front-end and I assume this cycle will go on for a while.
Looking back, we might have focussed a little bit too much on the bigger clients, taking more time to design and develop, but the bigger the client, the longer it takes to make final decisions. They need a dedicated PM that can lead them through the process in time. This is something we’re learning very quickly, that we take care of the PM when clients partner with Weichie.com for their webproject.
Although we have the skill and the experience in web, I’m not the usual sales guy. But step by step we’re taking on this role in our new projects to make sure we’re the authority in each project. no matter which external agencies are on the project.
At Weichie.com we’re all in on ClickUp as a project management tool. We’ve dived into our current workflow of handling maintenance for our clients. As the demand for website maintenance is increasing, but also the demand for à la carte development work. For this last one, a website that is up-to-date and secure is way faster to work and fix than logging into a website that’s never been updated before. It’s way harder to make a small change for the client in that case, as I cannot ignore all the required updates and just make this small fix. The website will break sooner or later and we get blamed it came from our last change.
Having a clear price calculator tool helps protect our business hours and gives upfront pricing to clients for their updates. Thanks to our calculator tool we can always defend our prices and feel confident we’re giving the most correct price possible – even if the client doesn’t think so.
We’ve also made the decision in terms of tech stack to ditch our current WordPress starter theme. Our previous website themes were heavily built on jQuery. On a side note, I’ve used jQuery my entire life – writing this in 2023. When I interned at NightOwl Interactive back in 2018, my first agency in New York, everything was done with jQuery. I still love it, but it simply doesn’t do the trick for us anymore when working with WebGL.
We have plenty of new ideas for this year! A brand new Weichie.com website, the launch of SnappStudio, releasing the latest version of our Presto application, and playing around with more Web3/NFT & AI projects. But maybe most importantly, is that we’re also continuously growing internally. The switch of our base theme, for example, our own uptime tracker, a new way of setting up pipelines to automate our workflow, having our own PM workflow, our own project calculator, our own Weichie.com CLI commands to boot new projects, …
A lot of new changes have come to our agency to improve our workflow, but I’ll be digging into those improvements in more detail later.
We have interns at Weichei.com every year and our most recent one was from the Artevelde College University in Ghent. His name was Arnaud and he stayed with us for 3 months in total. He received his first WordPress experience here at Weichie.com and was also the first person here at Weichie.com who was working, testing, and playing around with our new starter theme.