How Shovel runs its web design studio: team, contractors, sales

Hello! Blaze here for week 2,

The goal of this channel is to document any insight that will assist designers, developers, and creative business owners

This content is essentially a recap of my weeks as a web design studio founder & content creator

New website for Hours

This was a project we’ve been working on since November. It’s a lot of effort to create a case study, but I’ve started to promote it on my short-form channels here

The new design really speaks to where Hours and Shovel are at in terms of elevated quality

IG live insights

This is a new channel I’m focused on daily. Instagram lives…

Answering questions and showing my personality goes a long way to create lifetime followers. BUT ALSO is great to nuture leads.

I’ve already closed over 5-figures of design work through these. The ROI is clear

Every day I’m answering questions and designing the new Shovel website live. Killing 2 birds with one stone! Feel free to join here

Proposal & contract templates

These are a spin on what Ian has produced at Gardener. He has great content, but I’ve adjusted them to work with Shovel specifically

This is how I quickly automate the process

Add these PDFS into a Claude project -> Paste meeting notes from a lead into that chat -> Claude exports me a Google Doc and I paste it into Bonsai (my CRM)

Notion links:Shovel Proposal TemplateShovel Client SOWShovel Contractor SOW

This week’s business learnings

This should be simple. A contractor doens’t need to know a total project rate. They just need to know the rate you have budgeted for them. Save yourself from this awkwardness… There’s always a cost to acquire a customer. In Shovel’s situation, it’s likely that the lead has watched dozens of videos before reaching out

All of that said, instead of asking contractors what rate they will offer me. I start first by saying “this is my budget to get you into this project”

“Shovel sells design systems”, not websites. Clients in the $1M to $20M a year range want scalability and have strong email or app-related channels.

More questions I get asked often:

How big is Shovel’s team?

There are no full-time employees (not sure if I ever wany any either), but I work with contractors on a recurring basis and have invested into those relationships.

How many projects can I maintain at once?

Around 8, not counting any Shovel-related projects for content, web design, and branding

Why don’t you post more YouTube videos?

I’m posting one this month! Takes a ton of effort. 50% of that game is nailing a title and thumbnail. If that isn’t hitting, there’s no point in posting. Right now I’m getting a little too hung up on that process. Web design content is huge there and I don’t see anyone that looks like me (in terms of age) or is talking about culturally relevant brands

More importantly, a lot of design youtubers are promoting courses/products and don’t actually have a foot in the game of web design business!

My trip to london

It’s awesome that I can post a story in a major city and have 30 people to meet. The downside is that I don’t have enough time to meet everyone! IG is truly the ultimate networking app

Cool people I met through IG this week

• Jaime Garmendia - A fellow design content-creator, but also a man with a strong foot in the creative business game
• Mitchell Barton - Turns out he does dev work with a design studio I posted this week. Turns out we have the same mentors as well!

I didn’t just meet David Diliberto this week… but we’ve been meeting weekly so he’s top of mind

If you don’t know him, he’s basically posting the same content as me but comes from more senior expertise! He just doesn’t post as often as I do lol.

We actually were supposed to do this email list together. Everyone should follow David’s work because he just launched his new studio Situation Normal and has worked hands-on with many mainstream ecomm brands (even Shopify directly)

Take care

Feel free to reply to this email with any recommendations you may find valuable here. Thanks again for the support. My DMs and email are always open

Talk next week! - Blaze