Thanks Jessie. I was thinking . . . when I do get into those direct conversations of trying to communicate the value of my team’s service, I often refer to the old 80/20 rule. An off-the-shelf solution will get them 80 percent there, but the last 20 percent requires 80 percent of the effort and attention (and therefore unanticipated labor costs on the client’s end). A custom solution gets you all the way to the goal without any of the agita of implementing an off-the-shelf solution. In my line of work, off-the-shelf would be intelligible and grammatically correct $50 blog posts that have no connection to the client’s business or marketing strategy.

They’re definitely still out there. In fact, I would say the ubiquity of cheap solutions is a selling point for those of us who sell custom work. After all, if all your competition is paying bottom dollar for design, hiring a designer to custom-make your own site is a way to stand out from the competition.

This question gets right at the heart of why we started Nation1099. There is so much opportunity to thrive as freelance creatives, but there is also tremendous downward price pressure in certain areas, so we need an ENTREPRENEURIAL and STRATEGIC approach to our freelance businesses. The “back office stuff” — accounting, writing good contracts, finding insurance — is the easy part to figure out. How to position our services in the market is a lot harder.

Design isn’t my domain, so I hope other web designers and developers weigh in. But where I do work (freelance writing) has a similar dynamic. Certain parts of the work have been commodified because technology makes it easy for a lot of supply to come into the market and makes it easy to use “rinse and repeat” solutions. How do we thrive with that downward price pressure on our services?

I can think of two basic approaches. One is to find the limited number of clients who want bespoke solutions — who get why that is important and a good investment. Partly we’ll have to take on some responsibility for customer education. Two is to think of our work as made up of links in a chain and to let the less valuable parts of the chain go while we concentrate on working higher in the value chain. Many of us are thriving by selling strategy and planning and helping to our clients put those commodity solutions in place.

I suppose that second solution is sad if you are put off by disposable blog content (as I am) or generic design templates. (Confession: we are using an off-the-shelf theme here at Nation1099.) But . . . there are probably creative compromises to be made in there that provide satisfying work. Custom cabinets for my kitchen are great. But a carpenter or decorator who can tell me how to get a custom look with my limited budget out of the Home Depot cabinets is providing a valuable service.