Five Ways to Use AI to Start Your New Web Design Agency

Are you just about to start your own web design agency, but struggling to know where to begin? With all the things you’ll need to do, it can feel overwhelming, but don’t panic, because AI is here to help.

AI can be a great tool to get your agency up and running, and it can do a lot of the heavy lifting for you. In this article, I share five ways that you can use AI to get your agency started.

01. Research Your Target Market

When you’re starting any new business, especially a web design agency, the last thing you should do is go in blind without fully understanding your market, and what your customers will be looking for.

In the past, getting this kind of information could be difficult. You’d probably need to spend serious time undertaking some form of market research, but when you’re trying to get a new business off the ground, that time comes at a premium, and you will probably be spread quite thin trying to get many other things done.

But with AI, this research can be done a lot quicker. AI can basically scour the internet and use its own intelligence to give you insights, advice, and context that can help to guide you. Some of the important information that AI can help you uncover can include:

1. What kinds of businesses or organisations operate in your local area or target market, helping you to identify potential clients.
2. What kind of size they are, i.e., how many employees they have, and what kind of revenues they turn over.
3. What kind of prices those potential clients typically tend to pay for websites.
4. How many other agencies operate in your target market, who they are, and what kind of services they offer.
5. Where there could be any gaps or opportunities in the market.

AI can even help you formulate questionnaires or other ways that you could conduct market research yourself. This can help you get an even deeper dive into what your target customers want, so that you can tailor what your agency offers.

The best part is that none of this needs to cost anything. You could use free tools like ChatGPT’s free account, and even just an hour of research can yield valuable insights.

02. Formulate Pricing Structures and Strategies

As well as market research, AI can also help with one of the most challenging aspects of running a web design agency, which is pricing structures. This is one area where many agencies come unstuck, and if you don’t get this right, it can cost you.

I discuss this in more detail in my second book, Grow, but working out how much you’ll need to charge isn’t just about picking some arbitrary number out of thin air, or just charging the same as your competitors. That’s a surefire way to either lose money, or not earn as much as you could.

Every agency is different, and how much you’ll need to charge is a combination of how much your overheads are and how much money you’ll need to make to ‘keep the lights on’, combined with how much time you have available, and how much profit you’ll need to make for your business to be healthy.

Fortunately, again this is where AI can help, and it can save you a lot of time. You’ll still need to know how much your overheads are – things like software subscriptions, staff salaries, office rent, and all your various other bills – as well as what working hours you or your team have available.

But if you can use AI in your process, it can help you by doing the serious number crunching. It can give you a range of pricing structures, and it can also use those insights into your market and other contextual knowledge to advise which models could be best for your business.

Or to think of it another way, a few minutes playing around with pricing models in AI can save you hours of pain and potentially thousands of pounds in lost revenues.

03. Get Recommendations on Tech Stacks, Systems and Processes

When you’re running a web design agency, and especially if you’ll be designing and developing the websites yourself, the tools you use to do this can be just as critical to your success as the actual websites that you create.

If you’ve been designing and developing websites for a while (or if your team have), then you’ll likely have your own preferences as to which software or systems you’ll use.

But just because you’ve been doing things a certain way for a while doesn’t mean it’s the best way to do them moving forward. Technology is always changing. New software can emerge, and old software can quickly become out of date.

Even the software you’re currently using may have features that you’re not even taking advantage of. But how do you find out? Trying lots of different software and other tools can be time-consuming and expensive, and who has the time to go through multiple applications or tools to find the best one, let alone pay for them?

The good news is that this is another area where AI can save you time and money. All you need to do is tell it what you’re looking to do, and it can come back with a range of options. It can even give you detailed summaries of the features and benefits of different solutions, along with price points, so you can work out which one is best for you.

04. Use AI to do the Development Heavy Lifting

This is something that I’ve already talked about in some of my other articles, but coding, and development in general, is an area where AI excels, and it can be a game changer in helping you deliver your client’s websites. When you’re just in the process of getting your agency off the ground, this can be invaluable.

To explain what I mean by this, when I started my web design agency many years ago, I did it on my own as a sole freelancer, and it was hard. I came from a design background, not a development one, so I had a steep learning curve when it came to actually building websites.

It was difficult and stressful, and it’s why I eventually employed people with more advanced development skills than me, so that they could handle the more complex projects that were beyond my capabilities.

I sold that agency a few years ago and I’m now working as a sole freelancer again, but the difference this time is night and day. With AI, I’m able to develop highly complex solutions for my clients, on my own, and often without needing to actually write much of the code myself. I tell AI what I need to achieve, and it does most of the work for me, and to a much higher standard than I ever could. I still lead the whole process, and I still need to do work to properly integrate the code that AI gives me into my projects, but it’s a huge gain.

This is incredibly important is because it gives me confidence. Before AI, even when I had a team, if a client asked for something complicated, there was always a certain level of anxiety about how we would deliver what they were looking for.

But now, even though I’m working on my own, if a client asks for something challenging, I’m 99% confident that I can deliver whatever they ask for. By using AI, it should give you that confidence too.

05. Get Inspiration for Your Brand

Choosing a name and creating the brand for your new agency can be one of the most fun but also challenging aspects of starting your business, and it’s where a lot of people get stuck. But again, AI is here to help.

Now, I’m not suggesting for one minute that you should use AI to actually generate your brand. I don’t think that would be a very authentic way of doing things. But as we’ve already covered, AI can be really useful in doing some of the heavy lifting, and it can also inform your decision-making process.

It can certainly save you a lot of time, especially by telling you what’s already out there in your market. This can be incredibly useful in helping you understand what works, and what to avoid. AI can give you things like:

1. A list of your competitors, including company names and logos.
2. More general research, like colours and styles that are proven to be popular.
3. Other reference points, like successful brands from outside of your sector.
4. A list of the deliverables that you’ll need, like stationery, social media graphics, business cards, and more.
5. Technical aspects and specifications, like the sizes and dimensions of assets.

AI may not be able to create your brand for you (and it probably shouldn’t) but it can at least make the process of creating it much easier.

AI doesn’t just stop here either. There are so many other ways that AI can help you get your fledgling web design agency off the ground, and as the technology improves, this will only open up even more opportunities.