From Freelancer To Million-Dollar Agency Owner
How this web designer turned from freelancing to running a fully remote digital marketing agency with 32 full-time employees making 6 figures monthly.
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Hello! Can you introduce yourself and tell us about your business?
I'm Felix, 34, an entrepreneur from Cape Town.
I run Woww, an award winning digital marketing agency that helps businesses start, grow and thrive online.
We work with businesses from around the world, who are looking for a strategic partner to help them succeed online. We engage with growing businesses offering them everything they need to initially to start such as a logo and brand identity, through to the design and development of their first foundational website.
From there we offer everything to help that website gain traction, which could involve traffic acquisition strategies with organic content creation to drive traffic through SEO or pair the website with performance based paid marketing such as Google Ads, Meta Ads or email marketing.
We further help support that business as they grow, offering continued ad-hoc website development, maintenance and hosting, enabling that business to continue to scale.
Check out our website and our Behance portfolio.
How did you start this business? Take us through the process.
Woww originally started as WordPress One Week Websites, focusing on super fast turnaround time template based websites.
We quickly pivoted away from this approach, as we realised that our clients were needing a deeper level and more holistic service. Instead of focusing on just delivering a website, we tried to truly understand what the client needed to be successful.
By first asking "why" and then creating a bespoke purpose fit website paired with complementary services, we were then able to truly help our clients achieve their business goals.
Thus we expanded our service offering to not only focus on just web design, but everything that related to the online success for that business. (Branding, Traffic Acquisition, Support etc), becoming a full service strategic partner for our clients throughout the digital journey.
We continue to iterate and innovate launching and expanding our service offering to help our clients grow and ultimately succeed online.
Because we’re based out of South Africa, we are able to offer incredible value for our rates when compared to the local competitors (UK, EU, US, etc), without compromising on timezone and language barriers.
How did you get your first initial customers?
As with most agencies, our first clients were friends and family, building our first website for my fathers business, which then lead to other opportunities as that website got traction and other people wondered where that website was designed.
Word of mouth was always a powerful mechanism to gain clients and repeat business and we put a huge amount of effort into maintaining relationships with clients and strategic partners.
We joined business networks and accelerator programs like EO, surrounding ourselves with like minded entrepreneurs who were also our ideal clients.
We also leveraged our own SEO skills to master organic traffic acquisition, ensuring we had a regular and sustainable stream of high intent driven leads.
Since launch, what are your marketing strategies or channels to get new customers?
SEO is still our largest channel for new business and we publish a regular cadence of quality content to drive organic traffic.
However as we've grown, we've diversified our acquisition to include Paid Ads with Google, founder led social media marketing on LinkedIn and email marketing with existing clients.
We also use outreach campaigns, PPC, and social media, along with a lot of effort into network building through professional groups like the Entrepreneurs’ Organization and conferences.
We're also seeing huge potential in GEO, optimzing LLMs like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, etc to list us in queries such as "List of best web design agencies Cape Town".
How does your business make money?
We are a primarily a service based business and have different divisions and revenue each per division:
Web Design: 40%, Graphic Design: 5%, SEO: 15%, Paid Marketing: 30%, Hosting 10% as a percentage of revenue.
Each division has its own pricing models for different deliverables. Some deliverables are fixed fee based eg: Logos, Brand Guides and Audits, while some are project based that are properly scoped based on goals eg: Websites
We have monthly retainer based billing for services such as Paid Ads management or SEO. We have monthly subscriptions for Hosting, Maintenance And lastly we have consultation based fee's for strategic consulting or ad-hoc support.
We currently generate $100-120k MRR aiming for a 15-20% EBITDA.
As a service based business, the majority of our operating costs comes in the form of team salaries at ~75% of total revenue, We help our clients generate over $370M in revenue in 2024. .
Where can we go to learn more about you and your business?
You can check out the following links to learn more:
Thanks for reading!