the menu vs prescription framing is spot on. i used to send these massive PDFs breaking down every single deliverable and wondering why people ghosted. now i lead with the problem they told me about on the call, what i would do about it, and one clear price. keeps it to one page and the close rate is way higher.

the bounce rate stats are wild. i had a client whose site was loading in 6+ seconds on mobile and they genuinely could not understand why nobody was filling in their contact form. swapped them to a static site with optimised images and their enquiries doubled within a month. speed is the one thing most small business owners completely overlook.

honestly notion has been fine for me with smaller clients but the moment you have more than three active projects it gets messy fast. the biggest issue is notifications, clients either miss updates completely or get overwhelmed. been looking at dedicated portals for exactly this reason so good timing on this post.

switching to project-based pricing was probably the single best business decision i made last year. the maths just works out so much better once you get faster at delivery. one thing i would add though, the initial discovery call is where you set the anchor. if you quote too early before properly understanding what they need, you end up either too cheap or scaring them off. i try to never give a number on the first call anymore.

the change request form is genuinely underrated. i started using something similar about six months in and it completely changed how clients talk about "just one more thing." the trick for me was making it feel collaborative rather than bureaucratic, like a shared google doc where we log changes together rather than a formal approval process. way less friction and they still think twice before adding stuff.

this resonates hard. spent way too long on my first project trying to make it perfect before launching. second time around I shipped in 2 weeks and learned more from actual users in a day than I did in months of planning. the speed thing is real, but it's also just emotionally easier when you accept most things won't work.

the maintenance bit is what gets people every time. I run a few client sites and even "simple" projects need updates, security patches, content tweaks, customer support. It's not passive at all, it's just a different kind of active. The honest framing of this is so refreshing compared to the usual "I make £5k/month while sleeping" threads.

genuinely this. I freelance in web design and the amount of work that comes from just sharing what I'm building on socials vs any actual marketing I've tried is mental. People want to see the messy process, not the polished portfolio. My best client came from a story about a CSS bug that took me 3 hours to fix. They said it made me seem "real". So yeah, your build process IS your marketing is bang on.

Building it yourself first is genuinely the best way to understand why Zustand or Jotai make the tradeoffs they do. The point about performance optimization and having precise control over rendering behaviour is one that gets overlooked when you just reach for the popular library without questioning it.

The assembly line analogy really lands. When you are only executing tickets without understanding the why behind them, you are essentially optimising for the exact thing LLMs are best at. The pause-and-ask habit you describe is such a simple shift but it changes how you show up in every conversation with stakeholders.