Starting today, I’m giving myself a challenge: I will build and publish a complete website every single day until I land my first paying client.
No exceptions. No rest days. Every day, a new site goes live.
Why I’m Doing This
I officially opened up my web development services a few days ago. I’ve put together the pricing, written up what I offer, and made it easy for people to reach out. And now I’m waiting, which is the part I’m bad at.
Waiting is passive. Building is not.
The honest truth is that I want to get better. I want to get faster. I want to work through the friction of going from a blank file to a deployed website so many times that it stops feeling hard. The best way I know to do that is to do it over and over again.
And if it helps me land a client faster? Even better.
What Counts as a Website
To keep myself honest, here are the rules I’m setting:
- It has to be a complete, deployed website accessible at a real URL
- It has to be something new, not a recycled project or a theme tweak
- It has to solve a real problem or serve a real purpose, even if it’s hypothetical
- I have to ship it before midnight
The sites don’t have to be complex. A single-page site for a fictional coffee shop counts. A landing page for an imaginary event counts. A portfolio for a concept brand counts. The point is to build something real and ship it, not to architect the perfect product.
What I Hope to Get Out of This
Speed. Right now I have all the skills, but I lose time to decision fatigue, second-guessing design choices, and the general overhead of setting up a new project from scratch. I want that overhead to get smaller every day.
A portfolio that proves what I can do. Saying “I build websites” is one thing. Showing thirty different sites in thirty different styles is another. Every site I build during this challenge becomes evidence.
Better intuition. You don’t get good at design by reading about it. You get good by making decisions constantly and seeing what works. A site a day means a constant stream of design decisions: typography, layout, color, hierarchy. I’ll get reps in that would otherwise take months.
A client. That’s the goal. The challenge ends when someone pays me to build their site.
I already pushed myself before this challenge officially started. The Mochi & Donut site is a cute, playful site for a dog Instagram brand and not my usual aesthetic at all. But I built it anyway to boost their online presence, and that’s exactly the point. Not every client is going to want what I’d naturally gravitate toward. Learning to work outside my comfort zone is part of the job.
How I’m Going to Approach It
Each day I’ll pick a concept, real or invented, and build a website for it. I’ll use a timer to cap myself at a few hours max. When time’s up, the site ships regardless of whether I think it’s perfect.
I’ll document what I build here on the blog as I go: what I made, what I learned, what I’d do differently. Not every post will be long, but every site will have a writeup.
If you’re reading this and you’ve been thinking about getting a website built, reach out. You might just become the reason this challenge ends early.
Let’s see how long this takes.
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