829 | Nobody Wants A Website (Sell This $250/Month AI System Instead) | Enmanuel Diaz

I’ve built over a thousand websites and I’m telling you, nobody actually wants just a website. That is a wild thing to say in a room full of agency owners who sell websites for a living. Our churn rate is less than 2% and our conversion rate is over 90% because- That’s Emmanuel Diaz. Two years ago we sold websites for two grand and one in ten people said yes. He blew up that model at the start of this year and now nine in ten say yes. His revenue’s doubled and almost nobody cancels. So what’s he actually selling now? A local business will pay me $250 a month for a software that would have cost a hundred grand and six months of development time in the past and this year I’ve already doubled my revenue.

In this episode you’ll learn how to stop selling websites and start selling solutions clients can’t say no to. It’s a clear numerical value with a money symbol in front of it. Unless this number is less than what we’re charging them, they would have no reason to cancel whatsoever. How we build a $100,000 software in a week? A custom tool like this is usually something only an enterprise would be able to afford. We’re talking $50,000 to $100,000 so with me and my team, yeah just under seven days we were able to create the entire system. The offer he wraps around it is the part that makes every agency owner flinch. There’s no contracts and there’s no commitment cancel anytime. Plus to make his experience practical, Emmanuel has agreed to build one of these systems live on camera from blank screen to working product and trust me by the end this episode isn’t just going to change what your agency sells it’s going to change what your agency is. For an audience of agency owners who sell websites for a living can you explain that in simple terms?

Yeah for a long time especially when I started my website design business I thought that the most important thing that I could sell was the actual website design and having a website is important it’s more important now than than ever but what I noticed was that especially if you’re going in cold it’s very hard to just pitch a website redesign or a brand new website and what I’ve noticed over time is that these business owners are more interested in getting solutions versus just getting a pretty website. You sold websites for two thousand dollars and one out of 10 people said yes then you found a business that provided the whole model or proved rather that the whole model was broken a firearms training company with an ugly amateur website that was still ranked number one on google with a packed calendar. Tell me what that business taught you. Yeah so what I noticed was the following they had over 500 five star reviews they were very busy getting booked constantly and their website was something that the owner made by themselves using a free go daddy builder so you know when I originally thought about reaching out to them I was like sure I could

I could make this website much prettier but they don’t really need that like the business is working well they’re making money um what could I actually offer them that that would be better but what I ended up offering them was a system where the bookings that they were already getting could be rebooked so what that means is whenever they had a student they mentioned to me in their discovery call and that was kind of like my light bulb moment that they were very good at acquiring new students but very rarely would the students come back and practice again and when it comes to firearms training because it’s like a safety thing it’s something that you’re supposed to practice regularly so I ended up building a system for him where it automatically every 30 days or 60 days depending on the class these students uh get re-invited to book again it also tracks what level of training they did so if it did level one it invites them to do level two and what that did was the students that used to just go one time ended up doing level one two three four a shotgun class and they ended up booking four and five times increasing

revenue so that was my aha moment and that was also that’s a system that you see maintained versus a website where for a lot of small businesses the website is kind of static as it is like a business card so if you’re explaining a process to somebody else and you had to break it down into three steps what would you call it the first thing you have to do is identify what is the the value that you can bring to the client you know whether that’s tools that allow them to rebook people tools that allow them to increase conversion um for example we have uh one customer where he does kitchen remodeling and a tool that we put together for him is an ai tool that allows customers to upload a photo of their current kitchen and um edit it with ai and have an idea of what that remodel would look like right on his website kind of like an inspiration tool that gets people excited so once you identify where it is that you can get that value for the client it becomes much easier to close the sale so your business went through a great transition here like walk me through the first time you realized that a $250 a month tool was doing more for a client than a $2,000 website ever could

yeah so the first time I kind of brainstormed this was with a bridal um a bridal business so we had a very pretty website designed for her and I had recently started experimenting with tools like um cloud code and agent to coding and that really brought in the horizons of what can be developed for a small business um expensive software that maybe would be boutique and cost tens of thousands of dollars or maybe they would have to pay like for an office shelf software that had too many features or too little um we could not develop that in-house and make it super custom for her business so her subscription is $250 a month and you know she’s getting an amazing value out of that because if you think of the price of wedding dresses even if she only sold one additional dress it’s it’s kind of covered and and her conversion has gone up significantly ever since she started doing that here we have her website and like I said before you know having a beautiful attractive website is important and you know we show here the brands that she works with um different images from her inventory um and everything

you’d expect on like a very nice well-designed website but what’s actually important to the business this alone would not it’s nice but unless the business really wanted it might not be enough to convince them um what actually changes things is here people can actually book an appointment so a bride can come in here pick a date and time fill out her information and make the payment and she gets that appointment request and what happens after that is like the magical part so if we come here to her dashboard I’ll show you what her appointments look like and by the way before this she had a generic um WordPress booking plugin that was actually breaking the website it was it was horrible she was very happy to get that resolved so if we come here to booking we have a custom booking dashboard where it’s actually themed to her website and she can see here the appointments that come in um identifications of different things that happened she has a CRM of the brides and now this CRM is organized by wedding date which is something that like a basic default CRM would not organize by wedding date but we can

create custom things because the wedding date is what’s relevant for her for the delivery for the bride we can make that customization and she has your calendar and that what really took it to that next level is what happens when the bride actually walks in so for example we see that all of these appointments this one has a start appointment button right here and if we click that you’ll see what happens this splash screen comes up now she has this TV monitor in her studio and when the bride walks in this is the first thing they see so they feel like it’s customized they feel like it’s welcoming it’s not just like her website’s homepage it’s something the bride can actually take a picture of and share because the bride usually is not going to share her actual wedding dress until the wedding day and when the bride takes a picture and shares it you know we added here her instagram tag so the boutique gets a little bit of credit as well and in this photo right here i saw that she had the the tv in her studio and i was like why is she showing the website in her studio and she explained to me that she goes through the photos and videos of dresses on the screen before the the brides try

them on and i thought well instead of having a generic e-commerce website experience we should make this custom appointment experience where they have the welcome screen and then instead of seeing an e-commerce page they can actually see a really beautiful page let me see if i can show you some an example of what that looks like here i’ll click start appointment i’ll click start and we can see here that this bride already favorited some dresses and we can see it’s very beautiful it’s very clean we have these videos on hover uh instead of just your generic e-commerce screen we don’t even show the price like instead of the bride going to the e-commerce page seeing a large text of description small images a price tag that maybe scares her she can just focus on the beauty of the dress the gallery the images if the business owner or the bride wants more information they can click here and get all the extra information but it’s not in your face um and what this has done is because we can kind of tap into that emotional side it increases the average price of the dress sold because we’re not showing the brides um the the the price

of the dress as a as a decision factor we’re letting them choose um emotionally what dress they like the most what a nice personal touch to make the client feel special in a situation like that like what would this type of custom build cost you a few years ago her and cost the client yeah so you know boutique custom software would take months to develop you need an entire coding team ux ui engineers you know a custom tool like this is usually something only an enterprise would be able to afford we’re talking fifty to a hundred thousand dollars maybe more for this kind of custom software development and and how long did it take you to put all of this together for the client now yeah so um probably about a week to get it working just right um so with me and my team yeah just under seven days we were able to create the entire system uh but we used to take months i was able to be done in one to two weeks there’s a flip side to that too uh when you switch to subscriptions at the start of 2026 here the first month your revenue went down walk me through the first 60 days of that transition i made the decision to switch to a subscription model where

i would kind of offer an end solution for small businesses first of all it was hard to sell because a small business that maybe is just starting up or doesn’t have that much revenue you know you tell them two thousand dollars it’s kind of a hard sell sometimes and um for example if they’re a landscaper and they’re charging fifty to a hundred dollars per yard you know the website is 20 30 yards that’s kind of how they’re thinking about it because another thing was that my my customers after i finished the website they were destroying it then i would check on the website a few months later and they had destroyed it um and they either were too embarrassed to reach out or thought it would be too expensive to get it fixed and it ended up where i i felt embarrassed even having the website in my portfolio because if somebody clicks it they’re going to see this really broken website they’re going to think that i did that so i couldn’t even use it as a portfolio piece i knew that the only way that it would work would be for you know customers to stay for a long time so the the value had to be there so it couldn’t just be a static website it had to be something that provided value

but setting it up in a subscription um does several things one significantly lowers the barrier to entry it’s a lot easier to get a yes on for example $250 subscription versus $2,000 and sometimes if if it’s a small business they do just need a basic website that can just kind of be like a like a placeholder business card portfolio kind of website and needs updates once in a while and that’s okay paying $250 sometimes still makes more sense than paying $2,000 and they’ll happily pay that for a long time when they know that it’s a subscription they can feel like somebody’s gonna be there every step of the way making sure traffic is coming in making sure it’s working if i want to make a change somebody’s always there to help me and it’s also at a very good cost so what i’ve noticed is that even though at those first few months um profits went down conversions went up i just showed that example because i was going to ask you how you package and price your solutions yeah so um like i mentioned it’s a subscription i’ll share my pricing page with you guys right here so if we just come to icreateyoursite.com i do something that most agencies hate doing which is having public pricing

you know there’s there’s nothing to hide there’s no contracts and there’s no commitment cancel anytime so the reason we’re able to to say this is because our goal is not to sell you a $2,000 website and disappear we we have to build a business relationship where we can generate value every month um and pretty much earn our keep um that’s what makes our customers really happy they can they can see that value they can feel more like they have a business partner versus just an agency that they hired so some of your thinking on the pricing might drive other agency owners a little bit crazy you don’t charge up front build fees or contracts no commitments so how do you explain that to another agency owner this really is uh the long game um there’s a phrase that i live by that goes the person who loves to walk will get further than the person who loves the destination and uh we love what we do so um we we take that risk right there’s there’s no upfront cost it’s just the monthly service fee um and it is a risk because there’s also no commitment we could build um a really nice custom website and the person can say hey you know

what uh i don’t want it anymore maybe it’s been two or three months we’ve only collected you know under a thousand dollars and they just change your mind and they cancel that that is very possible um and by the way they own the website it’s not the website has not held hostage so they can cancel and here’s your files you know um so it has to go beyond a pretty website we need to actually provide these services that generate value so it makes sense to keep paying us and our conversion rate is over 90 because the risk is so low and the cost is so easy um it’s just a no-brainer and then we make the value on the back end by keeping this customer for such a long time where if you have a customer paying you four hundred dollars a month for four or five or six years they’re generating more revenue than than what you would have ever sold them a website one time you said nobody objects to something that they can already see working so yeah let’s build one for us pick a business a plumber a dog room or whatever you want and show us what you have working before the first meeting even ends all right so for example

here’s a customer that recently reached out her business name is sugar bees and at first glance it was like okay this is a business that sells custom cookies i’m always trying to figure out how can i pitch this so that the subscription kind of pays for itself based on added revenue and that’s why the discovery is so important so we did the meeting with her we had a discovery call and how her business works she does not do birthday cookies she does corporate event cookies and what we identified when you come to her website is that there’s no way of you knowing that when you land on her website so what we would do usually in our process is we start by redesigning the homepage um and what we want to do is bring into focus what the business uh what will actually produce income for the business in this case making it making the value proposition for enterprise customers very clear making it clear that she has experience in these kind of events um putting that front and center and making it very easy for business to order and probably the most important thing is the call to action making it super easy for business to contact her so

normally i start off by defining what folder i’m going to work in and for this customer the kind of prompt that i would get started with would be something like this so what i’ll do something like this create a custom website redesign for this website all right we’ll give claud the url right there and then i will give a context of what it is she makes custom cookies but she works specifically with enterprise customers not just regular day-to-day consumer sales the prompt is going to help us with the technical part of creating the website but you can make something that’s bad and it’s not going to help the business so the the what we’re bringing into focus is what’s going to actually help the business generate revenue so we can continue by saying something like create a hero section that clearly depicts a corporate event with her cookies on a table and i have my claud code connected to my google ai studio so we can generate an image for that use google ai studio to generate a custom image that depicts this event and we’ll say on the hero section include two call to actions one with a call now button and one with a schedule a call button when the button is clicked we

should see a contact form pop-up that is followed by a calendar date picker then a time picker this will send her an email to her email address which i will provide later make sure you also pull her actual images from her website you can use google ai studio to enhance the images to make them look more professional as well so for this build we’re only working on the homepage because sometimes if you don’t do that it’ll do the whole website and we’ll be here for a while her logo is a honey bee use a hexagon pattern and a bee and hexagon motif throughout the website included in patterns icons and other relevant areas to make her branding stand out use soft gradients and gentle animations to really make the website stand out while not being overwhelming okay so i think we have everything we need we have a opus 4.8 we have set to high this is pretty normal for me and we’re gonna run it and let’s see what we get here we have the finished version of the website now this took probably about 150 prompts to get just right and the customer can give some feedback to make additional changes but we can already

see how much better it is than the original website here the source website where you know it was very template very cookie cutter didn’t really explain that she focused on corporate customers on the new site it’s very clear we have an example here from one of her clients and if we scroll down we have all the brands that she’s worked with you can hover over and see examples of what those cookies might have looked like we scroll down here the website overall is much more visual much more engaging especially when she’s focusing on these corporate customers right they’re looking for that they’re not looking for a generic website especially like a basic template so this has all her information all the services that she offers clients can request a quote right here from the website filling out all their information and overall it provides a better experience for her client we have all her different services here that people can click and look through and we can see the website overall is more engaging compared again to the previous website which you know it looks very generic and if especially when it’s a corporate customer a customer who might be coming in to make

a thousand dollars worth of an order you definitely want to capture that which is what we focused on for her but yeah this is an example of what one of our customers might get and we hope that she’s really happy with how it turned out