The Cheesecake UX Agency Tactic

0:00 Most designers want to be paid more, a lot more. Yet, they do everything in their power to undermine themselves and clients take advantage. But it doesn't have to be that way. You can charge more. I solved this years ago. You just need to frame your work the right way. There is one crucial mistake that you really need to get around, and I'm going to cover it in this video. And when you do that, it's going to be raining dollar bills. Sorry, I didn't have more on me. And before we begin, thanks for ordering the courses with the discount for my birthday. As promised, you guys got me this new MacBook. Appreciate it. Today, I'm going to tell you how understanding

0:46 the sales of cheesecakes can help you charge more for your design or dev work. This is a cheesecake. It costs $8 for a piece. Let's break it down and annotate it a little bit. This will help you understand the design of the cheesecake salesfunnel. We got the base, the cheese, and the raspberry mix, the whipped cream, and fresh fruit on top. When we add up the prices of the ingredients, it comes to around $3. That designers would say that they could probably make that cheesecake for a single dollar and that it's a ripoff. What they failed to realize is that the cheesecake is sold at a cafe. It has employees, rent, taxes, electricity bills, and more. Selling it at $3 would be stupid, but many people buy it, and

1:31 it's because of the framing. Let's talk about it. By the way, this is a very small part, a tiny part of the Squareblock blueprint. It's my best work so far. More documents, templates, and guides how to get to a 7 figureure freelance or agency business are all inside and the price is going to go up soon. Link in the description. Now, let's get back to the video. If you frame the cheesecake as just $8, many people may complain. Yeah, it's too expensive. Same with your $2,500 website design. The cheesecake is a lot easier to grasp when you realize that at $8, it's likely not returning a profit. The costs of creating it are too high. So why does it exist? Well, because of the

2:19 upsells. If you buy the cheesecake, then you'll likely buy a drink and on those margins can be up to 10 to one. Going to that cafe, you're not really buying a cheesecake. You're buying a good time. And cheesecake is just one of the elements of that good time. So, it's a combination of a lot of different things and you need to look at your designs the exact same way. It's not a single thing that you offer. It's a mix. All things have a perceived value. So, a client looking at a cheesecake can assess whether it's too expensive or not. And it goes the same way for your website design. Most designers try to simplify pricing. So they write something like no code

3:06 development and design of a landing page is $2500. The problem is that just making a website as a service is decreasing in price because a lot of people do it. There are a lot of tools that help you do it and a lot of people do it well. So there is a lot of competition. So, if you sell the same thing that they do for a similar price, you're going to be stuck in a loop of slightly lowering your prices every year to compete. What you should do instead is create a scope of work document and show where the value is. We include the one that I use at Squareblock in the Squarebug blueprint obviously, but let's cover what this document should have right

3:52 now. The design part or the dev part is just a tiny little cog in that machine. It might be the most time consuming and it might even be the most expensive, but it shouldn't be perceived as the only and main thing that you do. The best scopes of work are incredibly detailed. So the first thing to do is to make a large list of everything you do in the process so the client has a better understanding of what they're really paying for. But it also has to be clearly positioned around the value to the end client. Many designers just sell a template that they adjust to a client and they say, "Oh, this is a beautiful

4:37 design that I'm going to modify to fit your business." This is a dead end. That's a wrong way to do it. You should always do a quick research exercise first. Even if the client is not normally paying for it, you should always do it anyway. At least do a competitive analysis, a huristic evaluation. Look through the current product feedback and then look at some adjacent niches to the one the product is in because sometimes there is a gold mine of information there. Then make a mood board. Make a strategy document post-launch, pre-launch, during the design strategy. Outline the client's goals. Write out the potential solutions. Then design. Do what you do best, right? But then annotate on your

5:24 design where those goals are and how are they going to be solved with the benefit to the client clearly outlined. So you'll get more registrations, more clients, more money. Then plan what can be tweaked and how. What can be tested how and adjusted when. It all has to be framed around the fact that you want the client to succeed. You don't just want to sell them a website design. You want the website design to be iterative and to be constantly growing their revenue because that's the way they're going to stay with you and that's the way they keep showering you with money. Yeah, same $3 bills again. But if you do all of this right, the client sees value.

6:09 Value beyond just some pixels in a template. Value beyond a design or dev work alone. And this is what they actually pay for. And when your scope of work is really clear and you show that you do a lot of things to make them earn more money, then they will be happy to give you even more. And here is another thing that we did for long-term clients, ones that we've been working for at least a year. When we do a rebranding or a redesign, we make those little hard coverver books that have the whole branding completely explained in great detail. We make one more of these, but we're

6:56 going to talk about this one a little later. Giving something like this to a client is a little unexpected in a purely digital world and they appreciate it. Those clients stay with us for a decade and they keep paying us for the value that we provide and all those little extras just add to the value. I show you how to do it all in the Squareblock blueprint and there are updates coming. There are going to be price increases. So, get your spot first to keep the lower price before it goes up because this is worth thousands. And I'm really proud that I've done something like this. Of course, you can just grab the little bits and pieces that I share for free and then create your own patterns, your

7:42 own documents, your own templates, and your own strategy. And this is just going to take you a lot of extra time. But no matter what you do, if you're going to go with this or you're going to make it all by yourself, remember that you deserve more money. So just do it.