Welcome back to the third edition of The Lab Report!
It will be a slightly shorter newsletter this week.
I usually try to get them done the day before, but that didn’t happen this time around.
I spent most of the week trying to figure out what I wanted to do next with NewPulse Labs and how I could grow this into a real business.
Honestly there are so many opportunities that are super exciting. Some options I’ve been considering:
- Focus primarily on creating content, where my job is to publish tutorials & reviews here, on the YouTube channel, and the blog.
- Create a simple & beautifully-designed block kit for marketing designers. It would have a ton of blocks to put landing pages together quickly. It would come with the Figma file to design everything first, and then Oxygen/Elementor/Zion sections to build it out in a snap.
- Design high-converting funnel packs. For example: a physical product funnel including the landing page, checkout, upsell and thank you pages.
- Design purpose-built templates. I’ve built both a lightweight virtual summit site and LMS for clients using Oxygen and Advanced Custom Fields. It would be cool to sell these as an advanced starter site.
Anyways, those are just some ideas I’ve been playing around with.
I hope you don’t mind me sharing the behind-the-scenes of building this business. I thought it’d be fun to take early subscribers along for the ride 🚀
Let’s get into this week’s newsletter!
💵 Here’s permission to raise your rates
My girlfriend and I recently purchased our second property (in this economy??) and are going through the process of renovating it now.
We’re taking an older single-family home that smells like smoke and turning it into what will hopefully become a beautiful duplex by the time it’s done.
One of the first steps is getting the floor plans submitted to the city for approval – which is done by a certified draftsman/draftswoman.
So we hired one to do ours…
…and our experience was not good!
There wasn’t much thought put into the initial floor plans. We needed to provide them 5 options of our own to get something we liked.
Even then, they were a week late in giving us the final drawings.
We had to follow up every couple days, and there was no apology when we did eventually get them.
Want to hear the real kicker?
Immediately after, they sent us an invoice for $2k!
Two thousand dollars to certify our floor plan and provide a poor customer experience.
I thought to myself… damn, it wasn’t long ago that I charged slightly more than that to build a full out website.
Custom design, fast performance, security and all.
The difference in value per $ is insane.
Are you good at what you do? Do you communicate with your clients? Are your clients happy in the end?
You may not believe it, but if so, you’re already ahead of 80% of other service providers out there.
You’re probably undercharging.
So use this as a reminder that it might be time to raise your rates.
Usually the toughest part is giving ourselves the permission to charge more.
And if that’s not enough to convince you…
(I published this story as a blog post here).
🧊 How much does a polar bear weigh?
Newsletters are cool, but being part of a real community is way cooler.
So why don’t we break the ice and get to know each other a bit better?
I just made a post in the FB group with a few fun intro questions.
Take a two minute break from this newsletter to introduce yourself!
The more we surround ourselves with people who share similar interests, the faster we’ll take our craft to the next level, build our network, and create new opportunities.
So seriously, go there now and comment on the thread!
⭐ Product of the Week
I spent a solid day or two this week playing around with Untitled UI.
It’s a massive website UI kit and design system for Figma.
I’m going to do a full review on it soon, but in short – it’s awesome.
The whole thing is just really well built, and the creator Jordan has been really helpful over email.
I probably spent a couple hours just looking at how they set things up so that I can get better at Figma myself.
There are a ton of designs for hero sections, features, pricing etc.
The sections tend to mostly be geared towards SaaS companies and startups, so it’s an easy recommend if that’s your use-case.
Even if not, the layouts are pretty universal.
Jordan has some example designs he’s built with it on his Dribbble page.
You can get Untitled UI here for $99. You can also use the promo code DRIBBBLE to get $10 off.
💬 Closing Comments
Thanks again for hanging out with me for another edition of The Lab Report!
As always, feel free to reply back if you found anything particularly interesting or useful – or just want to chat.
Lastly, please don’t forget to comment on the FB group introduction thread.
Have a great weekend!
– Sunny
