If your website makes $80M a day, paying $10K to keep it running feels like an immaterial investment in maintaining or improving it. If you drive an average car, a $25 tune-up from your local mechanic every once in a while is fine. If you drive a Formula 1 car, that won’t cut it. You need a whole team of engineers and mechanics whose only job is keeping it running.

I was lucky to learn this early in my career, so we worked hard at my agency to solve expensive problems for our clients. Yes, we specialized in design systems, but the design system for each company had its own unique purpose. We launched a new section of a software company's site to tie in more directly with their marketing tools. We built customizers for a furniture company that made it easier to spot the most popular bundles to sell. We helped a museum raise money faster by boosting the city’s tourism strategy. We shipped new features for a data company so their customers could find signal over noise.

These are hard, complex things to do that not everyone can. The fact that my team and I knew how to do them—or could figure them out—was a major unfair advantage in running a lucrative and profitable agency.

I became my own client

If the last time you visited my website was more than a week ago, it might look a little different now.

I’ve had a personal site since 2005. Last week, I quietly pushed this sixth version live.

Every version until this one was a blog at its core. The first was built on Textpattern. Version 2 was on Movable Type. Version 3 was hand-coded. Version 4 was hand-coded too, but added some build tools like Grunt. Version 5 was built on Eleventy.

A lot of you reading this may remember one or more of these versions. One of my proudest accomplishments is how long most of my subscribers have been on the journey with me. I get messages all the time from people telling me they’ve followed me for 5 or 10 or even 20 years across different platforms. One of my biggest regrets is how little of that data I actually have. Without it, I don’t really know the best way to help the people who follow me.

There’s a reason the latest version looks and works so differently. For every version before this one, I was the designer. I’d get the itch for new fonts and colors, open my tools, and start pushing pixels around. This time, I didn’t start as the designer. I started as the client.

When I sat in the client’s chair, I delayed asking “what do I want this to look like?” and started with “what does this site need to do for my business, and what’s that worth to me?” That’s the same question my clients were really paying me to answer for them. I’d just never seriously asked it about myself. Once I did, the whole project changed. I was building the thing the business needed, not the thing the designer wanted.

The site has a brain now

The front end is built in Framer. I’m tired of writing and debugging code every time I want to update something, and a canvas-based builder solves that for me right now.

The bigger change is that the site has a brain for the first time. My newsletter has run on Kit for the last few years, and I’m so glad I made that call. Because of Kit, I know a lot about what my subscribers like to read, so I can give them more of it.

RightMessage takes that even further. Based on what I know about what people read, the whole site changes on its own to fit them. You can even fill out a quick survey to speed that up if you want. I have so many ideas I’ll be rolling out over the next few months now that this is possible.

None of this is stuff the designer version of me would’ve bothered with. A brain, a personalization engine, dynamic content are expensive, complicated, and invisible if all you care about is how the site looks. But the client version of me wanted it, because the client could see it was worth it.

Make More Money

One of the biggest lessons I learned doing high-stakes work for big companies is that a rebrand or redesign is rarely just about a fresh look. Usually something got outgrown and needs bigger clothes to fit into.

The thing I’ve spent months thinking about and sketching around is how I could better help the people who reach out to me. My old site was bad at that. Through email replies and DMs, I’ve learned there are so many things I could help people with, from pointing them at an article that solves a problem today to coaching them every week to grow their agency. I could have bolted a bunch of stuff onto the old site, but the new one is built around a few common paths that draw a straight line from a problem someone has to a solution I have for them.

So when I quietly launched this new site last week, I didn’t just launch this site. I quietly launched another one too: an updated site for Make More Money with some new products.

When I first launched Make More Money in January of 2025, it was a group coaching program to help agency owners grow from six figures to seven. Group coaching was only one way to help them, but it was the only one I had the capacity for at the time. Today I have more capacity and more data about what the other ways are.

I learned that some of my audience “doesn’t care” about my coaching program because they’re already past what it’s built for. A lot of agency owners think that once they hit $1M in revenue, they’ve figured it all out. Then they’re surprised to learn that $1M+ comes with its own set of problems. So I’m opening up Vanguard, a monthly gathering for design agency owners doing $1M+, built around the conversations they can’t have with their clients, their employees, or the rest of the internet.

I also learned that a lot of people want to grow their agency but want to do it at their own pace. So I took everything we’ve covered in the coaching program over the last 18 months and packaged it up to go through whenever you want. That became the Field Guide, self-paced video training for design and creative agency owners who already have paying clients and want to price better, smooth out their pipeline, and run the business with less chaos. Take what you need, when you need it, and get back to work.

Of course, the coaching program isn't going anywhere. It's now called Quest, which represents the journey and the system you can use to get to $1M with a crew of your peers next to you every step of the way.

These three offerings make a point that's been there all along: Make More Money is a brand that helps agency owners live more life, in a bunch of different ways.

My new personal site and the new Make More Money site work together to point you toward the solution that’s right for you.

There’s no “Dan” in “team”

Working with clients through my agency taught me that important, valuable work usually takes a team of specialists who can do far more together than any of them could alone. The whole was always greater than the sum of the parts.

One of the biggest constraints of previous versions of my website is that they were limited to whatever I could pull off on my own as a designer and developer. I decided to release that constraint by bringing in—read: paying—people who could do more than I could.

One of the biggest limits of my earlier sites is that they were stuck at whatever I could pull off on my own as a designer and developer. A client would never accept that limit. Once I was the client, I didn’t either. So I let it go by bringing in—read: “paying”—people who could do more than I could.

Tanjim Islam got the Framer build off the ground. Jonas Leupe elevated the art direction and design and finished the Framer build. Brad Hussey built the personalization engine. Madeleine Sava set up the funnel and automations to streamline marketing and sales. Duy Duc Nguyen created many of the flower illustrations. I creative directed, established the content strategy, and did all the content migration.

The business of websites

The mistake agency owners make in pricing a website at $10,000 is they’re usually pricing the thing they can see—the layout, the build, the number of screens—instead of the thing it does. A site that helps 150,000 people book flights a day isn’t a $10K site, no matter how many pages it has. It’s a piece of the business that happens to look like a website.

Most agency owners have a blocker on what they can sell a site for. The blocker usually isn’t a skill ceiling. It’s a chair problem. They design from the designer’s chair, so they build what a designer would want and price it like a designer would price it. Sit in the client’s chair instead—really understand the business the way the owner does—and you start building what the business actually needs. That work is worth a lot more to them, so they’ll happily pay a lot more for it.

I’m not telling you to redesign your site like mine. I'm telling you to do for your clients what I finally did for myself: treat their website as the machine that runs their business, because that’s what it is. I gave mine a brain because, as the client, I could see it was worth it. Your clients can see it too, when you show up as the person who gets that.