Transcript of the laziest way to start a web design agency in 2026 ($10k/month)

Everyone's telling you web design is dead. AI killed it, game over. They're right about one thing, the old way is dead. But what they don't realize is we are about to witness the biggest wealth transfer in digital history. And lazy people who understand what I'm about to show you will make an absolute killing. Look, I've been in web design since before AI could spell HTML. I've watched countless designers panic, pivot or straight up quit. Meanwhile, I'm doing less work than ever and charging five times what I did two years ago. Not because I'm special, but because I saw something everyone else missed. The web design industry isn't dying, it's splitting. And if you position yourself on the right side of the split, you can build a $10,000 a month agency working maybe 20 hours a week. I'm going to show you exactly how. No fluff, no guru mindset BS, just the exact system I'm using right now. But first, you need to understand why everyone else is wrong about AI. In 2019, building a decent website cost between $3,000 and $15,000. It was basically this comfortable middle ground where everyone competed. Today, that middle ground is mostly gone and it's basically completely vaporized. We now live in a world where websites either cost $500 or $50,000. Nothing in between anymore. Because AI didn't kill web design, it just killed the mediocre middle. Think about it, if someone just needs a basic site, they can get it from Wix AI for maybe $15 a month, some guy on Fiverr using JetGPT for $200 or their nephew who knows it. computers and also things like lovable or cursor makes it easier and easier to make sites and these sites are mostly fine they work and they're getting cheaper every month but here's where it gets interesting on the other end companies are spending more than ever on websites netflix just redesigned the landing page three million dollars and also a local automotive company that i know dropped almost one hundred thousand dollars on a new website why because when everyone has access to the same ai tools the only differentiation is strategy creativity and understanding business deeply and so this might sound a bit paradoxical but this is exactly where lazy people will win when i say lazy i don't mean incompetent i mean strategically lazy richard branson once said if you want something done ask a busy person if you want to find a better way to do it ask a lazy person and so here's the traditional agency model that's dying sweat hours on proposals compete on price, do everything manually, manage huge teams and work 60+ hour weeks for thin margins. And now here's the lazy model and this is my model: never write proposals, never compete on price, automate the tedious and useless work and work solo or with one contractor max. 25 hours per week for 50% margins. Sounds impossible? Let me show you exactly how. And so now I will give you the step-by-step approach that I use that you can just follow along and regardless where you are in your business journey i hope this can help you on the way so step one pick your side of the split forget the middle you're either the 500 ai web designer volume play or the 50 000 digital transformation architect the value play i chose value here's why with ai you can deliver 50 000 worth of value with maybe 20 hours of actual work and the math here is actually beautiful. So everyone has a portfolio but nobody really looks at them. Instead I started doing what I call transformational case studies. And so it's not about look at this pretty website I made but rather here's how I added x amount of dollars to this company's revenue with a strategic rebuild. One sells only design the other sells design and money. Step three the LinkedIn heist method. And so what I've been seeing is that cold outreach gets less and less effective and so for this part I would say forget cold outreach. Here's what actually works. Search LinkedIn for just raised or series A or new funding or something like that. Filter by companies with 10 to 50 employees and look for ones with websites from 2019 to 2021. These companies have money, outdated sites and urgency. It's perfect but here's the lazy part. I don't reach out to them. I make them come to me. Step 5: The diagnostic close. Instead of hiring me for $10,000, I say: "Look, you probably lose 40% of your visitors in the first three seconds. At your traffic level, that's roughly $50,000 a month in lost revenue. I can probably fix it in two weeks for $15k or you can keep bleeding. It's your call." It's not manipulation, it's math. Alright, stop. Before we go any further, I need to address the elephant in the room. Half of you are probably thinking: "Cool system, Rafael, but I don't have a portfolio. I never had a real client. Nobody's going to pay me $15,000. Fair point. Let me show you something I saw on LinkedIn this week that blew my mind. So the portfolio hack nobody talks about. This is a concept from a guy named Mitch Davey and he builds workflow sites for agencies and he just dropped the exact playbook I wish I had three years ago. And so basically what he's suggesting is go to stripe.com, tesla.com, linear, shopify.com. These aren't just websites. They're actually masterclasses conversion psychology. Now, and this is crucial, you're going to rebuild them in Webflow or Framer from scratch. Of course, you can use some tools like Reloom or Compa to make the process faster, but you're not creating the whole site, just 4 to 10 key pages. The homepage, pricing, product pages, the signup flow, whatever makes the most sense. Why? Because this forces you to reverse engineer how billion-dollar companies think about web design, which is insanely useful. And so here's exactly how. First use an image downloader extension and grab all their assets. Then HTML to Figma plugin. This shows you their actual structure. And now the important part, break down everything. Why is there a 24 pixel of spacing here instead of just 20 pixel? Why does the CTA button have exactly 16 pixel padding? These aren't random decisions. Someone making $400,000 a year at Stripe spent weeks optimizing these little things. And you're getting that knowledge for free. Insane, right? You don't present them as practice projects or concept work. You present them as capability demonstrations. You're not lying. You're not claiming you work for Tesla. You're just demonstrating that you can execute at their level. Now step five, the agency backdoor. Now here's the move nobody sees coming. Don't pitch clients, pitch agencies. These agencies already have the clients. They already charge $50,000 for websites. What they need, either a developer who can actually build the ambitious stuff their designers stream up or a designer who can actually create something extraordinary. And so the response rate for this is insane. Why? Because you just proved you can handle their most complex builds. Oh, and by the way, a bunch of you have been asking for more detailed walkthroughs, so I'm considering putting together something called the accelerator, basically everything I couldn't fit in this video. My exact client scripts and DM templates, the full 17-point website audit checklist I use, their psychological pricing frameworks that 3x my close rate, and a lot more valuable stuff. If that sounds interesting, drop a let's go in the comments, and if enough people want it, I'll build it in a few weeks. Look, everyone's out there making weather app tutorials and to-do lists. Meanwhile, you're reverse engineering how DJI sells $3,000 drones through their website. Which person would you hire? And here's the thing, after you rebuild 5 or 10 of these sites, you'll understand web design better than 95% of professionals out there. Not because you took a course or something, but because you studied the masters. This is how I went from zero to charging four or even five figure projects. Not by begging for chances, but by proving I could play at the highest level. Look, in 12 months, one of two things will happen. Either you'll still be competing in the dying middle, racing to the bottom with every other designer, or you'll be on the right side of the split, charging premium prices for 20 hours of work per week. The tools are free, the information is here, the opportunity is massive. The only question is: Are you lazy enough to take it?