In my last post, I alluded to a business that I was in the process of starting. Today, I’m excited to publicly announce Grid & Arrow, a joint venture between myself and fellow Central Pennsylvania developer Joel Peterson.
Since my wife and I left Brooklyn in mid-2015, a sizeable percentage of my work had been hourly contract work for one company that I had no equity in. While I really enjoyed the work, if I’m being entirely honest, the looming thought of how many billable hours I completed in a week and my income being 100% tied to that had started to wear on me.
Concurrently, I had noticed time and time again that my business’ entire pricing structure was based on me getting medium to large budget jobs; I had nothing that I could offer to a low budget client without losing money myself. As I’ve gotten more involved with the small business community in Pennsylvania, I’ve been wanting to work less in California and New York and more in my own community, but have struggled to make the switch because of my pricing structure.
When Joel approach me about starting a hosting company after experiencing some of the same things, I realized we could craft a business model that had the potential to resolve both of the above.
We could build websites for a low upfront cost, especially since so many local businesses simply need a modern brochure-style website to present themselves well digitally, and make up for the time investment in the residual income of the monthly hosting fees.
After discussing the shared experience of building out advanced WordPress admin customizations only to have our clients just call us to have a change made, we decided that our primary offering would be “turn-key web hosting”, making basic changes to our customer’s sites just an email or a phone call away.
It solves a need many businesses have and, with a baby on the way, the idea of not all of my working time being devoted to “deep work” but supporting business with smaller tasks seemed like a wise transition for me.
As Grid & Arrow grows its legs, Joel and I will be continuing to operate our individual freelance businesses with full force for the foreseeable future (hire me, I’m looking for new clients). We’re excited about this new venture (and we have some other crazy ideas that extend beyond hosting) and hope you’ll check out the website we launched this week.