Twelve months ago we signed our first contract as an independent studio. Today we are writing this yearly report because we promised ourselves we would: if we were going to do things our own way, the least we could do is tell the story without makeup. This is not a motivational post. It is a balance sheet, with real numbers and mistakes that still sting a little.
Over the year we have learned more than we expected, mostly in the things nobody sees: how to write a proposal, when to say no, how to charge without feeling bad about it, and how much every unbilled hour actually costs. We have organised it in three blocks: the numbers, the scars, and the things we would do exactly the same way again.
NUMBERS
We closed the year with 14 projects shipped for 9 different clients. Three of those clients came back for a second engagement, which internally we celebrate more than any other metric: it means the relationship and the result hold up over time. The invoice mix landed at roughly 45% landing pages and corporate sites, 35% custom web applications, and 20% maintenance and small iterations. The average project ticket was 4,800 euros, with a wide gap between the smallest and the largest. The ratio between billed hours and hours actually worked was around 0.72: for every hour invoiced, we worked about 1.4. Not ideal, but honest and better than we expected for a first year.
SCARS
Four mistakes deserve to be written down so we do not repeat them. First: we accepted a fixed-price job that, by its nature, should have been billed by the hour. We misread the scope and lost around 40 hours we never invoiced. Second: we said yes to a client whose brief kept moving every week. We learned the hard way that without a written, signed scope we do not send an estimate, no matter how much we like the project. Third: we underestimated an SEO migration. What looked like a week turned into three, and from that point on we multiply by 1.5 any estimate involving migration, redirects or legacy content. Fourth, and the most expensive of all: we did not offer recurring retainers in our first year. It is probably the most underestimated revenue stream when you are starting out, and the one that gives you the most stability when months go quiet.
WHAT WE WOULD DO AGAIN
We are still a small team and we did not hire employees. We work with trusted collaborators when we need to, but the structure stays as it is. We also do not use templates: every project is designed and built from scratch, and that has cost us hours but has also brought us the clients we actually wanted. We keep things transparent: we share access, repositories and documentation from day one, and the client can check progress without asking permission.
For year two the priorities are clear: introduce maintenance retainers from the initial proposal, raise rates on projects that require more research, and turn down sooner the work that does not fit. Fewer projects, better chosen, better priced.