Safari is dumb. But I fixed the site anyways.

Used this when I first started freelancing as it was straightforward and nice to look at.

Eventually realized how much a cut Stripe + Slimvoice we’re taking and I also stopped caring what my invoice looked like so I switched to invoicing from my accounting software (Xero) and had clients pay by bank transfer or physical check.

But starting out or for one off, I still like Slimvoice quite a bit. I know a lot of people dislike them, but PayPal’s invoicing is pretty nice now too.

That's a fair critique, but it's pretty hard to get a client to provide that transparency...they really have nothing to gain by publicizing how much they paid.

I considered making up look-a-like websites as examples, but even that felt like they could be paired up with our published work.

This is based on our own experience over the four years working mostly on marketing-style websites. Even for 1000+ page websites, we were able to migrate the content in a day or so.

You're not far from wrong :)

But the lowest price point options aren't all selected for a single project. What normally happens is they supply mockups OR they already have a CMS OR they don't have new content OR they don't value our previous experience.

Sometimes it can be more than one of those options also.

It's unfortunately not clear to most companies...

Why are most (if not all) Windows PCs poorly designed? Why is all enterprise software sluggish and painful to use?

The second part of my thesis beyond proving value is to encourage designers to take on massive incumbents. I love, love Gusto for this very reason, it's actually not that hard to make enterprise software enjoyable to use!

People are finding the products directly through Google, which is why SEO/rankings is considered “business value” in this experiment,

For the second part of your question, I’ll let you form your own opinion:

• competitor: http://www.colorzilla.com/gradient-editor/
• my project: https://cssgradient.io

It’s because the 5 products I shipped were competing with existing products that have SEO+ads as their business model.

Let’s say instead I decided to design a toothbrush (like quip did), I’d instead use market share and revenue to gauge business value...but that would take years and is hard data to get.

The combination of fast results and easy comparison makes it simple to start with Google rankings.

Ultimately im interested in building saas software and eventually housing so I will continue testing my thesis at larger scales.

I'm pretty new to this whole writing about work thing, so I'm not quite as articulate as I'd like to be but let me give this another shot.

If you have two products that are identical in features, but one is designed better, the designed one is significantly more valuable, and this isn't obvious to most business owners.

The examples I created are simple web tools because they cost nothing to launch and have the business metric of Google ranking to prove value. A few other examples:

• Housing: A better designed apartment can garner much higher rent. A friend built White Stone Studios and it's the highest per sqft rent in all of Arizona!
• Gusto - Enterprise software is ripe for having tech companies come in and build the exact same features but with a better experience. I'm very long on Gusto passing ADP in the next few years.
• Computers/Phones: Apple's margins and cash prove convincingly that design is valuable.

Hopefully this helps clarify my thesis. Glad you enjoyed parts of the article!

Seriously, I hate Wordpress and this makes development palatable. Big fan of this repo and posted it on HN a while back.

Shipped a couple of popular sites with it including the initial version of askspoke.com and https://wordpress.metatags.io/ (personal project).