Local website studio

The idea

Plenty of local businesses have a website that does not work on a phone, loads slowly, or lists last year's opening hours. Some have none at all. The crew finds them, measures what is wrong and builds a better version. You do the talking and decide who to work with.

The crew does the slow parts: the search, the audit, the first draft of every message and the build. You keep the parts that need a person: the conversation, the price and the handshake.

Who it serves

Small local businesses that need a simple, fast site and do not have time to brief an agency. And an owner, perhaps a freelancer or a designer, who would rather spend the day talking to clients than resizing images.

The skills the crew needs

• Research with sources, to find businesses and record where each fact came from.
• A site audit: phone layout, speed, missing information.
• Plain writing, so every message reads like a person wrote it.
• Cold outreach with a send gate: the crew drafts, you send.
• Design: a mockup the owner can open on a phone.
• Build and deploy: an Astro site on Cloudflare, opened as a pull request you approve.

The setup

• One Firstmate home with Claude Code.
• One project for the studio itself, studio-leads, set to local-only. It holds the lead list, the audits and the message drafts, and never leaves your computer.
• One project per client site, set to direct-PR, created when a client says yes.
• A Cloudflare account in your name for previews. Each client site goes live on the client's own account.
• Your own email. The crew writes drafts; it never sends.

Before any outreach, check the rules where you work. Spain's LSSI, for example, requires prior consent for commercial email, businesses included. Where that applies, make the first contact in person and let the crew prepare what you bring. Keep only business contact details, record the public source of each one, and delete a lead the moment they say no.

The first week's steps

Each step is a request you give your first mate.

1. "Scout 30 independent [bakeries] in [town] whose website is missing, slow, or broken on a phone. For each, record the business name, the site, the problem, a public business contact and the source of every fact. Business details only."
2. Read the list and cut it to the ten you would most like to work with.
3. "Audit these ten sites: a phone screenshot, the PageSpeed score and anything missing, such as hours, prices or a map. One page per business."
4. "Pick the best of the ten and design a better home page for it as a private preview. Mark it not for search engines."
5. Open the preview on your phone. Say what to change.
6. "Draft a short first message for each of the ten. Name one thing that is wrong on their site and offer the preview. Under 100 words, no pressure, no claims about their sales."
7. Edit each draft until it sounds like you, then make contact yourself: by email where that is allowed, in person where it is not.
8. "Draft replies to the answers that came in." Take every call yourself. The quote is yours.
9. When a client says yes, write the agreement and the invoice yourself. Then: "Add a project for [client] and build their site from the preview, with their real text and photos."
10. Read the pull request and the preview with the client. When they approve, sit with them while they connect their own Cloudflare account to the site's GitHub repository, so each merge deploys to their domain. Then say "merge it".

Take down every preview that did not turn into a client.

Monthly tool costs

These are tool costs only, checked on the date above. Prices change, so check them again before you rely on them.

The decisions you keep

• The trade and the town, and which businesses you contact at all.
• Every message, before it goes out, and the decision to send it.
• Every call and every meeting.
• The price, the scope and the agreement.
• What goes live on a client's domain, and when.
• The client's accounts and passwords stay with the client.