A Good Kajabi Website Designer Will Tell You When You Don't Need a Website

I design Kajabi websites for a living, and I'm going to tell you something that probably won't win me any popularity contests among other website designers.

You might not need a website yet.

In fact, depending on where you are in your business, building a website might be one of the last things I'd recommend spending your money on.

I know that sounds like a strange thing to hear from someone who designs websites, builds sales funnels, and writes conversion copy. But I've spent enough years working with business owners to see what happens when people invest in all the infrastructure before they've figured out what they're selling and who they're selling it to.

And I have some pretty strong opinions about it.

The website isn't the business

Somewhere along the way, we've convinced ourselves that starting an online business means building a website, setting up an email platform, creating a lead magnet, writing a welcome sequence, connecting a dozen automations, and figuring out how to move people through a sales funnel.

Oh, and don't forget to segment your email list so you can separate your warm leads from your cold leads and your hot leads.

Good grief.

If you've spent any time listening to online business gurus, you've probably heard a hundred different versions of how you're supposed to set everything up. Each one has a framework, method, or system that promises to make your business easier to run, more profitable, or more automated.

And I'm not suggesting that all those things are useless. I build them for my clients all the time.

But there's an enormous difference between building systems that support a successful business and building systems because you hope they'll make your business successful.

I've watched people spend months getting ready to sell. They work on their branding, websites, funnels, and course platforms. They tweak colors, rewrite headlines, and add another page because they've decided they need one more thing before they're ready to launch.

Meanwhile, they haven't sold anything.

And I can't help wondering what would happen if they took all that energy and put it into talking to potential customers instead.

What I'd recommend if you were just starting out

If you came to me today and told me you wanted to start a coaching business but hadn't worked with any paying clients yet, I'd probably tell you to put your website budget away for a while.

Go sell your coaching.

Give someone your phone number. Meet them for coffee. Get on a Google Meet call. Send an email to someone who might benefit from what you do. Start a YouTube channel if that's where your audience spends time, or start having conversations on social media.

Find people who need your help and offer to help them.

I'd love to see more people spend a full year selling and delivering their services before investing heavily in the infrastructure around them.

Think about what you could learn in a year of working directly with paying customers. You'd discover which people benefit most from your work. You'd hear the questions they ask before they buy, find out what makes them hesitate, and learn which parts of your offer they find most valuable.

You'd have opportunities to adjust your program based on what happens when real people go through it.

You'd also learn how to sell it.

And that is an incredibly valuable skill that no website can learn for you.

By the time you were ready to build your website, we'd have something substantial to work with. We'd know who you're talking to, what they want, how your offer helps them, and the questions we need to answer before they'll feel comfortable buying.

Now, if you really wanted a website in the meantime, I'd probably suggest putting together a simple one-page site and calling it done. There's nothing wrong with having a professional place to send people who want to learn more about you.

Just don't let building it become the thing that keeps you from selling.

What a good Kajabi website designer should understand

When someone comes to me about a Kajabi website or sales page, I want to understand the entire business behind it.

What are you selling? How are people finding you? Where is your traffic coming from? What happens when someone becomes interested in your work? Are you building an email list? What are you offering people when they first discover you, and what do you want them to do next?

I want to know whether your offers make sense together and whether there's a natural path for someone who starts out with a free resource and eventually becomes a paying customer.

And I pay an awful lot of attention to the way you talk about your work.

Some of the most valuable pieces of a website come from the little things people say in conversation. A story they tell almost in passing. The way they describe a customer's problem. Something about their personality that comes through when they're relaxed and talking about what they love.

Those details can tell me more about how a business ought to present itself than a perfectly completed branding questionnaire.

I listen for them because I want the finished website to feel like it belongs to the person behind the business. Not just because we've used their favorite colors and chosen a font they like, but because the whole experience reflects who they are, how they work, and what makes their business different.

And that takes more than making a pretty page.

Sometimes it also means recommending a much smaller website than someone originally imagined.

I've worked with businesses that have substantial audiences, established products, and ambitious plans for growth, and I've found that even at that stage, there often isn't much reason to build something complicated.

If someone has one excellent product, a reliable way to attract new people, and a simple path to purchasing that product, what exactly are we gaining by adding another twelve pages?

Sometimes the answer is nothing.

A home page, a good sales page, and a place for people to find helpful resources might be everything the business needs.

I'd much rather build a handful of pages that work beautifully together than a sprawling website that leaves visitors wondering what they're supposed to do next.

Giving your business a place in the world

There is something wonderful about getting to know a business well enough that you begin to see all the little pieces coming together.

I'll have conversations with a client, look through their existing materials, listen to how they describe the people they serve, and start noticing things that haven't quite made it into their marketing yet.

Sometimes those details seem almost contradictory. Someone can be incredibly professional and thoughtful while also having a mischievous sense of humor. A business can be built around serious ideas and still feel warm and inviting.

Finding the right balance is part of what makes this work so interesting to me.

I want to build a place on the internet where someone can throw their doors wide open and invite people in. A place that represents the business professionally but also feels unmistakably like the person who created it.

There's an enormous difference between having a website you're slightly embarrassed to share and having one you're so excited about that you want to show it to everybody.

I've seen what that difference can do for the way someone talks about their business, and I absolutely love being part of that transformation.

It's almost like staking a claim. You've created this business, you've worked hard to develop something valuable, and now you've got a place in the world that belongs to it.

But I want that place to be built around something solid.

If you're considering hiring a Kajabi website designer, I'd encourage you to look beyond the portfolio and the price. Pay attention to the questions they ask about your business, your customers, and your offers. Look for someone who wants to understand how everything fits together and who will tell you honestly when a smaller project would serve you better.

Even if that means less work for them.

And if you're not quite ready for a website? That's okay, too.

Go find some customers. Talk to them. Pay attention to what they say, what they buy, and what gets them excited. Keep your offers simple, do excellent work, and let your business grow from there.

When the time comes to build your website, you'll have so much more to work with.

And I'd be tickled to help you build it.