Q: Ben, what drives you to do this type of work?

I first got interested in working with the web while I was living on the West Coast during the early 2010s. It was a heady time—new startups were popping up right and left, and I got curious... Maybe this internet thing was going to be big. I started going to engineering meetups and encountering brilliant people who were passionate about their work. I thought, this energy is pretty unique; I want to get involved. With that intention set, I committed to learning web development over an 18 month period. By the end of that time, I was confident enough in my skills that I took on my first client. The project was a new website for a local artist who made incredible creatures out of metal. I handled the design, copywriting, and custom development in WordPress. A few months after I published his new site, he got picked for a major art installation in the airport that would be seen by tens of thousands of people. It felt like immediate validation that I was on the right path, and could use my blend of creative and technical skills to really help my clients.

Q: What do you look for in a client?

I’ve been privileged to get to a place where I can pick my collaborators. I try to find people with a compelling product, whose work I can naturally get behind. Websites are essentially sales tools or products themselves, so I want to be working on a product I believe in. Often that means working with B Corps and other mission driven companies, but it can be any company with a product that makes people’s lives better. Beyond qualities of the product, I look for basic professional attributes like reputation and reliability. It’s not a formula, more of a vibe check. Whatever it is, it seems to be working. I’ve been graced to work with some amazing people over the last decade.

Q: What makes for a successful project?

There are two forms of success: operational and business outcomes. By operational success, I refer to the process of building a new web app or website or content strategy. Success is this area means that we collaboratively defined our goals for the project, came up with a reasonable budget and timeline, and executed our plan to mutual satisfaction. With experience, operational success isn’t that hard—at this phase of my career, we almost always hit that mark. That leaves business success. Business outcomes are trickier, because they involve the reception of the product by the market. Your marketing website or content strategy is only one of many factors that influence how well a product does. Done well, they can be a big asset, but they’re only part of the story. I’ve come to believe that successful business outcomes are the confluence the right product, at the right time, with the wrong competition. Meaning, your product strikes the market as superior or unique relative to your competitors, in a growing market sector with unmet consumer demand. If you can hit that moving target, you’re in for a wild entrepreneurial ride.

Q: What’s the best way to evaluate if Rules of Go is the right partner for my product?

I recommend filling out the contact form on this site. We’ll have an exploratory conversation about the nature of your offering and how I might represent it on the web. If we have overlap on your goals for the product and the services I offer, I’ll ask you to send me your existing marketing materials and any user-facing information about how the product works. I’ll digest that and set up a meeting to discuss how we might work together. Typically, I’ll distill our choices into a few different custom service packages you can choose between.