Three Pitch Sites, One Receipt Problem, 950 Bob Gone
Building prospectus websites for Kilifi coast prospects, fixing CRM lead and client separation, and why I stopped trying to narrow my agency niche.
Monday started with me tearing apart my own homepage and ended at half past eleven at night fixing a broken scroll animation on a pitch site nobody has paid for yet. In between I built prospectus websites for three coast prospects, rewrote my hero copy, and finally forced my CRM to stop treating leads and clients as the same thing. The honest version is that most of the day was unpaid speculative work, and I chose it on purpose.
Trying to pick a niche, then refusing to
I opened the day by reviewing the DDi site the way a hard-nosed marketer would. No mercy, just scrutiny. The hero was weak. A black band at the bottom saying something about "one team" looked pasted on from a different website. The testimonial placement was wrong.
Then I went down a hole that cost me an hour. I decided DDi should be known for one industry. I tried to name Africa's big industries (logistics, transport, construction, tourism) and work out what they lack digitally, then plant a flag there. I went around in circles on it. I asked for an interactive artifact so I could watch the reasoning happen, got frustrated, asked the same question again, got frustrated again.
Then I stopped and asked the better question: why am I narrowing now? I have no volume problem that a niche solves. I have a few past projects across completely different sectors (a diaspora community project, a sports events site, a fashion brand I founded and marketed myself). Picking one lane today would be guessing.
So I let the market decide. Keep delivering across sectors, watch what repeats, and let the "we are known for" sentence write itself in six months from actual demand. That was the right call and it took me 40 minutes of arguing with myself to get there.
New hero and callout written. Deployed. Then I looked at my browser and it was a mess, so I went back in and fixed the composition properly.
Why leads and clients cannot share one interface
A retail client sent through a 10,000 shilling commitment deposit for a refacing job. The full invoice I had shown him was bigger, deliberately, so he could see the shape of the whole thing. But the deposit was for the refacing only. I had already sent a 25,000 invoice. Now I needed to issue a receipt for 10,000 against it, and my own system had no clean way to do that.
That exposed a bigger problem. My CRM was showing leads and clients through the same interface, which means a lead can be half a client and a client can still look like a lead. Garbage in, garbage forever.
So I rebuilt the segregation:
- Separate parameters for leads and for clients. No shared fields pretending to be both.
- A folder per client inside the CRM, so everything about one job lives in one place.
- A new enquiries tab, separate from prospects, because someone filled my website form and I got the email but nothing appeared in the CRM at all.
- No overflow between stages, no double existence, no record sitting in two pipeline positions.
- Partial payments and receipts that do not fight the original invoice amount.
My dashboard money section was also broken, only showing outstanding shillings and nothing else. Fixed that too.
Then I hit a smaller thing I had not planned for. I am teaching this trade to a student, one-on-one. Four sessions in November, an hour and a half each, covering design thinking, tool familiarity, client sourcing and sales, then service delivery and consistency. 20,000 for the whole thing, paid in three installments, at a cyber in Kilifi where I pay about 500 per session for the space. That is not a lead and it is not a normal client. It needed its own segment, and an agreement template that matches a teaching arrangement rather than a build. Set both up.
Prospectus sites as the actual sales pitch
The rest of the day was design, and this is where I was most ruthless with myself.
A dhow operator came back with answers to my discovery questions plus two posters. I had promised them three concepts. The first thing I was shown was AI slop. Generic, soulless, the kind of layout that could belong to any business anywhere. I killed it. The second attempt was goofy. Killed that too.
What fixed it was reference. I went and found specific templates I actually admire and said build from this level of craft, not from a generic idea of a website. That changed everything. Once there was a real composition reference, the work got serious.
Four pitch sites by the end of the day, in various states:
- A tours and safaris operator who agreed I could redesign their existing site. They said go all out, so I did.
- A restaurant prospect in Kilifi, where a co-owner told me they already have a developer working on it (allegedly), but she was open to a free full-ops concept proposal anyway. I told her I would make something she would fall in love with. I researched their Instagram for tone, language and vibe before touching any layout.
- A beach resort, same approach, Instagram screenshots for reference first.
- The dhow operator, which mattered most to me. The name carries real cultural weight on the coast. I wanted the landing page to feel like it belongs to the people there, not like a template with palm trees dropped in.
For the restaurant I pushed hard on depth. The first pass was too shallow. I wanted hover states that reveal photographs as you move the cursor across the hero, proper scroll animations, a sense that the site remembers something. I gave it its own page and added booking directly on the platform, on demo data, not live. Pushed the working ones to hosting.
Last thing before midnight: the sun scroll effect on the dhow site was broken, and one section needed rebuilding. Still working on it.
Marketing money and the cost of being legitimate
Paid 950 shillings for the business name registration. Receipt filed. Now waiting on review.
When that clears, I want the next chunk of money going into actual PR, not just ads. Directory listings, blog placements, paying relevant Instagram and Facebook pages with genuine local audiences to post about us. Not the big accounts with inflated follower counts, the specific ones that reach people who might hire us. I researched what the media houses actually charge, drafted outreach to all of them, and sent it.
I also logged work hours and token costs into the CRM, so I can see what a speculative pitch site actually costs me to produce. If I am going to give away concept work, I want to know the real price of that generosity.
What I would tell another founder
Stop trying to pick your niche before the market has told you anything. I burned the best hour of my morning trying to decide what industry DDi is "known for" when I have nowhere near enough repeat demand to answer that honestly. Watch what keeps coming back, then name it. And if you are going to do free concept work to win a client, track the hours and the costs the same way you would a paid job, because unmeasured generosity is just a leak.