Webdesign as a side business is oversaturated

[StarStruck]

Too many discovered this field as a side hustle. You really don't need any coding skills to do it.

I'm fully focusing on my coding skills on this moment. Are there people who have coding as their side husste? On what kind jobs are you focusing on? Is the money good? Any tips?

Almost finished with the course on Java, soon starting with Python.

[StarStruck]

24 minutes ago, datamonster said:

Do some mini projects beyond the courses. Code a simple app or game to gain hands-on experience and start building a portfolio.

You have exp with that?

[Yarco]

What experience are you basing the idea that it's oversaturated on?

Where are you looking for clients? Locally or on job boards, or sites like Upwork/Fiverr?

How many jobs have you applied for?

How many companies have you cold-emailed or reached out to that haven't posted an ad?

I think you'll find that every area of business is oversaturated nowadays if you just try to do the standard thing. You need some way to differentiate yourself... price, quality, or something else that makes you unique and stand out from every other average web design company.

[JohnnyAb]

I do some data wrangling/analytics as a side hustle, often as my own projects that I can somehow monetise.

Usually I use Python/R. Lately I started working with ArcGIS and MatLab too since I can use my university licence for any purposes. 

I don't have any experience with Java but I bet you can find a lot of opportunities.

Try getting some hands-on experience and build your portfolio.

[Leo Gura]

The hard part in any biz is finding clients.

If you know how to find the clients you don't even need to code, just hire a team of coders overseas and manage them.

But of course you can be a coder too. You'll just have to compete with cheap overseas code labor.

The real money is in being unique.

[captainamerica]

18 minutes ago, datamonster said:

Yes, as a data scientist I code quite a bit in Python and R. Also taught myself VB as a teen. Would not recommend that language tough ?

@datamonster Which company do you work for? Do you have a kaggle?

[captainamerica]

1 minute ago, datamonster said:

I worked with kaggle datasets for some side projects but I have my portfolio on github. I won't share it here though as I believe anonymity is essential for this forum to be effective.

If you want you can in PM. otherwise no worries. 

[Raphael]

There's a lot of possibilities of making money.

However, getting starting is tough and the competition is tough, if you have a good portfolio it will make things much easier for you. Also, a lot of people will compare prices when you'll get started and pressure you to do low prices. DON'T DO THIS, do high quality work and charge properly.

[Hello from Russia]

It's not oversaturated at all. There is actually a fairly low supply and ever-increasing demand for High Quality services in that domain as more and more marketing becomes digitalized 

Probably you just got lied to/gaslighted by your peers who don't know much about how markets work or just lame businessmen

Edited February 5, 2021 by Hello from Russia

[Gianna]

Maybe look into SEO

[Alex M]

I'm freelance web designer full time. Have been now for about 15+ years. Like Leo mentioned the challenge is getting a constant flow of clients. Also working out ways of retaining residual income, rather than clients coming in and out of the door. So hosting / maintenance contracts and retaining future work will all help build up constant flow of money without a great deal of work involved. The main area of over saturation I see is the vast amount of poor designers / developers, that charge little money. But in the grand scheme of things this is only an issue if you are competing with them. Build your skills, set your rates and stick to them, if clients don't want to pay your rates, they are not the clients you are looking for. You also mentioned 'web design' I would call this more frontend work, so design skills are an absolute must (so good X D / Illustrator / SCSS / GSAP / Javascript skills) and being able to beautifully code from designs and again like Leo mentioned being unique. Anybody can grab an off-the-shelf 'theme' for a site and change the colours, but this is not web design and this is the main area of over saturation.

[impulse9]

Guess what, everything is oversaturated. The good news is it's oversaturated with garbage. Put out genius works of arts and you will be noticed.