Here’s something that happened on the show this morning. I took the ugliest landing page I own, loaded it into a brand new AI tool called Claude Design, and rebuilt it live on air in about fifteen minutes. When we were done, it didn’t look like a page I made in my basement anymore. It looked like a page a real business made. And that’s the whole point of this post.
If your website looks homemade, your prices look homemade. It doesn’t matter how good you are. It doesn’t matter what your testimonials say. It doesn’t matter that your clients love you. If the first thing a stranger sees online is janky, generic, or outdated, their brain immediately prices your services accordingly. People do judge books by their covers, and online, the cover is all they have to go on.
The Small Business Reality
You are probably not a designer. I’m certainly not a designer. For years, I had two options: hire one (expensive, slow, and you still had to know what you wanted) or do it myself (free, fast, and the results looked like I did it myself). Both options had the same outcome. My stuff looked cheap, and I was stuck charging cheap prices because that’s what my brand said I was worth.
Squarespace templates, Canva layouts, Wix themes, drag-and-drop builders. Those tools were a step up from nothing. They are also a big part of why every small business website in America looks exactly like every other small business website in America. If you grabbed a template, you got a template. Your business ended up looking like two thousand other businesses. That is not differentiation. That’s camouflage.
The Upgrade With Claude Design
Claude Design launched over the weekend. It is not another template library. It’s a system that takes your actual brand assets, your actual voice, and your actual business and builds pages, graphics, and motion design around that. On the show today, I loaded up my SBOC design system once, and now every time I ask it to make something, it uses my fonts, my colors, my logo, and even how I actually write. That is a different kind of tool than anything small business owners have had access to before.
The Floor Just Moved
Here’s what matters most for you as an owner. The floor for what small business graphics can look like just moved up. A year ago, it was reasonable for your website to look okay-but-not-great because the tools didn’t let you do much better without hiring help. That excuse is gone. When your potential client lands on your page tomorrow, they’re going to be comparing you to every other service provider in your space, and an increasing number of those service providers are going to be using tools like this.
Which means if you don’t raise the floor on how your stuff looks, you aren’t staying level. You are falling behind.
Try With Claude
Three things to do this week:
- Go to claude.ai/design and make an account. The cost is low. The learning curve is an afternoon.
- Upload your logo, your colors, your brand assets, and a couple examples of the kind of tone you use. This is the one time investment. After that, every graphic you ever make lives off that foundation.
- Take the worst piece of marketing you currently have, the landing page, the PDF, the one pager, the sales deck, and feed it into the tool. Ask it to rebuild it. Do not settle for the first pass. Use the tweaks panel. Get it to something you would be proud to send to a stranger.
When you finish, take a look at your pricing. If your stuff has moved up a level visually, your rates probably need to move up too. That’s the whole point. You are not in the basement anymore. Don’t keep basement prices.
One More Thing
You don’t have to do this alone. The Small Business Owners Community is a room full of people working through this exact stuff right now. If you want in, go to smallbusinesscommunity.com. And if you want to watch the demo live, today’s Businessing episode is on YouTube at youtube.com/@BusinessingShow.
Raise the floor. Raise the rates. That’s the order of operations.
