Stories, updates and ideas from Jellypepper

Blog

There are five key ways to reduce the cost of a new website. Let's explore each of them.

The easiest way to reduce the cost of your new website is to simply reduce the scope by removing sections of content or entire pages. For example, if you want a website with an events page and don't plan on holding any more than five total events per year, then it doesn’t make sense to invest in that feature.

We're usually not super keen to do this as you’ve figured out the sitemap already and you have a story you want to tell, so the solutions below are probably better.

It's more common than you might think to not know the content of your website until after we've started designing it. This is a great way for us to come up with creative solutions that work within an agreed budget, but if you're new to web design this can be frustrating.

To avoid this happening, try creating some wireframes or a sitemap before getting in touch and give us as much information about what will go on the site so we can quote accordingly.

At Jellypepper, we have a list of things we typically figure out during a website strategy workshop. You can browse these concepts and figure them out internally.

One of the bigger cost factors is unique templates. Rather than splitting content into low-quantity pages, we could combine them into a longer form page that optimises for quality and experience over quantity and takes your audience of a journey through your site, rather than constantly clicking around.

If you have multiple pages that don't require high amounts of content, then it's often a good idea to combine them into one. A good use case for this is the About pages or, more likely, the Careers pages. We will still need the same amount of visual assets (minus 1 or 2 depending on how they’re merged) but in the case of Careers, it saves on an entire template.

Using the same high-level structure for multiple pages with the same intent allows for launching new pages and scaling easier, as well as much faster development. A good use case for this are a Product or Service page. When you have multiple product pages, they typically follow a pretty similar pattern so we can immediately cut out a whole slew of unique templates and just focus on what’s different in the middle, which saves time.Another good example are legal pages — they’re just static content pages so easily repeatable.

As most websites are scoped off a basic sitemap, the estimate needs to be conservative and it's assumed every page is large and unique. We’d rather overestimate at this point than underestimate and be potentially misleading. If we find out there’s less content per page, it immediately cuts down the time to design and build. A great example for this is the Contact page — if we know for a fact it's super short, simple and beautiful, it saves us a lot of guesswork.

Reducing the upfront cost of a new website through thoughtful planning frees up a lot more budget for creative assets later on, which can really help your website's new design.

The upfront cost of a website quote can be quite overwhelming for young startups. So, how can you reduce it?

5 Ways to Reduce the Cost of a New Website

A great explainer video can do wonders for your startup. It's a chance to explain what you do in the most engaging and interesting way possible, which helps people understand why they should care about it.

It can help customers or clients better understand how to use your product or service, too - but there are common principles that you need to consider when creating an explainer video.

The first thing you need to decide is what your goal for the video is. Are you trying to inform people about a new service? Or are you just looking for some unique content that would be good on social media? Once you have decided on your goal, then it becomes much easier to write copy and make decisions about mediums, type of video (promotional or informative), tone, style and constraints.

Here are some examples of what your goal might look like:

Dive into the product and giving a medium to low-level overview of how it works and the different features

Reach a general audience who will never use the product but are curious about it

Create a video that is informative and doesn’t try to convince people of anything, or entertain them in some way.

Figure out your goal for this explainer video before you create one because all these decisions will stem from what you want most. From here, think about how will you measure the success of these goals? Is it views, impressions, clicks (link under video)?

Next up are the specifics of the video, how long it is, where it will be posted. When we work on a new video at Jellypepper, we usually come prepared with these questions:

Call to Action: What are we encouraging the viewer to do?

Copy: Are we using voiceover, or just text?

Duration: How long will this video be? We recommend a maximum of 90 seconds.

Style: Do you have a brand styleguide? Other videos you like?

Constraints: Do you have a budget and/or deadline in mind?

When we create a video, we typically break it down into 3 key pieces:

The script defines what’s happening at each scene in the video. It’s not what’s being shown or being said, but rather the point that we’re trying to get across. The script can be as short or long as you’d like, but we recommend spending the time to get this right.

A rough sketch of the video. It’s a visual representation of what we want to do in each scene, and it really helps us see where our shots are going to go. The storyboard is the visual layer of the script, wireframes and sketches that show what each scene might look like and what it may involve.

Copy is used as subtitles on the video or voiceover if that’s your preferred method. The copy describes exactly what is going to be said, verbally or visually. This is how you explain your product, sell it, tell people about it—whatever needs doing! The script should contain all this information at some point too if not throughout. We always write out scripts before shooting because there’s no budget for re-shoots on videos with voiceovers which means that everything has to be perfect from the start.

You have a few options when creating a product explainer video:

Footage (for live-action): awesome and super relatable, but it can be hard / expensive to get original footage. Stock footage usually sucks, so be careful.

Animation: awesome and also relatable, but you should choose a style that matches your brand. They’re usually cheaper to produce than live-action footage because they don’t require actors or location permits. But still be careful about stock footage.

Whiteboard Explainer: pretty old school, but can be really good for explaining complex concepts quickly without much effort. All you need here is a decent video camera and a whiteboard artist.

Screen Recording: great for showing product features in-detail, but can get pretty stale. We're seeing these a lot more in early-stage product startups and they can be super effective.

The soundtrack or audio effects you select can make or break the video. It’s important to choose a style that complements your voiceover and visuals, but also adds emotion and meaning.

Music: perfect when you want to create an energetic mood—think of it as background music for your explainer video. Music can really add emotion or highlight certain messages.

Sound Effects: great if you're trying to emphasise certain messages—but be careful not to overuse them

Voices: this is a great option if you want your explainer video to feel personal and engaging. Do remember that there's more than one woman in the world, so unless it's specifically aimed at women try using different voices for variety.

There's heaps of sources for good audio, some of them even free! Here's a handful that we regularly use:

https://www.youtube.com/audiolibrary/music?nv=1

Lastly, you'll need to put everything together! If you're doing it yourself, you might consider apps like Clipchamp which make it super easy to create your own videos online. If you have a budget, you might consider hiring a motion designer, compositor or even a team to film content.

If you're doing it yourself, here's some things to consider:

Transitions between scenes: If your explainer video is going to be longer, think carefully about what makes sense as transitional moments. For example in some videos there are cuts from scene A to B and then from B to C and then back to A. This might be a good idea if you have an important point that needs repeating in both of those scenes.

Colour grading: when you're exporting your video, think about the colours and how they make you feel. You might want to play around with different presets in apps like Filmora or even use a website called ColourLovers which has colour pairing suggestions for various themes.

Different screen sizes: depending on where you plan to post this video, you might want to make it more vertical or horizontal in order for the text and video play well. If you have a phone, tablet, desktop computer or TV screen - think about how your explainer video will look on those different sizes too.

Creating a video is hard work, so we've assembled a few tips and resources to get you on your way.

How to create an amazing startup explainer video

Starting a startup is hard enough without having to pay full-price for the fundamental resources to run your business. Over the years, we've scoured the internet for startup plans for our clients and our own projects. Here are our 10 favourites we use every time.

Stripe Atlas is a powerful, safe, and easy-to-use platform for forming a company. By removing lengthy paperwork, legal complexity, and numerous fees, Stripe Atlas helps you launch your startup from anywhere in the world.

While Stripe itself has a generous pricing method of 1.75% (or 2.9% for international cards) + $0.30 per transaction, their Atlas toolkit is a fantastic way of kickstarting your company with a U.S. legal entity, stock issued to founders, special offers on other services and free credits for the Stripe payments platform!

The leading Customer Data Platform. Segment collects user events from your web & mobile apps and provides a complete data toolkit to every team in your company.

Segment is an absolutely brilliant tool for SaaS products as you'll eventually want to wire up your entire app to talk to your CRM, social media tools, newsletter, database and more. Their Startup program gives you up to two years free usage ($25k in credits) and $1M in free software with their partners.

The Top Analytics Choice for Digital Teams. Amplitude is a product analytics tool aimed at getting your users to that "aha" moment when they realize they can’t live without your service.

Amplitude's startup scholarship gives you a year of Amplitude for free, which works out at roughly $40k. You can combine this with the Segment startup program above to kickstart your product with all the behavioural analytics you'll ever need, for free.

Sentry's application monitoring platform helps every developer diagnose, fix, and optimize the performance of their code. They help software teams build better software, faster.

While Sentry don't have a startup plan, their developer plan is completely free and has support for all languages, release tracking and is fairly generous with metrics — 5K tracked errors, 10K transactions and 1GB attachments.

SendGrid is an email provider, helping you with reliable email delivery at scale. Their SMTP service helps you confidently build and grow your email program.

SendGrid doesn't have a startup plan but their free tier is 100 emails a day forever, which compared to other email providers like Postmark or Mailgun is pretty good.

Mailgun actually has 5000 emails free for the first 3 months then PAYG, which is another solid option if you have a shorter projected time to revenue.

Canny helps you build better products with customer feedback. Capture, organize, and analyze feedback in one place to inform your product decisions.

While Canny is relatively expensive, starting at $50/month, they offer special plans for healthcare, non-profit, and education companies. They also have discounts for early‑stage and consumer / B2C companies, which we've personally used before.

Firebase helps you build and run successful apps. Backed by Google and loved by app development teams - from startups to global enterprises.

We've used Firebase on almost every single app we've built — it's a brilliant backend-as-a-service with database infrastructure, authentication, cloud functions and more built in.

While they don't have a startup plan, their PAYG plan (called Blaze) is unbelievably generous, meaning our early-stage apps end up costing mere cents per month to run.

Airwallex is a business account, built for the modern business. They take the hassle out of growing your business internationally.

Airwallex are an awesome new addition to our list, offering multi-currency business accounts, virtual debit cards, Xero integration and more. They have no monthly account fees and no card fees — just a small margin on interbank FX rates — which means it grows as your company does.

Notion is an all-in-one workspace. One tool for your whole team to write, plan and get organized.

At Jellypepper, Notion is our second most-used product (after Slack obvs). They have an amazing startup plan that offers $1000 in credit towards their Team Plan, which is also generously priced.

Typeform give you a better way to ask. You don't want to make a boring form and your audience won't answer one. Create a typeform instead—and make everyone happy.

Typeform have a great startup plan where, if you meet the criteria (seed stage, < $1m funding, $1m lifetime revenue and a new customer), you can get 50% of any plan for 6 months. We've used Typeform for many products to collect valuable user feedback and crowdsource knowledge quickly.

Some cost-effective tools and methods of getting your SaaS product off the ground without breaking the bank.

Our top 10 resources for launching a new startup

Sometimes, the strength of a business idea is enough to convince its founder that a name is insignificant in comparison. This thought can croak. Anyone who’s heard of Fashism, or the stories surrounding Bodega, know that deciding on a name is whatever the opposite of “easy, breezy, beautiful” is.

Every other part of a startup can be evolved, re-developed, scrapped and built over and over again after release—except for the name. It’s something you have to get right, ideally the first time. If you’re only starting out, a bad name might signal a lack of self-awareness and diligence to investors. It is the first thing you’re bound to say about your startup. On the other hand, a good name should function as a pod containing your idea, seamlessly carrying it from one conversation to another.

If it sounds hard, that’s because it is. There’s no scientific method for coming up with a good name—our own naming journey took us from Lightsaber to Erudito, before landing us on Jellypepper. So based on our own [branding experience" src="services/branding), here are some best practices for putting together a solid list and narrowing it down /to the best choice" layout="responsive" width={} height={} />

The dictionary can’t possibly have met the naming demands of the hundreds of millions of companies in the world right now. That’s why these naming conventions have been developed throughout the years:

1. Eponymous names strongly embody the vision and values of their founders. Disney is strongly associated with pioneering in the field of animation, while Armani is synonymous with red-carpet fashion.

2. Descriptive names put into words exactly what the company does. Anyone can tell what The Home Depot and Toys R Us are selling just by their names.

3. Acronymic names like KFC for Kentucky Fried Chicken are acronyms of descriptive or eponymous names. Slack actually stands for Searchable Log of All Conversation and Knowledge. That said, unless your startup’s acronym has an interesting double meaning like Slack, this naming convention is generally considered old-school and unimaginative.

4. Suggestive names use dictionary words that evoke characteristics of the brand or service. Uber means outstanding—a nod to its vision on transforming transportation. Facebook, on the other hand, is a composite while Instagram is a coined term born from fusing “instant telegram” into one word.

5. Associative names make use of words as symbols to connect a brand with certain imagery. Amazon is both the world’s largest river and the world’s largest online marketplace.

6. Non-english names are usually callbacks to a brand’s country of origin. Lego is an abbreviation of the Danish words “leg godt” which means “play well”.

7. Abstract names have no intrinsic meaning. Rolex is an onomatopoeia for the sound of a watch being wound, while Kodak is the sound a shutter makes when a camera is clicked.

8. Misspelled names attempt to add character to a common word or secure a URL. The early 2000s saw a dropped-vowel trend with brands like Flickr and Tumblr, but the most successful name in this category was founded in 1998. Google is a misspelling of “googol,” the mathematical term for the number 1 followed by a hundred zeros.

9. Location names take after any place on the map—usually the birthplace of a company. Although it’s been shortened to HSBC, the bank used to be officially known as the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation. Naming it after a country limited its reach, so it was turned it into an acronym to make the name sound universal and give it a better shot at global expansion.

You might’ve noticed that some names combine two or three conventions. Do take ideas from the list, but don’t be restricted by any particular item. If you’re still stuck, try a name generator.

Meaning and differentiation are the key ingredients at this stage of the process—what do you want your name to say about you? It’s easiest to create something descriptive, but your name should really stand for the big idea of your startup. Try dipping into suggestive and associative territories for the best results.

Associative names means thinking ahead in terms of the stories you will connect with your name. Nike is named after the Greek goddess of victory, but it took many, many campaigns to actually connect the name with sporting excellence. Nobody starts with a fully-formed brand. Years of good storytelling is required for a brand name to acquire meaning and connect emotionally with its audience. It all starts with a name that has a nice ring to it.

Step 2: Narrow it down to memorable names

The elimination process can begin once your list is complete. Though there’s a gut-feel element to naming, there are also tried-and-tested approaches to an unforgettable moniker:

Naturally, shorter names are better because they’re easier to commit to memory. But this also want to think ahead to when you’re securing a domain for your startup. The easier for it to be typed on the address bar, the better. That’s why misspelling names is a tricky branding trend. On one hand, it might be easier to secure a domain; on the other, people will misspell your name on the address bar and they might miss your startup altogether.

There’s actually a psychology to unforgettable names and it has to do with phonetics. The name should be easy to pronounce and must sound good when said out loud. Go ahead and ask friends to enunciate your startup name. If you really want to get ahead on phonetics, select an alliterative name. Coca-Cola is a good example; so is M&Ms. Alliteration and repetitive sounds can make something sound almost rhythmic and that’s a really good quality to have. Traditional oral stories have survived for so long because matching sounds link one word to the next. Circle anything with rhythm on your list.

One of the names we considered for Jellypepper, Erudito, didn’t make the cut because people could neither say nor spell it. Try your name on for size by getting other folks to say it out loud and asking them how it’s spelled. If it doesn’t come to them instinctively, crossing it out now is easier than waiting after you’ve already bought a domain. Thank you for your service, erudi.to.

Selecting based on presence and memorability is the name of the game for step two and there’s one last challenge to complete this portion: turn on your cultural sensitivity sensor. Bodega touched the wrong nerve because its name (and from that, its concept) appropriated a beloved Hispanic convention. You want to trend and be unforgettable—but not because your name provoked a salvo of 🤬 on Twitter.

Eventually becoming part of everyday language is the highest achievement a company name can attain. Just like how “google” has been entered in actual dictionaries as a verb for “searching online”. For this to even begin to happen, you have to start by gaining ownership of every touchpoint people have with your brand name:

There are online tools—our go-to is Domainr—for checking the availability of the domain name you want. Naturally, the .com should be your priority as it’s the one most associated with credibility. Your domain name is an investment, so we recommend going out of your way to acquire that .com or .co address rather than settling for alternatives. The exceptions to that rule are .io and .ai if you’re in tech. Try to resist the temptation of using an alternative extension as part of the name. Something like del.icio.us is incredibly hard to spell and explain to people. There’s also a slight SEO disadvantage to this domain hack because search engines don’t look at extensions as part of the name.

While on the subject of domains, here’s another tip: For names with multiple words, make sure it isn’t spelled anything else when the words are together. There was once an unfortunate website called I.T. Scrap that had to learn this lesson the hard way. 💩

Should you get stuck at this stage, try checking for name ideas similar to your initial one at Lean Domain Search.

Your website isn’t the only place people can access you from. They will expect you to have the same handle on social media, so it would be great to secure those online real estates as well. And while you’re already online, enter your potential name on Google Trends. This is to check if any similar name is getting hits so you can gauge what you’re up against.

It’s not over-the-top to think of securing exclusive rights to your name at the very beginning. Anything that isn’t protected by the law is fair game. The first step is to check for availability at the company registration office. It’s going to be a problem when you try to register your business only to find that there’s already something similar in the books. For trademark protection, try checking Trademarkia or the US Patent and Trademark Office if you live in the United States.

All of this is a lot of ground to cover. Startups already have their work cut out for them on the technical side of things and to add naming on top of all that is a pretty tall order. If it’s too tall, you may consider hiring an agency to do the work for you... like Jellypepper.

The power of a good name should never be underestimated. Here's our three-step guide to brainstorming the perfect business name.

Stories, updates and ideas on Startups

5 Ways to Reduce the Cost of a New Website

How to create an amazing startup explainer video

Our top 10 resources for launching a new startup

What you need to know before naming your startup