The websites I won't build

A guy called me last Tuesday about a website for his food truck.

He’d been in business eleven months, had a Facebook page, no formal menu, no fixed locations, and a concept he described as “elevated comfort food, but also tacos, but also bowls, you know?” He wanted four pages, an online ordering system, a loyalty program, and he wanted to be live in nine days because he was buying ads for a festival. Budget was twelve hundred.

I said no.

This isn’t a flex. It’s an essay about the projects Outpost turns down, because the harder I work on this studio the more I realize the work I say no to is what makes the yes possible. If you’re reading this trying to figure out if we’d build for you, here’s the inverse list — five briefs that get declined every time.

Restaurants that don’t have a concept yet

A website is a magnifier. If the business underneath is sharp, the site sharpens it. If the business is still figuring out what it is, the site freezes the in-progress version in amber and broadcasts it. We’ve watched restaurants spend three thousand dollars on a beautiful site for a concept that pivoted twice in the first year. The site doesn’t grow with them. It sits there, the wrong menu under the wrong logo, until someone finally pays to redo it.

If a restaurant comes to me and says we’re still nailing down the menu, I say come back when the menu is nailed. Instagram is enough until then.

Realtors who want a brand site that competes with their brokerage

Coldwell Banker has a real estate portal. Keller Williams has one. So does eXp, Compass, every brokerage in the East Valley. They’ve spent millions on lead routing and IDX integration. A solo realtor’s personal website cannot compete with that on inventory. What it can do — and what works — is be a personality site. About me, my testimonials, my neighborhoods, my listings via embed, a phone number.

But every realtor who calls us wants the personality site to also be a property search engine. IDX feed, advanced filters, saved searches, account creation. We can’t build that for the budget realtors expect, and even if we could, it’d be a worse version of what they’re already paying their brokerage three thousand a year for.

If the brief is “I want a site that beats Zillow,” the answer is no. If the brief is “I want a site that makes my next listing call easier,” that we can do.

Anybody who wants the site live in a week

I’m not saying this never happens. I’ve built sites in seven days. But the briefs that arrive with a one-week timeline are almost never simple two-page sites with stock photos. They’re full website builds attached to a deadline that wasn’t planned around the website at all. A festival is coming. A grand opening is set. The funding round just closed.

The work doesn’t take a week because the work doesn’t take a week. Strategy takes a week. Copy takes a week. Design takes a week. Build and QA take a week. You can compress some of that if you skip strategy and copy and use a template, and the result is a template that loads fast and says nothing.

I’d rather build no site than build that site.

Briefs with “unlimited revisions”

This is one I learned the hard way at the old agency. A client asked for unlimited revisions on a logo. We delivered version one. Then version four. Then version eleven. By version eighteen we were redrawing the same mark with a different shade of green. The client wasn’t being unreasonable — they just had no constraint to push back against, so every Slack thought became another revision request.

We scope two revision rounds into every build. Past that, revisions are billed by the hour. Not because we want to nickel and dime — because the second revision round is when work gets sharper, and the eighth revision round is when work gets soup. The constraint protects the result.

Anything where the owner won’t be on the call

This is the biggest one. I’ve had office managers, marketing coordinators, business partners, spouses, cousins, and adult children reach out on behalf of an owner who’s “really busy right now.” It never works.

The owner is the only person who knows what the business is for. The marketing coordinator can manage the project, but the marketing coordinator can’t tell me whether a tone shift in the homepage copy aligns with how the owner actually talks to a customer at the counter. That decision has to come from the person who built the thing.

If the owner won’t take a 30-minute call to decide the direction of their own website, the project is going to deliver something the owner doesn’t recognize, and then we’re going to spend the back half rebuilding to a vision they should have set on day one. Save us both the time.

Why this is the foundation

The studio that says yes to everything ships the same site five different ways and calls each version custom. The studio that says no to projects that aren’t right does fewer projects and ships sites that the right clients show off to their friends. Pick which one you want to hire.

We turn down work every quarter. Sometimes a lot of it. The people who hire Outpost are people who heard us say no to something before they hired us — and decided that meant the yes was worth waiting for.

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