If you are launching your business with €5,000 to your name, my first piece of advice will not necessarily be to give it to me to build you a website.
And yet, that is my job.
Before talking about design, a CMS, or technology, I would start by asking you some questions.
Why do you want a website now? How do you plan to get the word out about your product? What does this website actually need to achieve? Who does it need to speak to?
And above all: is this really where your money will be most useful today?
01
The question is not how big your company is
Consider two businesses starting out with limited resources.
The first is a startup preparing to raise funding. It will present its project to investors who see many other startups. Its website will be part of that presentation: it will need to explain the product, convey its positioning, and help establish the credibility of the whole venture.
In that context, turning up with a website that immediately looks like a landing page generated in a few hours can send the wrong signal. Investing early in a polished digital presence can be entirely rational.
Now consider a consultant, a craftsperson, or a freelancer starting out with the same €5,000.
Their immediate challenge may simply be finding their first clients. Their money might be better spent on communication, a social media presence, or some other way to get noticed.
A simple landing page with a form may be more than enough.
So the right question is not: “Can I afford a website?”
It is rather: “What role should digital play in the growth of my business right now?”
02
Yes, you can try doing it yourself
This is one of the major changes brought about by AI.
With the tools available today, it has become possible to build a decent landing page yourself with very little money.
To test an idea, that is sometimes exactly what you should do.
Present your service simply, explain who it is for, and add a form so interested people can leave their contact details. Then tell people about it and see what happens.
Does your page look like many others? That is not necessarily a problem.
If its only job is to receive traffic you generate elsewhere, explain your offer properly, and collect enquiries, it may be doing that job perfectly well.
At this stage, your goal is not to win a design award. It is to find out whether anyone is interested in your idea.
But you should also be wary of a claim you hear a lot: “I built my website with AI in two hours.”
Yes, that is possible.
The real question is: what kind of website?
Today's tools can produce functional interfaces very quickly, often ones that are pleasant to look at. The problem is not that they produce bad websites. It is that they make it very easy to produce good, generic websites.
You see the same structures, the same proportions, the same oversized headlines, the same components, the same animations, and sometimes even the same turns of phrase.
AI is not inside your head. It does not instinctively know your company's personality, what a visitor should look at first, or the feeling you want to create.
Getting beyond the generic takes knowing how to guide it, assess its suggestions, and understand what you are trying to achieve.
That is where positioning, art direction, UX, UI, content, and technology become decisive.
After three hours, take stock
I readily offer this rule of thumb to someone who wants to try on their own.
It is not a deadline. Your page does not have to be finished.
Simply look at where you are.
If it is fairly generic but does exactly what you need, great. Keep going.
On the other hand, if you start thinking, “just three more hours and I will get there,” be careful.
Three hours can turn into six, then nine, then three days.
The danger of DIY is not making something simple. It is starting a simple project and discovering too late that you have taken on something you can no longer manage.
At that point, the initial savings can disappear very quickly.
03
Hiring a professional does not necessarily mean starting a big project
If you come to me with a budget of €5,000, my first job is not to decide what I can produce for that sum.
It is to understand what your project really needs.
If you have an idea but do not yet know how to approach it, a focused scoping engagement may be far more valuable than a complete website.
We need to understand your positioning, look at the market, identify points of friction, think about how you will find your first clients, and determine the role digital should play.
Only then do we get to the question of what to build.
The conclusion might be: “You really do need an ambitious project.”
It might also be: “Let's start with a simple landing page.”
Or even: “Build it yourself for now.”
A young company's budget is not automatically a website budget. It is a launch budget.
As the stakes grow, this thinking becomes even more important.
A business that is already operating and wants to launch a new offer is no longer just trying to test a hunch. It needs to think about how to position that offer, how it fits with what already exists, the journey it proposes, and how results will be measured.
And when digital truly becomes a commercial or operational tool, the question goes well beyond the website.
What data does the company need? How will it collect it? How do prospects become clients? What needs to be measured? Who will manage the content? Which tools need to communicate with one another?
Does it need a complex CRM, a much simpler system, or a tool designed specifically for the company?
The website is then only the visible part of a larger whole.
04
AI has not eliminated my profession. It has shifted where the value lies.
I use AI every day in my projects.
It allows me to take direct responsibility for a much greater share of the work, from thinking through the problem to delivering the result.
Some phases have become much faster. But the work has not disappeared.
It has shifted.
A highly polished landing page can still take several days of work. You need to understand the market and competitors, work on positioning and design, decide what should catch the eye, design the interactions, work through UX and UI, prepare the SEO, set up measurement tools, check the forms, test, and start again.
I prefer to reinvest the time AI saves me in the quality of the project.
That is probably one of the most interesting changes in my profession: levels of finish and sophistication that once required much larger budgets are becoming accessible to smaller organizations.
The point is not necessarily to do the same thing as before for less money. It is to do something much better with a budget that would previously have required more compromises.
That obviously does not guarantee commercial success.
Even with an excellent product, an excellent website, and a serious strategy, the market may not respond as expected.
No serious professional can guarantee otherwise.
But part of their role is also to help prevent a company, as far as possible, from investing in a solution before asking the right questions.
There is a difference between a product that fails despite a well-considered project and an expensive project that should never have been built that way in the first place.
05
So stop hiring agencies when you do not need them.
If you are just starting out, every euro counts, and your main question is still whether anyone wants to buy your product or service, keep it simple. Test your idea and use the tools you have.
But do not confuse the ability to generate something with the ability to design what your business actually needs.
AI does not make experience obsolete. It gives far more power to people who know what to ask of it, how to judge what it produces, and where its limits lie.
Ultimately, perhaps the first question a digital professional should ask is not:
“What kind of website do you want?”
But:
“Why do you think you need a website?”
The right solution might be a landing page you make yourself, a highly ambitious website, an application, a few automations… or none of those things.
The most important thing is not to start by building. Start by understanding why you are building.
