The Design Business Show 029: Creating Websites for Authors, Entrepreneurs, and Course Creators with Kraig Mathias

Kraig Mathias is the founder of Mathias Media and he’s a husband, father, brother, son and uncle. His family means the world to him. He’s from Minnesota and enjoys traveling, spending time outdoors, eating good food and doing great work.

He got into the websites and internet marketing business 12 years ago, sort of by accident. After graduating from college, a position at a small, growing company that built and managed websites for furniture retailers caught his eye. He took a chance on it and that’s why he’s in the website design and development business today.

For six years, he learned from many successful business leaders how the internet works (and doesn’t work) for marketing and selling in business. That entry-level position turned into the COO position and he helped lead the company’s growth from $250k/year to over $3m/year in revenue.

In 2013, he founded Mathias Media as a website and online marketing service provider. The company has grown and evolved into specifically website design and development for entrepreneurs, authors and online course creators.

They’re honored to be recommended by David Siteman Garland of Create Awesome Online Courses, Mark Dawson of Self Publishing Formula and many others. They have high standards for their work and take pride in making top-notch websites for their clients.

Here’s what we cover during episode 029:

How Kraig went to school for business and then taught himself how to design and build websites
How a college assignment helped him land his first job in 2007
How he managed to work his way up from being a data entry person to doubling his salary in 2 years
Why starting off in a small company was the key thing in building his career
How gaining financial clarity and setting up a saving strategy helped him turn his life around and save 5 years of living expenses
Why he advises designers to have 1 year of expenses saved before leaving a full-time job
How buying a course by David Siteman Garland kick-started his career as a website designer and developer
How he managed to get David Siteman Garland himself to be his business partner and what impact it had on his career
How a theory about only needing 10 real clients in order to be successful changed his mindset and brought him his first big projects
Why conferences like FinCon have a huge impact on his business
How he went from $500 per project to being a premium service provider with an average of $3000 – $5000 per project.
Why Kraig advises against charging your clients per hour
Where his current clients come from today
His goals for next year
Why his lifestyle is more important than his business
Why he doesn’t scale his business and the pros of working alone
Why he doesn’t want to create his own online course
Why Kraig believes that it is ok to just enjoy your work and be an artist
Why he started using Kajabi instead of WordPress
His plans for the future of his business