We started our product agency Nicer seven years ago as three friends who loved building cool apps together, and seven years later (and many, many apps launched) we’re trying something we’ve never done before: we’re launching a second agency.
Say hello to Margins, our new Webflow agency. 👋
The backstory: at Nicer we’re a a product design/dev partner for startups who need to ship great digital products like apps, marketplaces and subscription services.
Along the way, we half-accidentally built a great Webflow side-business, designing and building high-polish Webflow sites for our own startup clients like Pixlmob and Sojourn and also in collaboration with great partner agencies like Faculty, Bunsen and RedThread.
In the last year three things happened that made us start taking the Webflow side of the business more seriously:
- We lucked out by hiring two incredible, multi-talented Webflow devs full-time: Carlos and Jake, who both have deep Webflow knowledge on top of being talented visual designers.
- Our team started getting really good at running Webflow projects. We even built a pretty intense Notion project template to systematize the process. (More on that later. Follow our new Margins account; we’ll be posting that template next week.)
- We started becoming convinced that Webflow is the future for most marketing sites.
Why spin off our Webflow team into a separate agency brand?
Three big reasons:
1. Different customers
At Nicer our customers are startup founders. (Or occasionally, companies who need to act like a startup and ship something new.)
But on the Webflow side, our client base is a lot broader: any business with a website. And beyond that: brand / strategy / design agencies who need a great, reliable Webflow dev partner.
It’s tough to send a Webflow customer a link to our website that’s pitching a different kind of service to a different audience. Designing margins.co to be entirely Webflow-focused felt like a breath of fresh air: a chance to speak directly to specific customers with specific Webflow needs.
2. Different marketing and content
This might be the most tangible pain point for us: we want our Webflow team to be able to post a bunch of great Webflow content, design, gifs and resources to a Webflow-focused audience, without worrying about distracting from the product team’s positioning to startups.
It’s hard to do two things at the same time, and it’s hard to feel your marketing focus pulled in two directions for the same brand. Launching margins.co doesn’t just give us a space to be Webflow-focused, it also frees up nicer.io and our social accounts to focus on marketing and content for startups.
3. Different processes
When you’re a product agency building apps with startups, there’s not a lot of repeatability. Every project is its own adventure, and while that can be a lot of fun (it’s why I love it so much!), it’s also tough to systematize or scale.
On the Webflow side, things are a lot different: we’ve had a lot of success building a process that helps us deliver consistently-great work, including a Notion project template that we use to track projects and timelines. We want to do more of that: building a process that helps guide clients smoothly through the journey of designing, building and launching a great website.
Why focus on Webflow vs. other website platforms?
The short answer: we genuinely think it’s the best platform for the majority of marketing sites.
We’ll write more about this later, but we’ve built marketing sites for clients on traditional platforms like Wordpress, or on Gatsby/NextJS alongside headless CMS’s like Prismic and Contentful. And while we enjoy headless CMS’s, we always felt a gap between the functionality we were building vs. our clients’ actual experience editing and maintaining these sites.
We hear clients say constantly: “I want a website our internal team can manage long-term.” The reality: that’s not an option for sites where most changes require writing code.
We’ve tried a bunch of other nocode tools, including building a version of our own Nicer.io agency site in Framer, and we want those tools to grow, but today we think Webflow is the only production-ready nocode platform for most websites.
Is splitting an agency in half a good idea?
We don’t know yet! But one of the best things about being small business owners is that we don’t have to ask anyone’s permission to try new things: we can run experiments ourselves and see what works.
Our Nicer and Margins teams will still live in the same internal Slack and Notion, and we’ll keep collaborating, especially on Webflow projects that involve writing custom code, like complex data-syncing integrations. But we’re excited to let our Webflow team branch out on its own and explore the margins. 😉