Why I sold my web agency after five years — Building Products [Mischa Sigtermans](https://mischa.sigtermans.me) [ Thoughts ](https://mischa.sigtermans.me/thoughts) [ Books ](https://mischa.sigtermans.me/books) [ About ](https://mischa.sigtermans.me/about) [← Thoughts](https://mischa.sigtermans.me/thoughts) January 20, 2022 · Personal Career Why I decided to sell my web agency =================================== I built Pixelstart from a hobby into a one-person web agency with 100+ sites, $10k MRR, and clients like Headhunterz and Enzo Knol. Then I realized I was building a job, not a business. ![Why I decided to sell my web agency](/images/why-i-decided-to-sell-my-web-agency.jpg)The first website I ever built was for a friend. He was a DJ, same as me, and his online presence was whatever the platform gave him for free. I built him a WordPress site over a weekend. It looked professional. It cost me nothing but time. What I didn't expect was the reaction. Other DJs saw it and wanted the same thing. Not the same design, but the same result: a site that looked like they belonged in the rooms they were playing. I said yes to enough of them that it stopped being a favor and started being income. Before that turned into a proper business, I was working at PCextreme, a web hosting company in the Netherlands. That job taught me how infrastructure worked and what broke under pressure. It also gave me the confidence that I could build things that held up in the real world. In January 2016, while still working there full-time, I registered Pixelstart. By August 2017 I had enough clients coming in that the hosting job felt like the side project. I left and went full-time. The niche that worked --------------------- Pixelstart was a web design agency in Haarlem, building pixel-perfect WooCommerce sites for creators. DJs, YouTubers, artists selling merchandise, fashion brands running drops. The niche was specific and the specificity drove growth. Within a year I was shipping 2 to 3 websites per month. The client list grew past anything I'd have believed when I started: Enzo Knol, one of the biggest YouTubers in the Netherlands. StukTV. Headhunterz. Colourful Rebel. Dancefair. DAY1 Lifestyle. Building a site for Headhunterz while knowing I'd been listening to his tracks since I was a teenager is the kind of thing that makes you think you've figured something out. The projects were fun. The clients were people I understood because I came from the same world. And the work was good, the kind of work where the client's audience notices the quality even if they can't name what changed. By the time I sold, Pixelstart hosted over 100 sites and was pulling in roughly $10,000 in monthly recurring revenue. All of it run by one person. That last part is the problem. The hosting trap ---------------- My clients had audiences, and those audiences bought things. WooCommerce sites with real transaction volume. When Enzo Knol dropped a new Knolpower merchandise line, his site saw traffic spikes that would flatten a shared hosting plan. When StukTV ran a campaign, the checkout page had to survive ten thousand visitors in an hour. WooCommerce caching is hard on a good day. Under those spikes, it broke everything. ![Presslabs sent us a cake when we moved Pixelstart to their hosting](/images/pixelstart-presslabs-cake.png) I spent two years trying to solve this. I ran my own server first. That worked until it didn't. I migrated 27 sites to Presslabs, which gave me better performance but not enough control over the database. I tested WP Engine, Pressable, Kinsta. Each one solved a problem and introduced a new one. I ended up on Pressidium, which finally gave me the stability I needed for WooCommerce at scale. But by the time I got there, I'd spent two years of my life on hosting infrastructure instead of building websites. At some point during that stretch I looked up and realized I'd drifted from the thing I'd started Pixelstart to do. I'd started it to build websites. I was spending my weeks troubleshooting servers, managing hosting migrations, and answering support tickets at midnight because a client's e-commerce checkout had gone down during a product drop. The business had quietly reshaped itself around the least interesting part of the work. The scaling wall ---------------- Scaling was the other problem. I tried hiring developers to take some of the build work off my plate. The work they returned didn't match what I would have shipped. I tried freelancers. The reliable ones were expensive enough to eat the margin, and the cheap ones created more work than they saved. I'm a control freak. I've [written about this](/thought/why-perfectionism-was-my-worst-enemy) and I'm still working on it. At Pixelstart, the control problem and the business model were the same problem. A service business built around one person's standards can't grow beyond that person's hours. Every attempt to delegate ran into the wall of my own expectations. I couldn't teach someone else to care about the details the way I did, and I couldn't stop caring about them enough to let someone else try. The result was a one-person operation managing 100+ websites, handling hosting, design, development, and support. Perpetually on-call, perpetually behind, and starting to resent work I used to love. Round-the-clock support for problems I hadn't caused. Late-night emergencies that could only be fixed by the one person who'd built the thing. A calendar full of projects and no room to think about what I actually wanted to build next. The honest admission: I was building a job, not a business. A good job, with $10k in monthly recurring revenue and clients I was proud to work with. But a job. One that paid me for my time rather than growing beyond my time. The sale -------- Once I saw it that way, I couldn't unsee it. I decided to sell. The process took longer than I expected. Four months of negotiation, then two more months to finalize the agreements, transition the clients, and hand over the infrastructure I'd spent years wrestling with. I sold Pixelstart's client base to another agency for a six-figure sum. The transfer completed on January 1, 2021. I stayed available for several months after to help with client questions during the transition, because 100+ sites don't change hands without some people needing reassurance. I'm grateful for what Pixelstart was. Five years of building WooCommerce sites for creators taught me what it feels like to ship things that real people use under real pressure, with real money on the line. It taught me what a traffic spike looks like from the inside. It taught me that [perfectionism feels like professionalism](/thought/why-perfectionism-was-my-worst-enemy) right up until it stops you from delegating, hiring, or sleeping. What the sale made room for --------------------------- The sale freed me to do the thing I'd been circling for years. Before Pixelstart, I'd run a booking agency for DJs, and during that time I'd built a mental list of every tool the music industry needed and didn't have. Spreadsheet chaos, email overload, software that hadn't been updated since 2015. That list became [Stagent](https://stagent.com), the booking and management platform I've been building ever since. Selling Pixelstart wasn't the end. It was the proof that I'd learned what I needed from it. Build a thing. Learn from the thing. Recognize when the thing has become the wrong shape for what you actually want to do. And be willing to hand it to someone else before it burns you out. I've [sold two more things since then](/thought/why-i-built-and-sold-true-identity). The pattern is the same every time. The hardest part is never the negotiation. It's admitting you've outgrown the thing you built. *thanks for reading* Hi, I'm [Mischa](https://mischa.sigtermans.me/about). I've been *shipping products* and *building ventures* for over a decade. First exit at 25, second at 30. Now Partner & CPO at [Ryde Ventures](https://ryde.ventures), an AI venture studio in Amsterdam. Currently shipping [Stagent](https://stagent.com) and [Onoma](https://askonoma.com). Based in Hong Kong. I [write](https://mischa.sigtermans.me/thoughts) about what I learn along the way. [More about me](https://mischa.sigtermans.me/about). Keep reading: [How working out 5 times a week changed my life](https://mischa.sigtermans.me/thought/how-working-out-5-times-a-week-has-changed-my-life). 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