We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Dave Hooper a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Dave, appreciate you joining us today. Looking back, what’s an important lesson you learned at a prior job?

I was a touring musician for 20 years. This industry was all about fun and creativity, and nurtured a visceral awareness within a highly collaborative environment. My experience working at Microsoft and Facebook was much different. The brain power of my coworkers was inspiring, but the strict process-oriented nature of working in “corporate” was challenging. Big teams move slowly, we seemed to have meeting after meeting, and I couldn’t shake the thought that I could have had the project finished by now. When I decided to leave Facebook to start my own digital agency, I decided to focus on smaller projects for smaller businesses. I enjoy dealing with the business owners as it clearly mattered more to them that the project got done quickly and within the budget. To my surprise, I experienced that visceral joy again but now within a technical project like a website build. There’s no standing ovation at the end of a website project, but there was an equal sense of satisfaction and accomplishment.

Dave, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

My background began in music. My father was a Grammy nominated composer who wrote for TV and commercial jingles. I was the voice of the Little Green Sprout in the Jolly Green Giant commercials. As I got older, I took up the drums and got to play on my father’s recording sessions. Then got to work and tour with Sheryl Crow, Herbie Hancock, Chaka Kahn, Larry Graham and so many more. This was a highly rewarding experience and I got to travel and see the world through music. There was also a lot of down-time between concerts. So I taught myself web design on a tour bus. It was interesting to reverse engineer the sites I liked and that lead me to a gig with Microsoft where I worked as a UX/UI prototyper and web developer. These may seem like drastically different skills, but there was a surprising amount of commonality. In music you are encouraged to learn from great players… to mimic them and figure out what they do. It’s rare you get to take lessons from your music heros. My approach to learning tech went similarly. I mimicked the great coders. The biggest surprise to me what the lack of fun in a corporate tech team. I found myself telling jokes in meetings and my coworkers were not so much amused by my jokes as they were just surprised that someone actually made the attempt.

Starting my own agency allowed me to combine my 2 worlds into something creative and fun. I decided to create a business model that is unique and favors small business. I am happy to say I’ve found great success so far.

How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?

Before Covid I was working during the week as a web developer at Facebook and on the weekend as a touring drummer. There was balance there but no future in either. Music work did not pay well and my next step up at Facebook was my boss’s job. She seemed very stressed and I had no ambition to take on that role. Covid put a hold on gig work and I decided to pivot away from Facebook and start a digital agency. In an odd twist of fate, the lockdown forced business owners to invest in their online presence which meant there was a big need for my services. It was great for the growth of my business and gave me an opportunity to help keep businesses afloat.

We’d love to hear the story of how you turned a side-hustle into a something much bigger.

As with most web developers, I had the occasional side project, helping a friend with a website. When I launched my agency, I noticed that all the business tools and services I needed were expensive. This gave me an idea. I decided I was going to position my services to favor small businesses. Rather than charge the usual 50% up front and balance when it’s complete, I decided to spread the total cost out over 12 months in a subscription of sorts. I would build the website in month 1 so I could launch it in Month 2. The business owner would have the benefit of the live website working for them and they didn’t have to come out of pocket to get it. This meant I was in the red for quite a few months, but eventually, with more and more projects in the works, my monthly subscription payments came in and that initial few months I invested my time in paid off. I had predictable income. I was paying it forward for small businesses, which is what they needed. Plus, so many business owners had horror stories about their previous “web guy” disappearing on them. My business model gave them piece of mind knowing that I was relying on them being happy with their website.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://buildabetterweb.site

Image Credits
n/a. These are screenshots of my websites.