Why I stopped building client sites and started making my own things

Every so often I get an email from someone I’ve never met. They run a small studio, or they photograph people for a living, or they make films, and they’ve built their website on one of my templates. Sometimes they just want to show me how it turned out. Sometimes a section won’t behave and they want help. I still haven’t gotten used to it.

That part caught me off guard. When I moved away from client work and started making my own things, I was thinking about time and money, mostly time. The people came later, and they ended up mattering more than either.

Three years of other people’s websites

For about three years I built client websites in Framer. I liked a lot of it. Clients taught me how to turn a messy brief into a site people could actually use, and how to explain a design decision without getting defensive about it. Deadlines I didn’t set made me faster, and I’m a better designer for all of it.

But the shape of it never changed. A project came in, I gave it my hours, I got paid for those hours, and then it was done. The site went live under someone else’s name, which is completely fair, since they paid for it. If I spent a whole weekend getting one scroll animation right, that weekend belonged to them now. Then the next project started from an empty canvas and the meter started running again.

Launch days always felt a little strange. I’d spend weeks caring about every detail, then hand over the keys, and a month later I couldn’t change a pixel without asking permission.

What slowly wore on me was the math. My income could only grow as fast as my calendar, and every new month started more or less from zero.

Building something once

Anabios started with a simple idea: make a website once, and let a lot of people use it. After years of building Framer sites I had a decent sense of what creative people need from one. A photographer needs the images to be big and the words to get out of the way. A filmmaker needs video that loads fast and looks right. A small studio wants to look calm and confident, even if the inside of the studio is chaos. So I started making templates for exactly those people and putting them on anabios.supply.

A lot of them are free, and some have paid licenses. I like that someone with no budget can grab a template, drop their work in, and have a proper site by the end of the weekend.

The part that still feels a little like magic is that a template I finished months ago keeps doing its job. Someone downloads it on a Tuesday afternoon while I’m sitting in a design review. Someone else opens it at night in a city I’ve never been to. I did the work once and it keeps going, though I should be honest that it isn’t fully hands off. Framer changes, things break, people have questions, and every template needs care long after launch. Still, the effort and the reward aren’t welded together hour for hour anymore. I can put a good week into something and keep getting something back from it well after I’ve moved on to the next thing.

Lately I’ve been building small tools too. These days I work across design and code, and with AI in the loop I can get from an idea to something that runs much faster than I used to. This site is a small example: I built it myself, on Astro and Cloudflare. The tools are tiny on purpose. Each one does one job, and I share them in case they save someone else the same bit of hassle.

The money, and the people

Then some money started coming in. I want to be clear about the size of it, because the internet is full of stories about templates that paid for someone’s house. This isn’t one of those. It’s small. It sits on top of my salary, and it’s growing slowly. But I really hadn’t expected it, and the first time a paid license sold, it felt strange in the best way. Nobody had signed a contract or sat through a feedback round. Someone found a thing I made, decided it was worth paying for, and bought it without ever talking to me.

The people were the bigger surprise. With client work I always knew exactly who would use the site, because they were the one paying me. With templates I have no idea who’s next. Strangers write in to show me their finished sites, or to ask how to change something that isn’t working. Some of them clearly care about the template, which still amazes me a little. By the time they’ve filled it with their own photographs and films, it’s more theirs than mine, and that’s the part I like best.

Client work never gave me that feeling. When I built a site for a client, I was a vendor doing a job, and a good job earned a thank you and a final payment. When a stranger picks one of my templates out of everything available and then writes to say they like it, that’s a different kind of thanks. They didn’t have to choose it, and they definitely didn’t have to tell me.

What independence looks like on a normal day

I should explain what I mean by independent, because I still have a day job. I lead design at Mutolaa, and I like it there. I’ve been in design for almost eight years now, and I enjoy working inside a team. Anabios is the one corner of my work where every decision is mine.

Nobody sends me a brief for it. If I want the next template to be for filmmakers instead of studios, I just start. That’s lovely, and also a bit scary, because there’s no one to tell me an idea is bad before I’ve spent two weeks on it.

Owning the mistakes took more getting used to. When something breaks in a template, there’s no account manager to soften it and no client who signed off on the wrong version. If a layout falls apart on a small phone, that’s on me, and the person who reports it is right. I’ve gotten quicker at saying so, and at fixing the real problem instead of patching around it.

And I ship on my own clock. Some things come together quickly. Others sit half finished for a while, because work is busy or because I’ve lost the thread and need to find it again. Nobody is waiting on me, which also means nobody is pushing me. Some weeks that feels like freedom. Other weeks I’d honestly love a deadline.

The day job and the side work help each other more than I expected. At Mutolaa I think about product decisions that need to hold up for years, with a team around me. At Anabios I do everything myself, from the first layout to the support emails, and I can make a call in an afternoon that would need a few meetings at a bigger company.

Still small

Anabios is still small, and I’m fine with that. I’d rather grow it slowly and keep recognizing the people who email me than chase something bigger and lose that. For now the plan is to make the next template and answer whoever writes in about the last one.