The Story of Local Web Co.

By: Jacob, Your Expert

Published: 21 Nov 2021

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The experiences that started it all.

Hey 👋, my name's Jacob and I started Local Web Co. right at the start of the pandemic in early 2020. As the pandemic was happening, I realized that there were tons of businesses that just didn't have adequate digital infrastructures and online presence.

I realized that I could use what I knew in order to make their businesses stronger and more resilient to big economic shifts like the one that was unfolding.

That was the start of Local Web Co., but let's back up a bit and start at the beginning, 4 years before, when I had just gotten started building on the Web.

Starting Out Small

I have been a technophile my whole life but it wasn't until 2016, just after graduating college that I became obsessed with the web and what it was capable of.

I was primarily interested in what it could do from a business perspective. big e-commerce had really already blown up the entire internet and there were lots of articles and blogs on how to get a piece of the online pie.

I was interested in ecommerce, but not necessarily building the sites themselves. I was interested in the utility of the web, not its foundational technology. That interest would catch fire a bit later on.

GetSpeedCad.com - 0/5 👍

So I made attempts to start a number of websites centered around selling some intellectual property. I was doing mechanical engineering back then and so my first site was selling a book on how to become excellent at 3D CAD and draw prototypes very quickly.

I never wrote the book, the site was only a single page with a checkout and I had no strategy whatsoever. Despite my efforts, this stuff, it turned out, was pretty difficult.

Productionlogic.store - just when you thought a name couldn't get any worse!🤭

My second idea wasn't that much better. I was really into crafting music on my macbook and thought that this would be a much more eager market to engage with. I wrote the book this time!

I built a strategy and spent a lot of time thinking about my target market and the value I was proposing to sell them. Eventually, this one petered out too, but I was a bit closer to finding the elusive 'it'.

I knew this was hard, but what I didn't realize is that it's really too much for one person to take on at all. In fact, the websites I made for these projects were always pretty terrible and I did all the graphic design, branding, strategy, content myself in addition to writing the book.

What I didn't realize until far later is that I should have hired some experts to do what they do best and I would have gotten much farther.

Realizing the Sad Truth about Industry Standards

I continued to build websites, but at this point I built them for other people. I still used Wordpress and it took a few more builds to realize that the tooling I was using was just absolutely subpar and outdated, despite being the so-called 'industry standard' for web development.

But I wasn't truly a web developer yet, I was just an ambitious guy with some creative impulses who wanted to leverage the biggest technical feat mankind has come up with yet- the Modern Web!

Setting Out to Build A Better Web

So I set out to find the very best solution for how to build on the web. If Wordpress wasn't the best technology, than what was? And I don't need to tell you what an overwhelming world it is for beginners. There are literally 1,000s of ways to build a website!

For every good one, there are 10 bad ones and a few that are downright awful! It took about 2 years, but the late nights studying web development paid off as I began to sort through the muck and land on some particular sets of technologies that play well together and that make blazing fast websites. Literally the fastest on the web in fact. If you want to see a bit more in depth why this is true, I wrote about it here.

Where We are Today

This pretty much leads to where we are now - ready to serve our small business customers with the very best web technology that money can buy. And we haven't lost touch with our mission to make this tech accessible to local businesses along the way, which sometimes happens.

If you haven't read our mission statement, you should! It matters a great deal to us. And we pride ourselves on our ability to bring the full power of the web to you, our neighbor.

Thanks for reading and we look forward to serving you!

✌️ Jacob, Founder, Local Web Co.