People ask, why not Milton Keynes, Oxford Or London, which is under an hour away on a decent train or by road. The assumption behind the question is that a web studio ought to be somewhere with more of everything, and that being here is a compromise you make for the house prices.

We are in Haddenham, a village in Aylesbury Vale about fifteen minutes from the town centre, and Aylesbury is the town this studio is built around. I think it is a better place to start a business of this kind than those cities, and this is the honest version of why, including the parts that are worse.

The town is growing, and growing towns make businesses

Aylesbury holds Garden Town status. Roughly 16,000 new homes are planned by 2033, and the transport strategy covering that period anticipates something like 20,000 additional residents and 15,000 additional jobs. Kingsbrook on the eastern edge is about 2,450 homes on its own, with an RSPB managed nature reserve attached and an estimated half a billion pounds heading into the local economy. Berryfields to the north west already houses about 5,000 people.

The obvious reading of that is more customers for the businesses we build sites for. The more interesting reading is that it means more businesses full stop. Somebody opens a coffee shop on a new estate. A plumber moves out from Watford because the work is here. A woman who has been cutting hair from her kitchen decides to take a unit. Every one of those is a business that did not exist last year and needs to be findable this year.

Growth that is planned rather than accidental is also unusually predictable. I can look at a map of what is being built and make a reasonable guess about who will need what, three years out. You cannot do that in a city where the churn is enormous and the drivers are invisible.

The client mix is broader than the size of the place suggests

In a single week around here you can be talking to a builder, a restaurant, a firm of accountants and a manufacturer on one of the industrial estates who sells to three countries and has a website from 2011.

In a bigger city you tend to specialise or drown. There is enough of any one sector that somebody has already built a studio serving only dentists, or only law firms, and competing with them on general work is a losing game. Here the variety is forced on you, which keeps the work genuinely interesting and stops you building the same website eleven times with different logos on it.

The flip side is that you cannot become the obvious studio for any single sector, because there are not enough of anything. You have to be the obvious studio for a place instead. That suits me, but it is a real trade and worth knowing before you make it.

London is close enough to be useful and far enough to be irrelevant

Chiltern Railways runs Aylesbury to Marylebone in about fifty two minutes on the fastest services, roughly twice an hour. That combination does something quietly valuable.

It means a London meeting is a morning rather than a day. It means you can work with people who commute in the other direction. And it means a decent share of local clients spend their working lives in London offices, so they arrive with London expectations of what a website should look like and entirely reasonable local expectations of what it should cost. That is a good combination to build for. They know what good looks like and they are not paying agency rates for it.

What it does not mean is competing on London terms. We are not bidding against Shoreditch agencies for Shoreditch work, and I have no interest in trying. The proximity is useful precisely because we do not depend on it.

There is a specific gap in the middle of the market

This is not me claiming there is no competition. There are good people working around Aylesbury and some of them have been at it far longer than I have.

What is thin is the middle. At the bottom there are template resellers charging a monthly fee forever for something the client never owns. At the top the price jumps straight to Oxford and London agencies at three or four times the money, with an account manager included whether you wanted one or not. In between, there is not a great deal, and what a lot of local businesses actually want lives exactly there: something built properly, explained in plain English, by somebody who will still answer the phone in year three.

That gap is the whole business. It exists in most market towns, which is why I think this is a repeatable idea rather than a lucky one.

What is harder about it

I would not trust this post if it did not have this section in it.

The budgets are smaller. You will not do a sixty thousand pound project in Aylesbury. Everything sits between a few hundred pounds and a few thousand, which means you need either volume or ongoing relationships, and if you have come from agency work that adjustment is uncomfortable.

Sales take longer. People want to meet you, then think about it, then talk to their business partner, then meet you again. That is entirely reasonable when they are spending their own money rather than a marketing budget, but it is slower than a procurement process and you have to plan cash around it.

There is no local scene to learn from. No meetups full of developers arguing about frameworks, nobody down the corridor to ask. You do that online or you drive to Oxford or Milton Keynes, and if you are the sort of person who needs colleagues to think properly, that is a genuine cost rather than a minor inconvenience.

And hiring would be difficult. Anybody good enough to want is already being offered more by a London company that will let them work from their kitchen. I have not solved that one, and I am not going to pretend I have.

The thing I did not expect

How fast the reputation loop closes.

Clients here are also neighbours, or friends of neighbours, or the parent of somebody in your kid's class. You see them in the car park. That is mildly terrifying and enormously useful, because it removes any temptation to over-promise in a meeting. Whatever you say on a Tuesday, you will be standing next to that person in a queue at some point, and you would like to still be pleased about what you said.

It cuts the other way too. One job done well travels further here than five would in a city, because the people who see it are connected to each other. Word of mouth in a town this size is not a nice extra. It is the main distribution channel, and it is far more sensitive to how you behave when something goes wrong than to how good your work is when everything goes right.

On being just outside the town rather than in it

Worth addressing, since it comes up. We are in Haddenham rather than Aylesbury itself, still in the Vale but a village rather than the town, and there is a reasonable argument that you should be based where your customers are.

In practice the fifteen minutes matters far less than you would think, because almost none of this work arrives through somebody walking past a shopfront. What matters is whether you turn up when you said you would, and whether you know the place well enough to be useful in a conversation. I have spent enough time in Aylesbury to know which car park to avoid on a Saturday, which is roughly the level of local knowledge the job actually calls for.

If anything the village has been an advantage. The villages around here turn out to be full of businesses who had quietly assumed that nobody nearby did this sort of work at all.

Would I recommend it

If your ambition is a large agency with thirty staff, no. Go where the budgets are and accept the overheads that come with them.

If you want something small, profitable and properly known in one place, a growing market town with sixteen thousand homes on the way is about as good a starting position as you could ask for. You are not competing with the entire country for the same work. You are trying to be the obvious answer for a specific set of streets, which is a much more winnable game and a considerably nicer one to play.

If you run a business around Aylesbury and want a website that does more than sit there looking reasonable, get in touch. And if you are thinking of starting something of your own here, the first month checklist covers the practical side, and the first coffee is on me. I would rather this town had more small businesses in it than fewer.