What would discourage you from starting a web design business?

Clients who think they know but really don't.

The previous 2 attempts that didn't get anywhere, and negative bank balance leftover from the most recent attempt 2yrs ago.....

I think pretty simple.. attracting business.

We will just say you are going into business and your business model is to build $500 placeholder type sites. A pretty simple question.. how many of those a month would you have to make in order to " get by ". then how many would you have to make to get beyond " getting by " and move into " comfortable "... and then how many would you have to make in order to " get ahead "

I would say without question the hardest part in the business isnt doing the work.. its GETTING the work, and doing so consistantly. Think for a moment once you understand your financial needs and we will say its 2k a month.. you need to land 50 jobs in the next year at $500 each.

I wont even begin to say its not doable.. but I will say its not easy.

I agree with some of the comments above. Getting the business will be your toughest challenge. You'll have to spend some time and possibly money on marketing. And if there is no recurring billing from months to months for maintenance or that type of thing then you'll always need to be on the hunt for more business. It can get exhausting really quickly.

Is it possible? Yes. Is it easy? No

Competition!
In my country the following things are killing web design business:
1. WhatsApp.
2. Line.
3. Instagram.
4. Facebook.
5. Youtube.
6. Wordpress.com, blogspot.com and such thing.
7. Free templates and free hosting.
8. People still don't use website for business, they want direct like WhatsApp and SMS.
9. Low rate or under payment.

It's a much better to start a street-food business than any online business.
This is really happening. So, to encourage is a very hard thing to do!

The fact that i'm limited in my income by the hours I can put in.

Difficult to get recurring income.

Unreasonably demanding clients, and also the fact that an awful lot of business owners these days prefer to forego having their own self-hosted websites in favor of Facebook fan pages.

You may want to specialize on one niche inside the webdesign business. Doing so may make it easier to talk the language of your prospects and pile up testimonials from their peers. You may also have an easier time charging more because of your specialization in that specific market.

For me it's the insane cost of PPC for web design-related keywords! I've seen rates as high as $50 per click for some keywords. I know PPC isn't the end-all solution for marketing, but holy crap that's some market saturation right there.

The numerous number of competition. It's pretty heck to find new business.

When starting out it maybe challenging getting customers, but once your web business grows, it gets hard to keep up with the demand...

7 month old thread!

I have started this part-time website design job for 2 years. The biggest problem for me is that my clients always procrastinate providing the copywriting and images which I need.

So now I have to ask them to pay me off before our cooperation.

Obviously, i would care about design. Mostly social media accounts like instagram and facebook.