A Santa Monica 14-Year-Old Builds Shop Websites Before They Pay

Matteo Milk charges about $120 up front plus a monthly fee. He says agencies ask roughly $3,000.

Matteo Milk's sales pitch on Pico Boulevard opens with a single question for the owner: do you have a website? If the answer is no, the 14-year-old offers to build one before they spend a cent.

Since he and his partner, Mason Alvarez, launched MilkWebDesign this summer, he has built more than 15 sites for hair salons, barbershops, boutiques, food trucks and other businesses, the Santa Monica Daily Press reported Thursday. He charges what he calls "kid prices," about $120 up front and $50 a month, he told the Santa Monica Daily Press. The typical agency, he said, asks $3,000 up front and $200 a month.

The two find clients by walking shop-lined streets like Pico, Ocean Park Boulevard and Main Street, or by scanning Google listings for businesses that don't link to a site of their own. Then they build a sample first. "We build your website beforehand so if you are not interested you don't have to pay a dime," Milk told the Daily Press. He said owners would otherwise assume they were paying for a bad site.

His mother started it. Over the summer she showed him a video of a man in his 30s pitching a Mexican restaurant a $3,000 site he'd put together from its Google and Instagram pages. Milk said he wondered how anyone could charge a local restaurant that much. The laptop he works on is a hand-me-down from his older brother, passed along by his mother. His sister, who'd worked in web design, showed him how to code a site from nothing, and his father, who runs the marketplace handmade.com, taught him hosting, domains and Google ads.

The prices posted on his company's own website run a little different from the round numbers he gave the paper. Masih Hair Salon & Barbershop, his first client, is listed at $120 down and $63 a month. The Hairbrains on Ocean Park, his newest client, is listed at $148 down and $58 a month. The site says the monthly fee covers maintenance, the domain, hosting, analytics and security. Next to each client it lists an estimated value, as high as $14,000, and calls those figures illustrative estimates, not appraisals. The low price, the site says, comes from skipping the overhead agencies carry, not from cutting corners.

So far the business has taken in $2,000, plus $700 a month in recurring fees, Milk told the Santa Monica Daily Press. Masih, whose bookings picked up once its site went live, has steered other customers his way. With school back in session, he puts in roughly four hours a day on the business, he said.

Within a few years, he wants 50 or more stores on his books. The goal, he said, is a business that's "profitable for all of my teenage years."

Source: smdp.com, retrieved October 23, 2026. Other sources: the company's website.