Inexpensive, opinionated website builder

Create a website hosting platform with the following features:

• easy to set up
• opionated and low-customizability
• fast to load
• easy to register a domain
• low annual fee ($50 or less for as many domains as you want)
• Easy to export content (probably Markdown files on the backend).

The user experience is very similar to https://about.me

Advantages over competing products

• Less exensive
• Easier to set up
• Easier to quit

  Disadvantages

• Less customizable

Possible user experience

• We whitelabel our own product

We create several sites

• simplewedding.com
• myresume.com
• pitchdeck.com
• mysoccerclub.com
• mydaycare.com
• myrestarauntsite.com

Person lands on simpleresume.com

Pricing is transparent - $50 per year, and they see a demo of what the website will look like (1 site. No graphics options, though they can swap it out later.

User enters information.

User is asked questions through typeform-like interface.

Website is generated.

Possible upsell

• Upsell user to purchase printed QR business cards
• Sell printed version of site (for weddings, etc).
• Presumably, since data came in structured, you can nicely-format the data.
• Pauline would use it if minimalistic templates & super simple interface to spin a new one up. Still interested in the idea of easily hide/show parts of the page without deleting anything

  Competitors

• about.me - really, nice, and at a fair price: free or $7 a month if you want your own domain.
• Wix / SquareSpace / Forestry - charge too much
• Wordpress is way to complex
• GitHub.com is intimidating and the resulting webpages aren’t very pretty.
• Notion is ugly

  Reasons to pursue

• We (Pauline, Arun, Owen) are each attracted to simple, pretty, and fast experiences.
• It’s technically easy to implement.

Reasons to avoid

• User acquisition. If you’re whole business model is predicated on your product having fewer features and costing less, you can’t pay to advertise.
• There’s no moat. SquareSpace could easily release an ultra-cheap plan.

2020-02-07

We tried Leia.ai and were really impressed. They claim to us ML and had a typeform approach, but the final product was a little janky.

Adobe spark was really impressive and free, but you can’t use your domain and the resulting pages domain have a proper URL structure.

Decision to pass

Passed on this for the following reasons:

• There are awesome free options available online for building a website (though you don’t get your domain. Examples include Adobe Spark)
• There are awesome free options available on line for building a website that do include a domain (GitHub Pages)
• There are awesome, powerful options for building a site with GUI (SquareSpace, Wix)
• There are awesome self-hosted options (Hugo, Jekyll)