tech-company, business-plan, business-model, business-structureI’m building a website builder with all drag and drop features in the front end, I want to compete my web builder product with wix, godaddy etc. and planning to sell with the cloud space same as it is in godaddy or wix.
Just wanted to know what all steps shall I take or is it a good decision to take this product into the market, as there are many web builders available. Basically I’m looking for business model or plan, I’m very much new into this and my product is almost ready, please guide me.
Thanks.
Note: I was in this business at one point…
You’re facing many nimble competitors with $10M+/year development budgets and substantial marketing budgets to boot. It’s certainly not something you can compete against with a small team - even less so alone.
Unless you feel able to get enough funding to match their budgets, methinks you’re basically wasting your time. The market doesn’t need yet another CMS.
The market does need competent dev shops who use the existing ones properly however, but go there only if you’ve a good designer at your side.
It also needs competent dev shops who create and maintain plugins, modules, add-ons, whatever they’re called with your favorite CMSs. Particularly business-related such that integrate this CMS with that other tool in way that is sensible and easy to use - there are tons of opportunities in that. Oftentimes it’s “simple” things like modules for stats, caching, e-commerce, etc. that don’t have a “scratch your eyes out ugly OMG this is too f’ing complex” interface, and that do things sensibly under the hood without requiring so much configuration that users need a PhD to use it properly.
Well, I saw lot’s of competition in this. As, you already know there are lot’s of similar products already available which are doing very good. Shopify, Squarespace and Wix are among the top. It’s good that you have your product ready, but there is a lot more after launch. However, I feel that most of the website builders which are available already lacks following features which you can target/have in your tool.
Or you can target some specific segments like Real Estate, Education, Hospitality, eCommerce, Corporate Websites etc. only.
Coming to Business Model, I think you can offer some membership plans. Like a basic free one with limited space, limited hosting duration, etc. and some advanced plans with extended features, etc. At this point your main goal should be to attract the users and promote the product on later stages you can remove the free costing.
When launching a startup, the goal is to 1) solve a problem 2) bring innovation to the market 3) make people want it so bad that they will pay for it.
The web site builder space is pretty crowded - Wordpress, Weebly, Wix, SquareSpace, Jimbo - the list is endless. Unless you solve a problem that none of these companies is solving, it doesn’t make any sense to go into that space. You would need tremendous sales & marketing efforts & budgets to get even a tiny fraction of the market.
If your product is already built, think of ways how to pivot it into something innovative. For example, try a vertical - website builder for pets’ profiles.
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