Building a blog platform for small businesses - Day 0
Today I'm starting a new project, a blogging platform built for small businesses. I know this is wildly oversaturated market yet there still seems to be a need. Small businesses don't typically have technical know-how to build their own blogs, yet also don't have the need for the fully functional CMS like Contentful. I just read a post the other day where a dev said he typically charged businesses $500+ to integrate a CMS to their site and up to $100/mo to maintain it, and thats absurd to me. I want my platform to be the "Shopify" of the business blog market, so simple anyone can use it but still powerful enough to do the job well. I know there are still plenty of similar platforms out there but I want to stake my claim and build my own.
What it will be:
A hosted blogging platform that acts an extension of your business that should be as simple as logging in and writing your post. The platforms only goal is to get your blog on the web for your customers, and Google, to see with as little headache as possible.
What it wont be:
It's not going to be a website builder, I don't want to complicate the site with advanced theming and custom code blocks. It will have an opinionated style that keeps simplicity and accessibility at the forefront.
It's not going to be a CMS, there wont be schemas and complex collections, again I want this to be as simple as writing a Tweet so the business owner can focus on their business.
Features it will have:
- WYSIWYG editor, keeping it simple like Medium or Substack
- SEO and accessibility out of the box
- Limited theming, you can add your business logo, brand colors, and a nav with links to your business site
- Tagging, articles will be grouped and categorized using tags
- Search
- Teams, to invite your whole business or even guest writers
- Custom domains
- Analytics
- Comments
- Newsletter subscriptions and integration with 3rd party services like Mailchimp
- RSS feed
- API/Webhook/Zapier integration, probably down the line not a priority
What I need:
A name! I want to start pushing changes to the site, getting sign ups and developing a roadmap but I need a name to do that under. If anyone gives me a good name and I use it I'll give you free access for life!
I'd also love to know any more features you think are necessary!
Sounds interesting! For the dev blog niche it went really well for platforms like hashnode and I definitely think there is a market for that.
I see it for myself, creating a non-dev blog is defacto still wordpress.
How do you plan on getting non-technical customers to use subfolders instead of subdomains?
Also for the MVP you could just leverage self hosted Ghost instances and add analytics using https://plausible.io/
I may be misunderstanding the first question but the customers will be given subdomains, like volkandkaya.myblogsaas.com and can point their own domain to that as either their root domain or their own subdomain like blog.volkandkaya.com.
I’ll most likely leverage some helper SaaSs like Alogolia for search, Discus for comments, and someone for analytics maybe Plausible or host my own Unami.is for analytics. But I want to build out the base blogging system myself, plus I think with my skill set it’d be quicker to build out a basic version myself than figure out how to leverage a multitenant Ghost setup.
Most SEO folks i know dislike subdomains
They prefer subfolders such as domain.com/blog
Working on a good blog editor is very hard, that is why i recommended Ghost.
Also getting multiple users per account etc is hard work.
You can also leverage ghosts ecosystem such as templates and the ability to Google.
Sub folders can ruin someone else blog's seo and ranking.
For example, imagine two guys run their own blog on 2 subfolder (example.com/blogone and example.com/blogtwo).
If the blogone started posting spammy plagiarised content then blogtwo will also face consequences of it in mutliple ways.
Whereas, Google treat different subdomain as separate entity from same vendor.
What?
Why would you ever host 2 different company blogs on 1 domain?
That is why i asked how he plans to do subfolder. It isn't as easy as subdomain.
Ohh ok I misunderstood the question. Yeah that is a great point and probably my biggest worry so far that I’ll have to figure out.
What would be my competitors like blogstatic.io, blogger.com, superblog.so, and bearblog.dev all do it as a subdomian and superblog has a nice article on it https://discuss.superblog.ai/t/use-superblog-on-a-subdirectory-or-subfolder/53
If wanted to do subdirectories instead, I would have to ask the customer to write code to integrate my platform like a CMS and that is what I’m trying to avoid. I will be building out the API to fetch content if someone really wanted to go that route though.
But I’ll define have to validate if that is a dealbreaker for my customers.