Building a platform to publish personal websites & blogs - Idea Validation
I'm currently building a platform that lets people publish a personal website & blog without the hassle.
Users can:
- choose from ready-made templates
- just enter their information like about, social links, image, etc.
- explain their work/projects in detail
- write blog articles
- connect their own domain
Do you see potential for this kind of service? I came up with the idea because I had this exact problem of not being able to find a good service to easily publish a minimal personal website and blog.
I think there's potential to differentiate from other site builders from focusing on blog + portfolio. I'd look around at what's already out there that targets a niche like developers in the blogging/portfolio space.
If you could not find a good service that does what you want, it does not necessarily mean that the service does not exist, it might mean that they suck at distribution...so can you get your website builder get noticed by your target audience and not face the same fate as the bazillion of other services ?
I reckon what would make the tool valuable is to focus on the painpoints of blogging today. Personally my blog/biz site was started on Wordpress and it had/has a few issues.
If I was searching for WP blog building, a tagline like "WP-like blog in 10 minutes" would catch my eye.
If I was someone considering moving away from WP, then the tagline "Make WP maintenance a thing of the past, migrate from WP to YourProduct in 10 minutes" would catch my attention.
Overall, I'd suggest niching down a bit further and focus on painpoints of another option (WP/Substack/etc.) considering user persona (e.g. non-techie) and stage of journey (new blogger or existing).
Hey Peter, thanks for your ideas and suggestions! I like the idea of niching down the product as a wordpress and substack alternative, targeting their painpoints, especially since they're definitely the biggest competitors in combining website+blog. The product will be designed so that even non-techies can easily get started in less than 10 minutes. I will definitely look further into how to position as a wordpress alternative!
Please keep in mind that google comes with a similar solution https://sites.google.com/new
and as far as I know, they nailed SEO with it
You are in a very crowded space here. There are hundreds if not thousands of services both free and paid in nature. As others have also mentioned, SEO is key to nail for this, as not only you, but even more importantly, your users need to benefit from search engine optimized content (especially from a technical perspective!).
Have you done a competitive analysis to understand what is already out there?
That's right. I am very grateful for all the comments here as they are a bit of an eye opener. Doing a competitive analysis seems to be the right step to take to see what is out there and who I would be competing with
Awesome! I am happy to hear that my thought helped :)
@eyk Alright - you can check out OLITT- https://www.olitt.com/
It offers the same services you are looking for.
Would you mind elaborating what problems are you solving?
What's the difference between this and say, Notion? There are a lot of creators using Notion to quickly create a minimal blog and website.
That said, you never say never, although it'd be tough.
A few years back when we started building our own email marketing tool / ESP in BirdSend, there were already a lot of ESPs. What makes ours different? We focused on creators only and decided to keep it simple.
Having a laser-focused target audience to serve initially is a good strategy to have since you'll be the "specialist" for that specific audience. Plus you'll be able to go deep and discover their pain points and come up with features to solve them.
There are literally a ton of website builders on the market. Talking about writing blog articles with many templates available, I'm thinking about Ghost or even a wix site (which both are easier than a Wordpress). Copyfolio is another one I discovered recently and I like pretty much since it's using tech I use on my own as a developer. Also on Appsumo I saw several different website builders already.
So the main questions are:
What would be your differentiating feature(s)? And which audience you would target?
I'm not saying its a bad idea, just that there is a lot of competition here ;)
Hey Matt, thanks for your feedback - those are definitely important questions! There are indeed a lot of website builders out there. But with the exception of wordpress (in some form), I've never seen a website builder that focuses directly on personal websites and personal blogs while being accessible to non-techies. I would position it as a sort of wordpress alternative that targets a diverse audience, including techies and non-techies. The effort required to set up a site should be very low and not require any technical knowledge.
So the key selling points as of now are:
If your main goal is to have a "Frictionless" experience for blogging, maybe look at how Medium is designed. I think what made Medium popular is its simplicity and minimalism (and it's very adapted to blogging).
But again, a strong competitor of Medium in term of UX is Ghost, which attracts a lot of content creator. In the past Ghost was made famous for techies because of its open source model. Now they focus more on newsletter creators and pricing is based on number of subscribers (starting at $9) with a nice analytics dashboard.
Other idea: what about a tool to automatically bootstrap a WP website very easily with prebuilt themes and plugins?
The focus is not on blogging. It's about 'Frictionless publishing of a personal website and easy attaching of a blog, if you want'. It's like an all-in-one toolkit for building your personal brand/profile on the Internet.
Ghost is interesting as well, however there is still a huge overhead IMO. Ghost is more about building a business with your blog/online presence and less about building your personal brand.
While your idea is interesting, I don't like WordPress that much, that's why I would like to build an alternative for it.
I ended up with WordPress, because it's great for personal blogs, SEO optimized and has a bunch of useful plugins
Fair enough. Did you have some specific problems while setting up the website? Something that took you a lot of time or energy which could be improved?
I had a problem choosing a theme for the blog:) I don't know why, but that was hard and most themes are trash and I wanted something simple and minimal.
Alright that's definitely a thing that's going to be a lot easier with the product I'm planning. Thanks!
Keep it up, i am building also a waas on WordPress any ideas or guidance will be appreciated
Hey what you think about crrad.co
No blog?
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hello @volkandkaya, I would be very interested in knowing how you get your first 100/1000 customers? What is or was your main approach or the main feature(s) people wanted?
Blogging CMS- https://www.producthunt.com/posts/blog-by-versoly
After we launched that things went much better.
In terms of getting customers just posting in niche forums like Indie hackers.
I've seen your product before and it's pretty cool :) But as you said, it's targeting businesses. I'm planning to create a tool specifically targeting personal websites & blogs
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Love this straight feedback! You're definitely right, the product would need to rank first-page on Google. And that's pretty hard indeed.
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