DynaSite

After careful deliberation, my cofounder and I have decided to pivot to another product in an unrelated market, that is closer to my area of expertise. The new project is a platform for Kubernetes services, and I will share more details later on.

We realised that building a website builder with AI features that would be better than what's already in the market would have taken us a much longer time than we originally anticipated.

We both have a day job and my cofounder, who takes care of the frontend stuff, can't commit as many hours to side projects as I can, so it was going to be an even bigger challenge since DynaSite would be a frontend heavy project.

This new project we are pivoting to is backend heavy, so I think we should be able to have a first version of the product in a shorter time, hopefully within 4 to 6 months.

I will pause these updates for now and resume them when I have a bit more of a plan for this new product and clearer ideas.

I know what you are thinking... "didn't you just migrate to dynasite.io?" That's true, but stupid me I hadn't thought about registering the .ai domain despite AI being our main feature... So I was glad when someone pointed out. It took some work because I had to change/update many things but now everything is on the dynasite.ai domain. Other than that, everything is still the same.

I made a change to the schedule for the Google ad to optimise it for European and US/Canada visitors. The reason is that I was getting many signups to the waitlist from countries with very low purchasing power, so I don't think many of those would actually convert to paid users.

Once we launch and start having customers we'll look into implementing purchasing power parity, but for now I want to keep things simple.

As I mentioned recently I was discussing with a colleague from work at Brella, Paavo, about him joining the project. I am very happy because he is now on board! So I have a cofounder. This should help speed things up compared to doing everything myself, and he's a seasoned frontend developer, so he will help a lot with the page builder in particular.

We now need to discuss a plan on how to move forward and the scope of features etc for the version we'll be launching with.

In other news, the ad continues to do well and I haven't changed anything about it yet. So far:

• 11854 impressions
• 1004 clicks, CTR 8.47%
• Conversions 93, conversion rate 9.26%
• Cost 99.79, so 1.07 euro per conversion

Google Ads offered some recommendations on how to improve it so I will try those, but so far it's looking good.

Several people who offered some feedback over the past week said that they didn't like the .host extension for my domain, so today I migrated everything to dynasite.io instead. .io domains are quite popular and not too expensive. I wish I could buy the .com but it's been unused for ages.

In other news, the Google ad is doing quite well still. So far, total:

• 9839 impressions
• 806 clicks for a CTR of 8.19%
• 67 conversions (people joining the waitlist), for a conversion rate of 8.31%
• cost 70.79 euros

This means a cost per conversion of 1 euro. I don't think it's too bad, considering that each of them could be a sign up for a recurring charge. Next week I will see if I can improve the ad further, but more or less I am happy to keep it that way while I go ahead with building the product.

Google reviewed and approved my add much more quickly than I thought and started serving the single ad I created at around 4.30/5.00pm today.

It's midnight here now and so far the ad has generated:

• 2446 impressions in Google search
• 167 clicks for a CTR of 6.83%
• of these 167 clicks, 22 converted, meaning that those people joined the waitlist.

Considering that

• it was the first ad and I don't have experience with ads
• I only got some help from ChatGPT to generate the copy
• I did some basic keyword research, after than I applied some recommendations from Google
• the ad, in many versions of the copy, mentions "join the waitlist", so most of the people who clicked on the ad actually knew they would only be joining a waitlist

I think it's not bad! The ad so far cost around 18 euros. Now if instead of joining a waitlist people could actually sign up and try the product right away, I assume more people would have clicked on the ad, and more people would have signed up.

But even if it was just 22 signups, it's not bad for 8 hours I think. Depending on the pricing I will do, if even one only out of those 22 people converted to paid - 4.54% - this first run of the ad would have been repaid in 1-2 months. It it good? is it bad? I don't know, it depends on the customer lifetime value some other stuff I am not sure yet. I need to learn this stuff.

Overall I think that if 167 people clicked the ad in 7-8 hours even if it clearly mentions "waitlist", and 22 people joined the waitlist, surely it must mean that there is interest?

I have these credits from Google so I will keep the ad running until they finish. Let's see where this goes.

I've had interesting discussions with people offered feedback for the landing page and advice, and some of these people recommended I try some paid ads to "test the market" even though the product is still under development and all visitors can do is join a waitlist for now.

So I opened a new Google account and create a single ad with some nice copy (with the help of ChatGPT of course) and some long tail keywords that I found after doing some research using Keywords Everywhere, an awesome Chrome extension that allows you to add keyword research information (including suggestions for variations of the current keyword and long tail keywords) including the difficulty of competition, the cost per click and the search volume for each keyword.

I really like it because it integrates keyword research directly into Google searches and it's also inexpensive - I paid just $15 for 100K credits and after lots of searches I've only used a small fraction of that credit.

Since it's a new Google Ads account it's still under review and it seems it may take up to 2 days for the ads to be showing if approved.

For the budget I set a low amount per day just for testing, also because the keywords I used are low competition and not particularly expensive. But all the keywords I chose are examples of keywords that non tech-savvy small business owners would likely use on Google if they are not familiar with the technicalities and costs of creating a website and are looking for an easy way to establish their presence online.

Really curious to see the results, especially considering that the description in the ads invites you to join the waitlist, so who reads it might gather that the product is not ready so if they click is even more a sign of interest.

I was quite said when earlier today I learned that Webflow now supports direct integration with Figma so designers can design a website almost with no limits in Figma and just export it to Webflow... very easily.

I can't compete with that as that feature alone is a massive project and this makes it even harder to convince freelancers and web agencies to try DynaSite.

For this reason, I had to take a step back and review the target audience again. At this stage I still need to do more research to see who would be the ICP, but in the meantime since I didn't want to leave anymore the references to Webflow etc on the landing page, I asked .. ChatGPT and Bard what they thought the ICP could be, after a long conversation where I described the product, what it does now, what it is going to do at launch and later in the roadmap, and what I think the key features are - that is, ease of use and AI assistance.

Both ChatGPT and Bard concluded that the ICP for DynaSite would be.... drum roll... small businesses.

I already had considered small business before, but at the time I was targeting them as well as freelancers, bloggers and nonprofits.

I know that I need to niche down, therefore for the time being, until I have learnt more and have more data, I will be focusing only on small businesses, so I have updated the landing page copy accordingly.

I haven't advertised the page much, just in a few places to get some feedback really, so it's OK to make frequent changes now that there are not many visitors and we are still far away from the launch.

In the next days and weeks I hope I will manage to find some proven process, or tools, to help me better define the ICP the best way. I wish I had the cash to afford proper market research made by some expensive services...

Since I decided to go after freelancers and agencies with DynaSite, I thought "what the heck" and updated the copy on the landing page to mention Webflow directly already even if it's still early days in the development.

It feels like a David vs Goliath kind of thing but I think it's better to tell people who might be interested why they should consider DynaSite. And the reason is that this tool will not suffer from the same learning curve you have with Webflow, making it easier for beginners or clients to manage sites by themselves post-development.

So the key word is simplicity. Once I have more work done on the page builder I will then add some comparison pages vs Webflow and others.

There's so much to do.. and with this stuff being late to the game makes things more complicated.

Today I had another discussion with a colleague of mine at Brella who seems interested in joining the project, but he still needs a few days to do some research and evaluate the amount of work he'd need to do on his side of things, if he decides to join.

If he does, it means that while he works on the page builder I can finish some architectural improvements as well as implement newsletters, contact forms, subscriptions and payments and, maybe, start work on the ecommerce features, since most competitors already have those.

If he doesn't, then I need to go back to the drawing board and rethink how to go from there and what I need to do next.

I would be so happy if I/we could launch in 3-4 months!

As I read books, watch talks, listen to podcasts from people with lots of experience in business, especially with SaaS, one thing that all these people strongly recommend is to "niche down", that is, to focus on a target audience that is not too broad, but big enough for you to have a business. They recommend this especially for small, bootstrapped businesses with limited budgets. Of course, if you are a big company or have VC money or anyway more resources, it would be easier to go after a bigger audience.

If you have been following these updates, you know that since the beginning I have been listing 4 categories of people as my target audience on the landing page:

• small business owners
• bloggers
• freelancers
• nonprofits

According to what I have been learning, this is an example of "broad audience", so I decided to niche down and focus solely on freelancers and web agencies for the time being.

Reasons:

• As those seasoned entrepreneurs suggest, by focusing on a specific category of people I can optimise everything for them, from the features I build, to the marketing; if I had to go after different types of people it would be more difficult and more costly to do marketing for all of them, because they have different backgrounds, different levels of technical skills, different needs in general;
• Small business owners, bloggers and non profit organisations will only need one website and that's it; freelancers and agencies, on the other hand, build websites all the time for their clients, so the value I earn from these customers is much, much higher over time than it would be for those other categories. With freelancers and agencies, provided they are happy with my platform, it's a "they grow, I grow" kind of scenario, which I really like;
• As a developer, I am more familiar with the needs of developers, designers or anyone involved in the creation of websites, than I am with the needs of small business owners or nonprofits, therefore I can do a better job at selling the product to them;
• After all I have heard so far, I would very much prefer building a B2B business instead of B2C/B2BC. in B2C customers are cheap, don't want to pay much or have more limited budgets, and often generate more support requests.

Nothing is set in stone yet, and I am still keen to get feedback on this subject as with anything else about this project, so things might still change as I build the product, but somehow I feel that going after freelancers and agencies is probably a good move. Disagree? Let me know in the comments why 😃

Of course, if I go after these people, I can't avoid comparisons with well established services like Webflow, which is very popular among them. I can't realistically, in a reasonable amount of time, compete feature by feature with such a big product; instead, what I am aiming for is the ability to offer a much simpler alternative that lets you build a good looking website more quickly (also with the help of AI) while still allowing you a good level of customisation, including the ability to edit all the code so you have full control that way.

I hope that offering a simpler tool will resonate with those designers and website builders who find Webflow to be quite complex. Powerful, but complex.

In other news, I had another discussion today with my colleague. He's still evaluating joining the project but so far he seems interested.

Stay tuned for the next update!

I have been thinking lately that perhaps I should seek the help of a co-founder rather than going entirely solo on this project.

I have a ton to learn about lots of non-coding related stuff, so another brain could bring new perspectives and help me define a strategy as we build the product.

But it would be nice to get some help with coding related tasks as well, since this could help me launch earlier than I could if I had to do absolutely everything myself.

For example I would need some help with the visual page builder and the frontend side of the AI assistant; I actually bought a library with the goal of speeding up this process, but I am unhappy with some things so I am thinking of building it completely from scratch. But it would take time, and with these things time is money.

So last week I was discussing with a colleague of mine at Brella about DynaSite, and he seems quite interested in the project and might be able to help; he needs to think a little about it to see if he can commit to it, but if he can it would be a big help, because he's a seasoned frontend developer and therefore he could help a lot with building a new page builder from scratch the way I have it in mind.

This way I could focus on the backend for the most part, at the same time, since I still have a lot to do in that department. This could help speed things up quite a lot I think so I am hoping he can commit to helping with the project.