Frontecs - Website Editor

Before proceeding with our marketing strategy, we decided to launch this project on Indie Hackers. Feedbacks are critical for startups (and not only).

Transforming an idea into a real working tool is extremely hard. But after overcoming all the obstacles and challenges during the product development process, founders become super-subjective about their product. Therefore, by sharing our startup on this platform, we are looking forward to receiving a stream of refreshing feedbacks - either negative or positive - before entering the scary world of Marketing & Sales :)

So please feel free to add your comments below.

About a week ago, we successfully launched the Frontecs platform and our Customer Relations Management system (the CRM is created from scratch exclusively for our startup needs and requirements). Overall it resulted in around 500 pageviews after running a couple of test ads on several platforms - but no sales yet.

Currently, we are working on implementing our marketing strategy which is pretty straightforward. There are a bunch of website builders in the market like Webflow. Their customers are professionals who constantly create websites including static ones. So in general we know where our target customers hang out mostly. We are also targeting individuals or agencies who are providing front-end web design services.

During the development process, we encountered tens of complicated tech challenges:

Challenge 1 - FREE DEMO
We needed to give our potential customers the ability to test the Frontecs editor's FULL functionality on their EXISTING websites BEFORE a purchase. As a result, now anyone can upload their HTML website into the Frontecs platform and see how the Frontecs editor works on their website's layout. This feature optimizes our marketing/sales process; it's easier to sell a product when customers test it before purchasing. Also, the Free Demo feature establishes a robust customer engagement; anyone can upload their HTML website into the Frontecs platform at ZERO restrictions or conditions and play around with the editor features right on their website layout. No action is required for testing the product demo - no registration, no credit card integration. The demo is 100% open to the public.

Challenge 2 - CREATING A REGISTRATION FREE PLATFORM
We decided not to follow current online business standards and refrained from monthly payments, registration features, embracing a fixed price policy. This strategy simplifies the purchasing process for customers, but it also creates difficulties in establishing a sustainable customer base and cash flow.
However, we replaced registration/login features with alternative customer retention tools, such as creating a dynamic discount code system. Currently, we are giving away a $13 LIFETIME promo code to our first-time buyers. As a result, they can use their lifetime discount code for all their future purchases at Frontecs and share the $13 discount with their friends and colleagues.
Besides, we optimized and simplified purchasing steps. Our goal was to gather and store enough information about our customers requiring as few clicks as possible.

Challenge 3 - A DATABASE-FREE CMS
One of our primary intentions for the editor was that it should work ONLY on front-end technologies. It was pretty tough to achieve this solution. We managed to transfer some back-end technological solutions to the front-end side. As a result, the Frontecs Editor is a Content Management System that works WITHOUT a database - on external servers. The database-free feature extensively simplifies the product use, which in turn optimizes the marketing & sales process. Anyone can integrate the Frontecs Editor into their website using the Frontecs platform, download and upload their editable website on any CPanel server, extract the folder, and DONE - their editable website is live! As simple as that!

We had the idea of creating a simple editor for static websites a long ago. As a previous freelance web designer, I was always looking for a simple website editor that could easily be integrated into any HTML website. That way customers could make simple text, image, link, and metadata edits on their websites independently, right on their website's layout - like editing a Facebook page or a Word document.