Umso

It's been a while since our last update on IH. We have a lot of cool stuff to share, so have a look!

• Generator 2.0 🚀
  Our generator needed an upgrade, and it just got one! You can now out of the box get amazing new designs and layouts when creating a new website. We made it more intuitive and more focused on your needs.

• Custom Fonts 🖌️
  We want your site to match your brand and you can achieve that now with custom fonts. If your brand uses a specific font, you can upload it and use it on your site.

• Button Designer 🎨
  You can now design your primary and secondary buttons from scratch! You can add roundness, shadows, different colors, and more.

• Responsive Sections 📱
  Sometimes you might want some sections to show up differently for different devices. You can now hide/display specific sections based on devices screen sizes. Mobile, Tablet, or Desktop.

• UTM and Custom Parameters Forwarding 😎
  You can automatically forward the standard UTM parameters or any custom parameters to internal links, external links, and links to specific domains.

Behind the scenes, there is a lot of work happening to make Umso the best website builder for our customers. We have added an option for you to wrap your section into boxes, add ratings to the testimonial section, layout improvements, language picker in the header, and much more.

We have also launched on Product Hunt today! https://www.producthunt.com/posts/umso

We added new features like Multi-Language Support, Site & Page Passwords, or Cookie Banners and updated existing parts like the new Editor, a Dark Mode, Google Login, and our Analytics.

To keep track of all the updates and further details we recommend having a look at our Changelog:

https://roadmap.umso.com/changelog

We haven't shared many product updates over the past year, but that's not because we've been quarantining on the couch (I promise 😇)! Instead, we took a step back and worked on some big changes to our internal systems. First we'll explain what they are and then why we've prioritized them.

New Engine: Our "engine" is what renders your websites based on the design and content you created in the editor. We have learned a lot since we started and now we've used that knowledge to build a new system. In 2020 we rewrote the engine to become a standardized set of components which we can be more easily extended. This new version has been live since the end of last year and you probably haven't noticed. Sounds boring? Not at all, just read to the end!

New Editor: Our new editor has been a work in progress since May 2020 and will enter open beta very soon. As with the new engine, our goal was to standardize everything to make new functionality easier to add. We've also used the opportunity to improve the design and performance.

New Hosting: We have moved around between CDNs to host your websites but none of them really suited our situation. That's why we built our own CDN which has been in production since February 2020 and provides some of the fastest hosting in the industry.

Why we did this now
We did none of those big changes for fun. We would've much rather worked on beautiful new things you can see right away, but there's a good reason. When I started Umso nearly three years ago, it was a minimum viable product. That means it was just meant to help me figure out whether or not it could become a valuable business.

Many websites, paying customers (thank you so much 🙌🏻), and two full-time employees later we have decided that YES! it is valuable business, hooray! Now we had to figure out how to turn the successful MVP into the amazing product we actually want to build.

We have a great vision for what Umso can be. However, those things add a lot of complexity which our existing Engine, Editor and Hosting couldn't handle. That's why we worked so much on improving them.

Same people, same company, same product, new name!

We’re excited to announce that as of November 2020, we’re rebranding! Part of rebranding for us will be changing the name of our product and company from Landen to Umso. Our vision hasn’t changed and we're still on the same mission to build the best website builder for entrepreneurs.

The new name doesn't really mean anything, and we won't pretend otherwise. It's a short and sweet imaginary word. We've spent a lot of time trying to come up with a new name and had a lot of different ideas going in different directions. In the end, we had 56 candidates with affordable .com domains, some of which we're embarrassed to even say out loud now.

You may wonder why we’ve changed our name. Some of you really liked the old one. However, we felt that it created a preconceived idea of our product that didn't align with our vision of a well rounded website builder solution. The name Landen makes many people think of "landing pages". That means different things to different people, but it roughly translates to single-page websites at the end of a marketing funnel.

What we have been building over the last two years initially started as a landing page builder. Fortunately, it has evolved into so much more. Our goal is to build the best possible website builder for entrepreneurs and startups, because we want you to succeed. Our new name frees us from the limited idea of what our product does.

Landen has had an analytics feature for a while now, but it's been very basic. Now it tracks conversion rates and even lets your track custom events from your web-app or store.

I wrote a short article about the technologies that power Landen, and how they play together: https://www.landen.co/blog/how-landen-works-the-tech-stack

It's been almost a year in the making: the Landen 2.0 launch. In a way, this is really version one and the first version was just a prototype. At this point I'm really glad I didn't develop Landen behind closed curtains for a year and making this my first launch. The year as brought a lot of feedback from customers, and allowed Landen to slowly grow it's monthly revenue.