Show HN: Drag and drop page building for any site | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Drag and drop page building for any site

builder.io

109 pointssteve870835 comments

Hey all, I made this myself and am looking for feedback from anyone with time to spare some Thanks in advance!

Looks great. Is this embeddable (editor) in other SaaS applications? This can open new opportunities.

Thanks!

And yes - this is actually totally doable. I've done it so far for platforms like Wordpress, Shopify, and Magento, as well as a couple custom internal admin tools of customers so far.

It isn't something I have standard pricing and docs on yet but I am totally open to doing that. Do you have a use case in mind?

I’d also like to discuss this use case with you

Happy to, shoot me an email at steve@builder.io and we can talk more

I also see this use case.

Why? Ongoing "battle" between a large CMS (AEM) and a more modern SPA using microservices. Our claim is that the SPA is actually a superset of everything. It can SSR (like the CMS), it can also get data to display (like the CMS). All that is missing is a service for such data (we have other services delivering domain specific data).

Now the problem is not in a data service, but rather in the whole infrastructure around it - to make it easy for an content editor to use. These people like drag and drop and they would love your solution.

Great job!

Just reached out to you on your intercom.io widget. Also interested.

You should be proud of yourself.

Thanks so much, that means a lot!

I know we're only supposed to use up votes here and never use comments just for praise but if you built this by yourself you deserve far more credit than a simple upvote of karma. Way to go.

As in a single person made this? Even for a team of 10 that is simply amazing:

- Attractive and professional landing page

- Fully featured demo site, free to try

- [1] Over 10 SDK's built for all popular platforms (react, vue, angular... etc)?!!

I would be happy to have implemented just a fraction of what you've done... Like a sibling comment said; you should be very proud of yourself

Get ready to scale :)

[1] https://github.com/BuilderIO/builder/tree/master/packages

Thank you so much for the encouragement, it really does mean a lot

May I ask how much time it took you to build it.

Absolutely - it's been about a year and a half of work so far

Yeah damn it’s good, I was assuming this was a company posting? Also the plans are good value. And backend/front end integration is well thought out.

My concern for you is there are a lot of GUI site builders out there. So I wonder how this stands out?

Thanks! I'm not sure what a company posting means but yes? Haha the company is just me anyway

Your concern is totally valid, and I perhaps need to make this more clear on my landing page. But Builder is different because it works like a headless CMS.

It can hook into any site to power page building, regardless of what tech stack that site was made with. So as opposed to other site builders that lock you into their system completely and can't hardly be extended with real code and engineers, Builder does this in reverse.

Companies come to use my product when they have already built some kind of custom website, but need to provided non-dev users with the ability to quickly build and test pages.

It just takes one simple API integration to make all that possible and retains your freedom to completely own your tech stack.

Anyway, happy to elaborate further if you like!

Edit: typos

Cool! You should post this on indie hacker as well. How long did it take you to complete this?

Oh interesting I haven't heard of indie hacker, I'll check it out

So far I've been working on this product for about a year and a half, though I did spend almost a full year beforehand just trying to figure out how to approach/solve this problem in the first place

...I did spend almost a full year beforehand just trying to figure out how to approach/solve this problem in the first place I wanted to point out how smart this approach is for a project/idea this big. You hardly ever hear about the background work that goes into projects before the MVC is started. I can't imagine how many little problems/questions you needed to address before you made your first "official commit" Great job on this - it is seriously impressive work.

Contrast to my current job where they say “we don’t plan, we just build and iterate as needed”

I point out swamp code and it’s “yeah I’ve been meaning to fix that but I don’t have time [fixing these 20 other debts we created]”

Quite nice! You may want to submit to 10words.io and producthunt.com also.

One concern for you about pricing. If I stick a varnish cache or cloudflare in front of my site (or your api), I’m unlikely to need a big plan. Free plan could do for a very popular site.

Maybe consider pricing by amount of content and requests?

Yeah, your concern is totally valid. One thing that would hit people who cache the API is they would also be subject to fair use policies for bandwidth usage (namely serving the images used). Pretty much all CMSs have some form of this that basically requires large bandwidth users to pay for one of the higher price plans anyway so not to be losing money on customers

That said if someone wanted to get real fancy they could comb through the content and replace the image URLs with some of their own. You are right, this will have to be sorted out if this becomes a common way people use the product.

Thank you for the feedback

No problems. What made me think of it wasn't so much trying to avoid paying for the service, but because I'd want to run a cache for speed of the initial page load. If you are serving your images from a CDN that would be compatible with my goal to keep the site fast.

I don't think anyone would "could comb through the content and replace the image URLs" to save a few dollars, as the development effort would far outweigh the cost savings. So maybe you are OK there.

Good stuff and congrats! How long did it take you to build this and how did you find your first customer?

Thanks!

I've been working on this for about a year and a half now, though I was able to get my first customer just a few months in.

The first place I went to was ShopStyle, since I had worked there previously and had experienced the problem that Builder aims to solve first hand (non-dev teams needing to build new pages all the time, and devs without time to constantly code up all this new content).

So since I had a good rapport with them and this was a pretty "hair on fire" problem with them, they were willing to be my first customer. I also charged them very little - at first at least ;)

Then I got new customers from word of mouth and from being able to demonstrate what ShopStyle had done (the pages their non-devs were making and how it was helping their business). When people liked the product they were happy to refer me to others who could use it. This was slow but it eventually got me a handful more initial customers, some I knew personally and some I didn't.

Anyway, happy to answer more about the process if you have other Qs or interested in more detail!

Edit: Typo

What a fascinating tool. Thank you for sharing it.

Looks really promising! That would be great to have licensing where one can pay a fee (subscription) without having API vendor lock (so it can be integrated into internal software)

Thanks!

And what you ask for is actually possible in two ways -

One is to use webhooks to side load the data. Aka when people publish content in Builder, it will trigger a webhook sending the data to an API of yours to store and then serve how you like. You can see some docs on that here https://builder.io/c/docs/webhooks (and feel free to reach out for further explanation - I'll create a detailed guide on this at some point)

The second way, which is not available yet but will be soon, is an embedded Builder editor you can work into your internal software. This is not publicly available yet but is used by one customer and will be available more broadly soon. If you're interested in trying that when available shoot me an email at steve@builder.io

Great job! Congratulations and best wishes.

Great tool - super useful.

what is different from site builders like wix, weebly etc.?

Thanks for the question! The big difference is that Builder works like a headless CMS - so you can easily hook it up to existing sites with an API.

This is most useful for existing sites or apps that have a lot of custom coded content, but you want non-devs to be able to make and manage landing pages and other content without relying on developers at all

If I start messing with a page in Builder, does that make it difficult to go back and start coding like normal again on it?

For instance, if I want to do the page layout first in Builder, then jump in and make one of the components into a messenger with sockets in the code, then tweak a component’s position and add a few more, then jump back into the code - is that a possible workflow?

Ideally I would want to use Typescript and React.

Not at all - you can easily balance your usage of Builder and your own code as much as you like. You can put Builder content within your code components, and you can easily use your code components within the Builder content.

Take a look at this for a real example you can play with on how you can have some pages powered by Builder and some fully in your react/typescript code https://codesandbox.io/s/github/BuilderIO/builder/tree/maste...

And then see this guide for how to use your own react/typescript components in the builder content https://builder.io/c/docs/custom-react-components

And don't hesitate to reach out if you have any more detailed questions about this - steve@builder.io

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