Strikingly (YC W13) Builds Compelling Mobile-First Web Experiences
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Photographers care most about their images/galleries. Restaurants need menus. Real estate agents need listings. All of them need different types of forms.
The trap with going general first is you'll either have to (a) build a "kitchen sink" product with features for everyone or (b) have a product that many industries don't want to use because it doesn't have NICHE FEATURE X.
When you go industry first, it's easier to get traction and recommendations. It's easier and cheaper to advertise to your audience. You can guerrilla market yourself at trade shows and find "industry rockstars" to champion you. You can totally dominate that industry and have a nice "lifestyle business" or simply use it as the first pin in a bowling pin strategy [1]. For example, we're pretty deep into the photography space and now we're taking one product and going after Architects.
Obviously Weebly and Squarespace have had success being general-purpose. So, now you're basically competing with them + wordpress with your main advantage being "mobile first and responsive". You say your format is suitable for small-businesses. I'm sorry, but in my experience that's not enough to get people to switch.
We've designed/sold/deployed/hosted websites for a few thousand wedding/portrait photographers plus almost the same amount of high-end commercial photographers. Don't take this the wrong way (your designs are beautiful) but I can't see any of my clients jumping ship to a product like this. (FWIW, most clients we lose go to WordPress or just go out of business).
Regarding to your second point about getting people to switch. You are right, "mobile first and responsive" itself is not enough, but simplicity is. From our user interviews, we've found that the single most important reason they switch over to Strikingly is because it takes less time to set up and manage. Also, they don't need to worry about how an edit on the web will look on mobile. The key is saving their time. The majority of our customers have actually switched from an existing website builder or CMS to Strikingly. As for why mobile is important, I think you'll agree that any website today should be mobile optimized. With the growth trajectory of mobile traffic, the importance of mobile is going to precede web in two, at most three, years. The question is what "mobile optimized" means. Taking a complicated desktop website and try to fit it onto a small screen is hard, but the other way around is not (Fred Wilson has an article here: http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2012/12/rethinking-mobile-first.html). Mobile is a catalyst for a web design revolution, with simpler and more intuitive designs. This trend is also happening on the desktop web, and that's why more people are using the one-page design. Mobile first is both a mentality and design shift, and eventually, desktop web design will have to assimilate the mobile experience. Our users agree with this philosophy of ours.
Of course, we are also working on simplifying the whole onboarding process. Some interesting updates will be released soon. Thanks for your feedback!
To be to fair to them, they have added analytics, social integration, SEO optimization, etc.
Disclaimer: I'm working on a service (but targeted at a specific industry) that will offer something similar as a feature but is not the core product/service.
So we're starting with the mobile experience and bringing it to bigger screens. In the process, we learned from our customers that the simpler mobile-first format is particularly suitable for certain small businesses (contractors, restaurants, startups, etc) and lowers their barrier to get online. We'd like to write an article to share our findings!
I'm sure this will be fixed soon, and they are just launching now, but it is kinda funny.
My email is in my profile if you have any questions. I'm an enom reseller and have no complaints.