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Niche Site Builders

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Last July Paul Graham put this on his list of <a href="http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html">ideas he'd like to fund</a>:

"29. Easy site builders for specific markets. Weebly is a good, general-purpose site builder. But there are a lot of markets that could use more specialized tools. What's the best way to make a web site if you're a real estate agent, or a restaurant, or a lawyer? There still don't seem to be canonical answers.

Obviously the way to build this is to write a flexible site builder, then write layers on top to produce different variants. Hint: The key to making a site builder for end-users is to make software that lets people with no design ability produce things that look good or at least professional."

So I've been kicking this around for a while and wonder what the community's thoughts are. What are the key features for an site that would allow you to come in an build website for your niche (donut shops, tow trucks, dentists)?

>What are the key features for an site that would allow you to come in an build website for your niche (donut shops, tow trucks, dentists)?

As a previous submission (from Steve Blank's blog) said, you need to "get out of the building" and find out what donut shop owners, tow truck operators and dentists want.

One site that allows makers of hand-crafted goods to set up "shop" is Etsy (http://www.etsy.com). One thing they have are the tools for crafters to communicate with each other and teach each other how to build a shop. Note that in this case, sellers have something more like an eBay store than their own site. Maybe that's all some niches need.

Dentists wouldn't want that. At all. Real estate agents have their own needs. You will have to do the classic build and iterate to find what they want. Do you have experience in a niche that can help you get started?

If you like not getting paid work for realtors. Or lawyers for that matter.

Credit card + 19.95 monthly billing is about as safe as it gets for getting paid on the internet.

I made my first site bulder product in 1999, went up against the biggies of the day in massive corporations (Vignette was a favourite one to beat) and won most pitches. Only we called it a 'Content Management System'

The first dot-com crash wiped out the product/company.

The big difference I see now vs then is that then you were selling site builders, now you have to sell complete marketing solutions. A product that makes a good site is not enough, you need to deliver the entire value chain. Right from SEO/SEM to the being the primary directory of the industry to having custom sites for each merchant better be available thru your platform.

This is what etsy and opentable do, this is what you have to do.

And doing this across industries is HARD. Though many of the components in the industry vertical products may be common, there are enough unique business processes in each vertical that doing a category leading job in multiple verticals is just not possible.

If you want to build a real-estate site builder, you need to compete with realtor.com, for restaurants with opentable, i'm sure there is (or will be) an equivalent for lawyers. Competing with one of these behemoths is challenge enough, now imagine fighting against all simultaneously.

These are all good points, but I don't think anyone is suggesting a universal platform that competes across industries. The point being that there are a breadth of these types of niches in which to compete.

I run a company that has been creating site builder products for 6 years now (sitezoogle.com).

It is one of the toughest markets for a web app, in my opinion.

On the dev side, there are very high requirements for each market. Take Realtors. You'd need to interface with MLS -- problem is each MLS has different requirements, and there are dozens in the US and Canada. Some have XML feeds, some only let you use an iFrame, others let you only download listings via FTP (!). You'd also need an internal CRM to help agents manage visitors and market to them. Both of these functions take a lot of dev.

Then there is the competition. Take realtors again, and do a search in Google. There are hundreds of competitors, and therefore the adwords PPC is in the $3 range for the top listings.

We've succeeded (profitable since 2004, 10 employees) by focusing on underserved niches (Landscapers, Horse breeders) and working closely with them to understand their needs.

But, it is definitely NOT easy to go across dozens of market and have a compelling product and market it effectively.

We are looking for help, so if anyone is interested in this market, send me a msg!

To make a general purpose site builder for estate agents, florists, lawyers etc.. is not that difficult. To make a general purpose web application builder is a hard problem.

You need to abstract 'a general business' and subclass as you drill down to the various business classes.

For example they would all include perhaps an 'accounts' section, but you wouldn't like to have an invoice from the funeral parlour stating:

  1 ProductID one body  Price $xxxx.xx

or even a shopping cart for this matter! :)

Even at the template level - and I am sure PG did not have that in mind when he wrote of his idea - this has not been very successful, although PG did quite well with it, at the time :)

The company I worked for up until a little over a year ago tried to do something like this. They had a generic site builder (built with hokey 1999-era tech) with industry-specific templates and a whole bunch of themes that could be applied more or less orthogonally to the templates.

It's not a bad way of doing it, but their execution was a little off and they weren't able to make it profitable over the nine years that I worked there.

To do it profitably probably means doing it on a very large scale and in a way that doesn't result in huge hardware/maintenance nightmares (i.e. as little dynamic content as your customers will tolerate).

Funny, I was just looking at that one too and wondering why Weebly isn't tailoring their app for vertical markets.

Almost paradoxically, I think sites in particular sectors need to add more generally available features to stand out in their fields. For example, how many professional services sites are nothing more than brochureware, and would benefit by adding "social" features and apps (commonly used by the portals and big, generic sites) to better communicate with customers?

Hmm...do Tumblr, and now Posterous, qualify as niche site builders? or maybe Shopify?

From all such site builder examples out there, the more successful ones seem to nail down the underlying problem first (publishing, e-commerce, etc), and then enhance it with customization - not the other way around.

just take the big things right now...

OpenTables features for restaurant sites ..

a version of opentable (modified) for mechanic websites

(VIN in lieu of seat preference)

A client once said his 8 year old nephew could put together a site using only Microsoft Word and Paint for 500 Microsoft Points and a copy of Halo:ODST.

Who else is doing this today? What do they do right? what could be improved?

Subscribing... interested in this as well.

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