has_many :codes
DynaSite • BuildInPublic • SaaS

Building DynaSite in public: "niching down"

Published  

Previous post in the series: Considering the help of a co-founder
Next post: David vs Goliath
☒

As I read books, watch talks, listen to podcasts from people with lots of experience in business, especially with SaaS, one thing that all these people strongly recommend is to "niche down", that is, to focus on a target audience that is not too broad, but big enough for you to have a business. They recommend this especially for small, bootstrapped businesses with limited budgets. Of course, if you are a big company or have VC money or anyway more resources, it would be easier to go after a bigger audience.

If you have been following these updates, you know that since the beginning I have been listing 4 categories of people as my target audience on the landing page:

  • small business owners
  • bloggers
  • freelancers
  • nonprofits

According to what I have been learning, this is an example of "broad audience", so I decided to niche down and focus solely on freelancers and web agencies for the time being.

Reasons:

  1. As those seasoned entrepreneurs suggest, by focusing on a specific category of people I can optimise everything for them, from the features I build, to the marketing; if I had to go after different types of people it would be more difficult and more costly to do marketing for all of them, because they have different backgrounds, different levels of technical skills, different needs in general;
  2. Small business owners, bloggers and non profit organisations will only need one website and that's it; freelancers and agencies, on the other hand, build websites all the time for their clients, so the value I earn from these customers is much, much higher over time than it would be for those other categories. With freelancers and agencies, provided they are happy with my platform, it's a "they grow, I grow" kind of scenario, which I really like;
  3. As a developer, I am more familiar with the needs of developers, designers or anyone involved in the creation of websites, than I am with the needs of small business owners or nonprofits, therefore I can do a better job at selling the product to them;
  4. After all I have heard so far, I would very much prefer building a B2B business instead of B2C/B2BC. in B2C customers are cheap, don't want to pay much or have more limited budgets, and often generate more support requests.

Nothing is set in stone yet, and I am still keen to get feedback on this subject as with anything else about this project, so things might still change as I build the product, but somehow I feel that going after freelancers and agencies is probably a good move. Disagree? Let me know in the comments why 😃

Of course, if I go after these people, I can't avoid comparisons with well established services like Webflow, which is very popular among them. I can't realistically, in a reasonable amount of time, compete feature by feature with such a big product; instead, what I am aiming for is the ability to offer a much simpler alternative that lets you build a good looking website more quickly (also with the help of AI) while still allowing you a good level of customisation, including the ability to edit all the code so you have full control that way.

I hope that offering a simpler tool will resonate with those designers and website builders who find Webflow to be quite complex. Powerful, but complex.

In other news, I had another discussion today with my colleague. He's still evaluating joining the project but so far he seems interested.

Stay tuned for the next update!
Previous: Building DynaSite in public: Considering the help of a co-founder
Next: Building DynaSite in public: David vs Goliath
© Vito Botta