
Review our startup: Instantly create a blog theme that matches your website - bdclimber14
http://www.blogic.com
======
callmeed
Went through the demo. Here is my advice:

1\. The pitch of "instant blog theme to match your website" is a compelling
one, and could lead to a profitable business model IMO.

2\. For a version 1/MVP, I think it worked reasonably well.

3\. However, I don't think it's a compelling enough feature to build
YetAnotherBloggingPlatform and convince people to switch. I'm convinced Blogic
would be way more enticing if you simply created themes for WordPress, Tumblr,
and Posterous and charged $ for it. If you can scrape my site and build a
blogging platform, then you can easily create the CSS/HTML/PHP necessary for
these platforms.

Besides, do you really want to deal with 1000s of abandoned blogs, battling
comment spam, and trying to play feature catch-up with these guys? (
_"Posterous does X. Why don't you? WordPress has Y. Why don't you?"_ ) Trust
me, you don't

Of course, this means you're now competing with the likes of ThemeForest, et
al. But that's not a bad thing. They've proven that people will pay to make
their blog look good.

My $0.02

~~~
rstocker99
First off this is a great idea. I'd pay (see caveats below).

100% agree on YABP. It never even occurred to me that this would lead me into
your "non-standard" blogging platform. I can't imagine most people wanting to
do that. I know I wouldn't.

But I think combining this with WordPress _hosting_ would make for a killer
unique selling angle for non-tech savvy folks that need to setup a blog for
their business. Selling a one-time use blog template generator isn't super
compelling. Recurring revenue is SO much nicer.

If it was me I'd either:

1\. Go into the same business as <http://wpengine.com/> and use this as the
differentiator or

2\. Make this in to an engine you could sell to every company that hosts WP
and it's friends.

~~~
nasmorn
It might me much nicer but the market is a lot smaller. The market for WP
Themes from your main website includes every website with custom design that
wants a blog. I also wouldn't underestimate how many people would pay a lot of
money for this. Not 20$ but more like 200$. Not ramen startups that do
everything through sweat equity but normal companies that would have to pay
someone to do it. 200$ doesn't get you very far if you tell a designer to
create a blog template based on your website. As an added plus they can
already show you the end result so if you like it there is absolutely no risk
involved.

Also the two products are in no way mutually exclusive.

------
cleverjake
I, on the other hand, thought the site as quite snappy. My biggest confusion
was that I was trying to add multiple sections to be replaced on the first
step, rather than delete it later. I would really suggest trying out the
"remove the part you don't want" before adding what you do. In my eyes, I
always see what I want to remove before what I want to add/change.

~~~
bdclimber14
That's great feedback, we never thought about it like that, but it makes
perfect sense.

------
freejack
I'd think hard about who your customer is. At most companies, there's a
designer either on staff or on retainer that worries about these sorts of
things and I'm not sure they are likely to spring for your services.
Similarly, the vast majority of small businesses won't see a need for a blog,
or they will already have a templates version built into the platform they are
already using (i.e. shopify, etc.) I agree that theming blogs can be a hassle,
but I'm not sure the market you've chosen is big enough to make a go of it.
Some of the other commenters have some interesting ideas about how to address
the needs of a larger market, but even then, the intersection might be too
small. I'd think really hard about whether or not this is worth investing in -
not saying it is or isn't, but just that its worth spending some time getting
very comfortable with the answer to that question.

~~~
bdclimber14
This has been a challenge for us. Some types of businesses have no real need
for a blog, or run on a comprehensive platforms such as Shopify or a CMS.

An ideal customer would be a SaaS business with a small staff (5-20 employees)
that is big enough to be able to afford throwing a few hundred bucks at a
blog, but small enough that the developers/designers don't have the bandwidth
to work on a blog. Businesses this size probably have a full-time designer
that could design the blog, but there is a sweet spot where it's not worth it
to spend their time on anything but the revenue-producing product. Our best
example is <http://www.transferbigfiles.com>
(<http://blog.transferbigfiles.com>). They have a full-time
developer/designer, but he simply doesn't have the bandwidth to also maintain
a blog design. Is this market big enough? We think so, but there are several
other potentially larger markets for our theming technology that we could
easily expand into.

------
bdclimber14
Hey everyone, I'm one of the founders. We started Blogic to cure the headache
of recreating your website's theme on an entirely separate blogging platform
such as WordPress. It was a huge pain with my last startup, and inspired me
enough to solve it. Please email sean [at] blogic [dot] com with any
suggestions or feedback.

~~~
albahk
I'm in the same boat as many others here. I am a bit of a control freak with
my content so I prefer self-hosted Wordpress. If I your product can give me a
wordpress theme at the end of it that I can self-install I would pay $20 for
that.

~~~
jng
Replying to this, but directed to the original authors: don't make it $20,
it's too cheap for a product like this, make it $49 and plenty of people will
still pay for it. I'm assuming you will be offering a WP template as the
output (nobody's going to move to your blogging platform).

------
MichaelApproved
Bug: Using the iPad, it capitalizes the first letter of the word so
<http://skimthat.com> turns into Http://skimthat.com. Your system doesn't see
the lowercase <http://> it's expecting and adds the prefix again causing the
invalid url <http://Http://skimthat.com>

Solution: Create a string that contains a lowercase version of the url to do
the <http://> check or ignore case with regex.

------
americandesi333
Wow! This is great. I wish I knew about your just 3 days ago when our
developer spent a few hours creating our custom blog :) I am still thinking of
switching to this because of the automated Twitter, Facebook and Google+ add
ons. Very impressed!

One feedback is that when I was customizing the blog theme, I was not able to
see how the sidebar would look in the blog. As a result, I went through the
entire process first time around and then went back to revert the 'add
sidebar'.

------
damoncali
I don't want your blog platform. I want my Blogger blog (yes, Blogger) to
match my website, even if it's not perfect, without spending 3 hours pulling
my hair out. That, I would pay for.

By the way, I'm just getting a spinny right now, so I can't comment furhter.
Will try again after the HN effect is gone.

~~~
SoftwareMaven
I wish I could visibly up vote this. Please don't leave Blogger out of the
equation.

~~~
damoncali
It baffles me to see WordPress site after WordPress site go down due to a HN
hit. All that trouble when you can get everything you need from Blogger for
free. Yet everyone looks at me funny when I say I use or recommend Blogger.

------
hardik988
This is really awesome, and helps bootstrapping blogs for startups. What I
would personally pay for is: the same functionality, but in the end, give me
an option to export as a Wordpress/Tumblr/Posterous/Blogger theme. That would
be kick-ass.

------
orthecreedence
My first impression was "wow, slow site load." Maybe add a few more servers
before posting to HN ;)

EDIT2 - The site is responding a LOT faster now, it must have been a one-time
issue.

When trying to replace the content of my site (beeets.com) in Chrome 14 I get

www.blogic.com/assets/themer-inner.js:6 Uncaught TypeError: Object [object
Object] has no method 'stringify'

so I'm not able to review the product

\- EDIT (error from Firefox 7, more or less the same)-

Error: JSON.stringify is not a function Source File:
<https://www.blogic.com/assets/themer-inner.js> Line: 6

~~~
alanh
_(Wrong):_ Sounds to me like JSON2.js failed to load or timed out for you,
probably accounting for the slow load & eventual failure. Refreshing should do
the trick!

 _Update_ : Your site, Beeets.com, doesn’t seem to be working for me, either.
It loads fine but I can’t select a content area. Probably some sort of JS
conflict — though this is, encouragingly, the first time we have actually seen
this in the wild! We’ll take a look.

 _Update2_ : It looks to me like Mootools, which your site is including,
redefines window.JSON (which is native in modern browsers, and which we
include for old browsers) with an object that is incompatible with the
browser-native JSON method "stringify".
[https://developer.mozilla.org/en/JavaScript/Reference/Global...](https://developer.mozilla.org/en/JavaScript/Reference/Global_Objects/JSON/stringify).
But in my jsfiddle attempt to confirm this, Mootools is playing nice… maybe
some other script on the page is doing this.

~~~
orthecreedence
Multiple tries, two different browsers, no reported resource loading failures
from my dev tools (All scripts are loading).

~~~
bdclimber14
Really sorry for that failure, it's definitely on our end somewhere, but
appears to be unique to your site. That's the beauty of the problem we're
solving - unknown inputs. Can I email you when it's fixed?

------
alexobenauer
Absolutely fantastic. All that's needed is to be able to export to Wordpress
or Posterous. Other than that, this solves a _huge_ problem of mine!

Great work on taking on such a problem.

------
antihero
What would be awesome is something like this for e-mail.

------
bdclimber14
Thank you everyone for the quality feedback and bug finding :)

To address the most common feedback, we have decided to create a theme
generator for WordPress and are in the midst of development. Other platforms
will likely follow. We actually decided this a couple weeks ago, so it's
reassuring to hear this.

If you'd like to be notified when the WP generator is ready, shoot me an
email: sean [at] blogic [dot] com

------
MichaelApproved
I couldn't get this to work with any website I tried. It just sits on the
"Loading… This shouldn’t take long." screen.

Can someone suggest a url to try?

~~~
alanh
Hey, sorry, seems we spontaneously developed a case of yep-that's-gonna-time-
out. Should be good now.

------
WA
It's weird that I need to refresh after I added a sidebar. And I don't get to
choose the sidebar. So if I designate the content area, but want the sidebar
in another area of the web page, this is not possible.

------
beggi
Nice idea - I think you could use a bit of tweaking regarding elements you can
select, for example I don't think anyone wants blog posts in divs smaller than
100x100px

------
cpr
I would think that many websites these days start with a blogging platform for
a combination product presentation / blog. At least we did. ;-)

------
glimcat
Buggy.

It also pops up a nag dialog when you try to close it, which is a crucifixion
offense in my books.

~~~
alanh
Haha, totally understood, glimcat. We hate those too, but they are necessary
to prevent some sites from auto-redirecting the whole page elsewhere (e.g.
nytimes.com did/does this).

Clicking “start over” disables the confirmation.

------
MostAwesomeDude
The end result with my site looked pretty much like my current site, but with
little Like buttons all over. I am not enamored. I'm sure others will find it
useful, though.

~~~
alanh
> _The end result with my site looked pretty much like my current site_

Success!

> _but with little Like buttons all over._

There should have been a simple checkbox to remove the like buttons, if you
don’t prefer them.

~~~
MostAwesomeDude
There is a checkbox to remove the buttons. I'm just echoing my experience,
since they want to know how it worked for me and what I thought about it. I'm
a micromanaging kind of person that prefers to tweak all of my layout myself,
so I don't really enjoy these kinds of tools, but it's pretty cool
nonetheless.

------
dsolomon
Lose every pop-up box announcing "OMG YOU'RE LEAVING THE PAGE! ARE YOU SURE?!
DON'T YOUR WANT TO STAY ON PAGE?! LIKE WTF I'M LONELY! PLEASE STAY ON THE
PAGE! YOU MAY LOSE YOUR DATA! DON'T YOUR WANT TO STAY ON PAGE?! LIKE WTF I'M
LONELY! PLEASE STAY ON THE PAGE!"

I had to kill the browser session and selectively choose which tabs to
restore.

We get it - you found javascript.

The site concept is great, but presentation is annoying.

~~~
bdclimber14
We definitely agree this is annoying. What you experienced is not the goal or
intention. It actually solves a technical problem but has this undesirable
side effect. Some websites have JS to force break-out of an iframe, if the
site is loaded in one. Since the iframe is core to the selection process, we
added this to prevent the automatic break-out. Unfortunately, it applies to
everything including trying to close the browser. We'll figure out a better
solution eventually, but we don't want anyone to think that this was added to
increase conversions or anything in that nature.

