

Niche Site Builders - spiretop

Last July Paul Graham put this on his list of &#60;a href="http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html"&#62;ideas he'd like to fund&#60;/a&#62;:<p>"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.<p>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."<p>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)?
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coglethorpe
>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?

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

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

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vitriolic
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.

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superchink
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.

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cvinson
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!

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yannis
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 :)

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frankus
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).

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percept
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?

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rykov
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.

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redorb
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)

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wkdown
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.

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

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johng
Subscribing... interested in this as well.

