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I don't want this to be intended as harsh criticism of your idea, but let me share my experience with website builders:

- The market is extremely tough. Maybe you noticed how much advertisment squarespace and Wix do. The reason being that these pages typically have small businesses as customers. The issue with these type of businesses is that they go away quickly. Most don't survive 6 months. So you need new customers all the time to keep up with the high churn.

- You do not have price dominance. The price is very competitive and companies with huge backing (like Squarespace / Wix) will dominate you.

- The intended target audience is actually not that keen on doing everything themselves. They don't know about online marketing, SEO, or other "special skills". Actually, they just need someone they can call when they have an issue.

- Developers and agencies prefer open systems like Wordpress, Gatsby, or others. They also value a vivid ecosystem of plugins and themes. They typically don't commit to proprietary software, because you never know how long it will be around.

In any case, I wish you the best of luck with the product. It looks nice! I hope you can use my experiences to advance your business.




Counterpoint: a similar service called Carrd.co is doing encouragingly well for its sole developer.

https://twitter.com/ajlkn/status/971417263969579008

This market is huge. If you can carve out a niche somehow you can do fine and not everybody needs to become the next SquareSpace.


It's worth considering that Carrd didn't start from 0. He had a pretty big following already from his work that has overlap with the type of user that Carrd wants. Having momentum from the start can be huge for this kind of service.


> Maybe you noticed how much advertisment squarespace...do

I would intuitively estimate that about 15% of educational youtube videos are sponsored by Squarespace.


Actually I would estimate 15% of all youtube videos are sponsored by Squarespace.


And the other 85% of YouTube videos are sponsored by Grammarly. :)


Podcasts too


I suspect the percentage of podcasts sponsored by squarespace is probably even higher than that


Still it's behind Audible ;).


I think google has just profiled you (and me, and everyone else on HN)...

We go on web-dev related and business start up websites, and google is watching us.


Sadly no. The ads I get are largely for things I don't want. Occasionally they are good or interesting, but usually no.

I wish more ad providers had a way to say "please show me more ads like this." Better yet, I wish there was one that had a box where I could just type random complaints about my life and over time it would show me ads for products that might be relevant.


Google says they explicitly don’t use web-browsing data for ad targeting. They don’t say that they don’t use web-browsing data to improve your experience with their various recommendation/prediction/autocomplete APIs. So there’s no guarantee that bad ad targeting implies YouTube doesn’t have a better profile on you.


I’m order to square these requirements, they would just have to use your browsing data to target you with the version of the instructional video which always plays relevant ads to you


From what I understand (someone correct me if I'm wrong), the selection of ads that play on an individual YouTube video aren't actually affected at all by which video you're watching—only YouTube's understanding of you built up over all the videos you've watched so far.


The sponsorships are part of the video. They are targeted only by video.


These are not Google ads, but the creator sponsorships


Which is analogous to squarespace targeting.


Well, as none of you bought into google glasses they still have to do it the old way.


Maybe, but I've also heard ads for Squarespace on terrestrial radio.


In Australia, Squarespace is running ads maybe 5 times a night with Keanu Reeves. And that's on one channel I've noticed. Must be a huge budget.


Cooking channels, too.


And just about every photography channel.


The market is also, like, the entire world though...


Good critic, well done.


The market is also, like, the entire world...




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