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Rate My Startup: SiteFont - A website webapp for small business

2 points by bengtan 16y ago

SiteFont is a hosted website service targeted towards small and/or service-oriented businesses. It's yet another variant of the existing business model of website builders. The main differentiation aim is speed of setup and ease of use. The target market are moderately-internet-literate people (which means nothing too bleeding edge). Keep in mind it's very much a beta. I should get some more themes done for it if the feedback from the beta is positive. One question that's been bothering me is ... how to price this? Would small business owners/operators find it compelling enough to pay for it? I guess only time will tell. (It's a bit tangential posing this question here since HN isn't the target demographic, but any insights or opinions would be appreciated.) The other question is ... how to promote this and tell people about it? That's another big topic (and probably my biggest weakness - marketing and promotion). Anyway, enough talk from me. If you are interested, please have a look, give the demo a spin, and give me your thoughts, comments, criticisms, flames etc. The site url is ... http://www.sitefont.com Thank you. (Note: This hasn't nothing to do with typography, despite the domain name)

vyrotek 16y ago
For some reason I feel like you're competing with WordPress. There are many small businesses who run off of cheap $5 hosting and a free opensource CMS which are backed and supported by large communities and lots of themes. How does this compare?
- bengtan 16y ago
  > For some reason I feel like you're competing with WordPress. If you consider that both provide hosted websites, then yes. But WordPress (and possibly others) themes generally look too bloggy. Case in point: I was contemplating porting some WordPress themes across, but I had trouble finding ones that I thought would be suitable for my target market. I would look at a WordPress theme and ask myself 'Would I run my small business website using this theme?', think about it, and answer 'Probably not'. > There are many small businesses who run off of cheap $5 hosting and a free opensource CMS Presumably, there are just as many small businesses who don't know how to run off cheap $5 hosting, or what an open source CMS is. For them, the entry barrier to setup a SiteFont site is much lower (or at least, so the conjecture goes).
skowmunk 16y ago
Came to know quite a while ago that yellow pages is offering a microsite building and maintaining service for small businesses. You may want to check it out to see if you are competing against them and if so, then you may have to come up with a USP to be competitive against them. Good luck.

2 points by bengtan 16y ago

vyrotek 16y ago

For some reason I feel like you're competing with WordPress. There are many small businesses who run off of cheap $5 hosting and a free opensource CMS which are backed and supported by large communities and lots of themes. How does this compare?

bengtan 16y ago
> For some reason I feel like you're competing with WordPress. If you consider that both provide hosted websites, then yes. But WordPress (and possibly others) themes generally look too bloggy. Case in point: I was contemplating porting some WordPress themes across, but I had trouble finding ones that I thought would be suitable for my target market. I would look at a WordPress theme and ask myself 'Would I run my small business website using this theme?', think about it, and answer 'Probably not'. > There are many small businesses who run off of cheap $5 hosting and a free opensource CMS Presumably, there are just as many small businesses who don't know how to run off cheap $5 hosting, or what an open source CMS is. For them, the entry barrier to setup a SiteFont site is much lower (or at least, so the conjecture goes).

skowmunk 16y ago

Came to know quite a while ago that yellow pages is offering a microsite building and maintaining service for small businesses. You may want to check it out to see if you are competing against them and if so, then you may have to come up with a USP to be competitive against them. Good luck.