| HN Mirror

> Your effort here is admirable, but I think you have chosen a very hard market to make an impact in.

Yup, I like to think I was always quite realistic about the chances of succeeding in this market (mind you, my definition of success is reaching a few hundred customers, not millions, haha). Wordpress and Squarespace are incredibly entrenched and their marketing makes it seem like there are no alternatives, but there are. Discoverability is the main issue.

> Who is your target customer? A small business owner without a website? In which case listing features like "Cloudfare CDN" and "DDoS protection" won't resonate with them at all.

This is a very good point and I have struggled with this. If you were a dev who wanted to re-sell and make websites for others with my system, you could. If you were a business and wanted me to build your site, well, I offer that as well. If you wanted to do it yourself, business or not, then you could, too. The problem is, I don't know which of these routes could work. So I don't want to commit to either of these branches. At the same time, offering them all waters down the proposition.

> * 10,000 for submissions a month is pretty meaningless: if 10,000 people a month are interested in my business I am motivated to spend a lot more than £7.99 to capture and process them. Either make the limits really small to feel like a limit, or just say unlimited.

Good point, I think I might make them unlimited.

> * support responses in 5 days ... this would be a red flag regardless of price. As a small startup the one thing you can offer is exceptional support (since you don't have many customers to offer it too!). If it takes off lower the expectations, but I'd suggest 1 day even for the lowest plan should be doable (and if not raise the price...)

Another very good point. I think I wanted to play it safe here. Is it better to commit to a turnaround time at all? Or is it easier to just say 'exceptional support', which I am indeed aiming to provide (and I think there aren't many situations where it would take me 5 days to respond. It's much more likely to be same-day), or is that too vague?

> A business owner doesn't really want a website builder at all, they want a website: lead more with your 'custom websites' page. If £199 is too much of a hurdle for them then realistically they aren't going to be a great customer anyway. Maybe offer a couple of business a free website to have some real world referable examples.

I have done that actually. Still no responses. I have a feeling that email marketing is not the way to go these days.

> If you are targeting website designers (which are probably an easier to identify market) then focus more on the builder itself, maybe stressing the mobile friendly side (though I don't really see how that helps me if I am a designer ... I won't try and work from my phone).

The mobile angle came from the fact that a fair number of business owners (n=10) have told me that, if they were to update their website at all, they would be doing it after work hours, which is when they are on the sofa with their phone or tablet. They don't want to sit at the computer / desk after already doing that all day in the office. So, making the whole thing work on mobile seemed like a useful differentiator over Wordpress or Squarespace, as they certainly don't work on phones (tablets are better).

Thanks for all this advice, it really helps to get outside perspectives on this stuff. I can see that positioning is my biggest challenge for now.