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Ask HN: What does the website builder market look like?

7 points by talksnocode ↗ HN
Trying to understand what the website builder looks like right now. Are people looking for something new ? This is an old market with several incumbents with their own special approach to the problem. Although I also feel like this is a bootstrappable market too. Wanted to understand what the community feels about building the next Squarespace / Wix lets say.

10 comments

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CM30
From what I can see, it's a tough market to be in. On the one hand, you've got large competitors in the SaaS space offering website builders for just about every type of site under the sun (the aforementioned Squarespace and Wix, but also Shopify, hosted WordPress and Ghost, various forum and social media hosting services, wiki farms and hosts etc), and locally you've got some really solid options for site builders too, especially given visual editing tools for things WordPress via Gutenberg and site builders).

It's definitely possible to compete given a certain site builder was shared on Hacker News about a week or so ago, and given how many others I've seen posted here, but it's going to be a tough market for sure. You're competing with services with huge marketing budgets and a lot of name recognition, often for an audience that isn't very good at researching solutions.

rozenmd
People are always looking for better, cheaper, easier to use $PRODUCT.

There are several fairly large bootstrappers in this space, go for it.

codingwagie
Only way to enter the market is to build a website builder thats purely generative ui. Skip any sort of old paradigm
dc_rog
I believe there will continue to be a market for people building websites. Storefronts, landing pages, personal pages, blogs. I don’t see these going away.

The feedback I keep seeing on hn and elsewhere is a mix of ease/ownership/flexibility but still abstraction of coding and hosting that most people might not want to do. It’s a super broad space and lots of people want different things in a solution.

Advice: go after a narrow niche since the space is crowded, competitive, and arguably commoditized.

Here’s an example I saw launch recently and thought “that’s an interesting niche” https://sprout.site/en/ (No affiliation)

fallinditch
I agree that's it's a good idea to go niche. I did some research about website builders for photographers and concluded that the best one for many photographers is a niche product aimed at their needs - https://www.format.com/website
meiraleal
> Here’s an example I saw launch recently and thought “that’s an interesting niche” https://sprout.site/en/ (No affiliation)

I was ready to look for problems but couldn't find much, impressive lean and fast landing page. If it is generated by the tool, great work.

MaiaIva
Niching down is definitely working really well. I had an experience developing a website for a fancy gallery in London, and they were already "sold" to use Artlogic (https://artlogic.net) because every other gallery uses it. The builder itself was quite horrible and confusing tbh.
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meiraleal
There is always space for better and cheaper solutions. Just need to surf the enshitfication
fallinditch
I think the market for website builders needs a shot in the arm. I would like to have a layout and design system for Web pages and sites that enabled me to build layouts by squishing, dragging, destroying, warping, randomizing, grungifying, etc with finger gestures on a touch screen... a more tactile and fun experience for building websites.