Things someone should build
Underappreciated niches, missed opportunities, and things I think would benefit the world.
- Better static content management
- I’ve noticed a recurring set of problems amongst startup founders that negatively impacts one of the most important things about a startup’s public image - their website.
- Throwing Out Everything And Starting Again many times because the way their static website is implemented requires valuable engineering resources to modify - often to move to another platform.
- Not updating their website to reflect the state of their business because the way their static website is implemented requires valuable engineering resources to modify.
- Having their website be ugly for a worryingly long time.
- I think most existing tools have missed the problem.
- Templates and smart defaults are king. Founders will ignore almost any problem if the speed to having a good looking website is quick.
- Approximately 100% of landing page builders can only be used to build ugly websites, so never get any customers.
- For a small number of startups, landing page is a high priority for them, and those people are already adequately served by Framer, Webflow and freelancers to build super custom experiences.
- For a much larger number of startups, they kind of care and their website is a thorn in their side. Problem awareness moderate, solution awareness moderate. These people are somewhat served by templates, but more often than not are not artists and use a fugly template. There’s an easy sell if you can show these people a cheap way to make their site suck less.
- Underappreciated challenges
- Assets & animation don’t scale particularly well and are one of the most time consuming parts of building a cool landing page. For this reason, demos are a scam.
- The MVP needs to look gorgeous. The fastest way to build another useless site builder is have everything it builds look ugly.
- Current players
- For B2B tech startups Webflow is the incumbent. I think the #1 reason for this is that their template library is the best.
- Framer is the most sophisticated tool for highly motivated aesthetics-oriented companies, but adoption is lower than it seems like it should be.
- Unbounce also exists and focuses mainly on the enterprise market.
- What a solution should look like
- SPEEDY and BEAUTIFUL websites.
- Get CMS functionality for free - extend to a marketing function without requiring git access.
- I’ve noticed a recurring set of problems amongst startup founders that negatively impacts one of the most important things about a startup’s public image - their website.
- Documents as internal tools
- Documents are the lifeblood of enterprise - forms, templates, policies.
- HTML is just a document.
- ReTool & Co. are really hard to use because they don’t rely on familiar interaction modes.
- Someone should build a tool where you either drag and drop elements into a stateful document (like Notion), or uses a spreadsheet grid with formula-like constructs to add functionality.
- Kind of like a souped-up form builder had a baby with Zapier.
- Automatic mistake/typo detection for websites
- It seems like low hanging fruit - a cursory review of even unicorn companies turns up multiple formatting errors within a few minutes.
- I messaged the founders of some series B companies that will go unnamed out of respect pointing out some errors and they all got fixed very quickly.
- Existing optimisation tools seem like they haven’t moved on since 2010