1. The pitch of "instant blog theme to match your website" is a compelling one, and could lead to a profitable business model IMO.
2. For a version 1/MVP, I think it worked reasonably well.
3. However, I don't think it's a compelling enough feature to build YetAnotherBloggingPlatform and convince people to switch. I'm convinced Blogic would be way more enticing if you simply created themes for WordPress, Tumblr, and Posterous and charged $ for it. If you can scrape my site and build a blogging platform, then you can easily create the CSS/HTML/PHP necessary for these platforms.
Besides, do you really want to deal with 1000s of abandoned blogs, battling comment spam, and trying to play feature catch-up with these guys? ("Posterous does X. Why don't you? WordPress has Y. Why don't you?") Trust me, you don't
Of course, this means you're now competing with the likes of ThemeForest, et al. But that's not a bad thing. They've proven that people will pay to make their blog look good.
First off this is a great idea. I'd pay (see caveats below).
100% agree on YABP. It never even occurred to me that this would lead me into your "non-standard" blogging platform. I can't imagine most people wanting to do that. I know I wouldn't.
But I think combining this with WordPress hosting would make for a killer unique selling angle for non-tech savvy folks that need to setup a blog for their business. Selling a one-time use blog template generator isn't super compelling. Recurring revenue is SO much nicer.
If it was me I'd either:
1. Go into the same business as http://wpengine.com/ and use this as the differentiator or
2. Make this in to an engine you could sell to every company that hosts WP and it's friends.
It might me much nicer but the market is a lot smaller. The market for WP Themes from your main website includes every website with custom design that wants a blog. I also wouldn't underestimate how many people would pay a lot of money for this. Not 20$ but more like 200$. Not ramen startups that do everything through sweat equity but normal companies that would have to pay someone to do it. 200$ doesn't get you very far if you tell a designer to create a blog template based on your website. As an added plus they can already show you the end result so if you like it there is absolutely no risk involved.
Also the two products are in no way mutually exclusive.
Glad to hear this because we are working on a WordPress theme generator, with others to follow. It was the biggest piece of feedback we received from TechCrunch Disruptor.
I think its a very compelling idea and having gone all the way through was very impressed with your execution.
As for point 3..
- Yes you should look at charging for themes. I was half expecting you to offer to charge me to download a theme and even (literally) had my CC ready to go. So, that's what I would prefer actually.. a starting point for my theme, rather than blog hosting (in my case).
However I think it is a very compelling feature not so much for people who already have a blog and need to switch but more for people who already have a website and need a blog (which is me right now).
I completely agree. Working in web dev / internet marketing this is deff something that people would pay money for. I would even think that an agency level pricing model would be something to consider if you went that route.
Callmeed and anyone else interested in a Wordpress theme generation option: Email wordpress@alanhogan.com and I’ll personally ping you when we launch that.
I, on the other hand, thought the site as quite snappy. My biggest confusion was that I was trying to add multiple sections to be replaced on the first step, rather than delete it later. I would really suggest trying out the "remove the part you don't want" before adding what you do. In my eyes, I always see what I want to remove before what I want to add/change.
I'd think hard about who your customer is. At most companies, there's a designer either on staff or on retainer that worries about these sorts of things and I'm not sure they are likely to spring for your services. Similarly, the vast majority of small businesses won't see a need for a blog, or they will already have a templates version built into the platform they are already using (i.e. shopify, etc.) I agree that theming blogs can be a hassle, but I'm not sure the market you've chosen is big enough to make a go of it. Some of the other commenters have some interesting ideas about how to address the needs of a larger market, but even then, the intersection might be too small. I'd think really hard about whether or not this is worth investing in - not saying it is or isn't, but just that its worth spending some time getting very comfortable with the answer to that question.
This has been a challenge for us. Some types of businesses have no real need for a blog, or run on a comprehensive platforms such as Shopify or a CMS.
An ideal customer would be a SaaS business with a small staff (5-20 employees) that is big enough to be able to afford throwing a few hundred bucks at a blog, but small enough that the developers/designers don't have the bandwidth to work on a blog. Businesses this size probably have a full-time designer that could design the blog, but there is a sweet spot where it's not worth it to spend their time on anything but the revenue-producing product. Our best example is http://www.transferbigfiles.com (http://blog.transferbigfiles.com). They have a full-time developer/designer, but he simply doesn't have the bandwidth to also maintain a blog design. Is this market big enough? We think so, but there are several other potentially larger markets for our theming technology that we could easily expand into.
Hey everyone, I'm one of the founders. We started Blogic to cure the headache of recreating your website's theme on an entirely separate blogging platform such as WordPress. It was a huge pain with my last startup, and inspired me enough to solve it. Please email sean [at] blogic [dot] com with any suggestions or feedback.
Hey Sean, great startup! You know how I know a great startup when I see one? When I immediately think "Holy crap, I should have started this!" :P
You guys should really add custom WP theme support, but other than that, great going. Good luck!
I'm in the same boat as many others here. I am a bit of a control freak with my content so I prefer self-hosted Wordpress. If I your product can give me a wordpress theme at the end of it that I can self-install I would pay $20 for that.
Replying to this, but directed to the original authors: don't make it $20, it's too cheap for a product like this, make it $49 and plenty of people will still pay for it. I'm assuming you will be offering a WP template as the output (nobody's going to move to your blogging platform).
We started Blogic to cure the headache of recreating your website's theme on an entirely separate blogging platform such as WordPress
..then I would urge you to question why you've gone and built your own proprietary blog system and not just use WordPress - where this would be very very compelling.
Bug: Using the iPad, it capitalizes the first letter of the word so http://skimthat.com turns into Http://skimthat.com. Your system doesn't see the lowercase http:// it's expecting and adds the prefix again causing the invalid url http://Http://skimthat.com
Solution: Create a string that contains a lowercase version of the url to do the http:// check or ignore case with regex.
Wow! This is great. I wish I knew about your just 3 days ago when our developer spent a few hours creating our custom blog :) I am still thinking of switching to this because of the automated Twitter, Facebook and Google+ add ons. Very impressed!
One feedback is that when I was customizing the blog theme, I was not able to see how the sidebar would look in the blog. As a result, I went through the entire process first time around and then went back to revert the 'add sidebar'.
I don't want your blog platform. I want my Blogger blog (yes, Blogger) to match my website, even if it's not perfect, without spending 3 hours pulling my hair out. That, I would pay for.
By the way, I'm just getting a spinny right now, so I can't comment furhter. Will try again after the HN effect is gone.
It baffles me to see WordPress site after WordPress site go down due to a HN hit. All that trouble when you can get everything you need from Blogger for free. Yet everyone looks at me funny when I say I use or recommend Blogger.
This is really awesome, and helps bootstrapping blogs for startups. What I would personally pay for is: the same functionality, but in the end, give me an option to export as a Wordpress/Tumblr/Posterous/Blogger theme. That would be kick-ass.
(Wrong): Sounds to me like JSON2.js failed to load or timed out for you, probably accounting for the slow load & eventual failure. Refreshing should do the trick!
Update: Your site, Beeets.com, doesn’t seem to be working for me, either. It loads fine but I can’t select a content area. Probably some sort of JS conflict — though this is, encouragingly, the first time we have actually seen this in the wild! We’ll take a look.
Update2: It looks to me like Mootools, which your site is including, redefines window.JSON (which is native in modern browsers, and which we include for old browsers) with an object that is incompatible with the browser-native JSON method "stringify". https://developer.mozilla.org/en/JavaScript/Reference/Global.... But in my jsfiddle attempt to confirm this, Mootools is playing nice… maybe some other script on the page is doing this.
Glad I could help you guys improve ;). You can reach me at andrew [at] beeets.com if you want to stay in touch, I'd love to try it out and possibly work with you guys on a fix (maybe something is terribly wrong with my site)
Really sorry for that failure, it's definitely on our end somewhere, but appears to be unique to your site. That's the beauty of the problem we're solving - unknown inputs. Can I email you when it's fixed?
Thank you everyone for the quality feedback and bug finding :)
To address the most common feedback, we have decided to create a theme generator for WordPress and are in the midst of development. Other platforms will likely follow. We actually decided this a couple weeks ago, so it's reassuring to hear this.
If you'd like to be notified when the WP generator is ready, shoot me an email: sean [at] blogic [dot] com
It's weird that I need to refresh after I added a sidebar. And I don't get to choose the sidebar. So if I designate the content area, but want the sidebar in another area of the web page, this is not possible.
Nice idea - I think you could use a bit of tweaking regarding elements you can select, for example I don't think anyone wants blog posts in divs smaller than 100x100px
Haha, totally understood, glimcat. We hate those too, but they are necessary to prevent some sites from auto-redirecting the whole page elsewhere (e.g. nytimes.com did/does this).
The end result with my site looked pretty much like my current site, but with little Like buttons all over. I am not enamored. I'm sure others will find it useful, though.
There is a checkbox to remove the buttons. I'm just echoing my experience, since they want to know how it worked for me and what I thought about it. I'm a micromanaging kind of person that prefers to tweak all of my layout myself, so I don't really enjoy these kinds of tools, but it's pretty cool nonetheless.
Lose every pop-up box announcing "OMG YOU'RE LEAVING THE PAGE! ARE YOU SURE?! DON'T YOUR WANT TO STAY ON PAGE?! LIKE WTF I'M LONELY! PLEASE STAY ON THE PAGE! YOU MAY LOSE YOUR DATA! DON'T YOUR WANT TO STAY ON PAGE?! LIKE WTF I'M LONELY! PLEASE STAY ON THE PAGE!"
I had to kill the browser session and selectively choose which tabs to restore.
We get it - you found javascript.
The site concept is great, but presentation is annoying.
We definitely agree this is annoying. What you experienced is not the goal or intention. It actually solves a technical problem but has this undesirable side effect. Some websites have JS to force break-out of an iframe, if the site is loaded in one. Since the iframe is core to the selection process, we added this to prevent the automatic break-out. Unfortunately, it applies to everything including trying to close the browser. We'll figure out a better solution eventually, but we don't want anyone to think that this was added to increase conversions or anything in that nature.
1. The pitch of "instant blog theme to match your website" is a compelling one, and could lead to a profitable business model IMO.
2. For a version 1/MVP, I think it worked reasonably well.
3. However, I don't think it's a compelling enough feature to build YetAnotherBloggingPlatform and convince people to switch. I'm convinced Blogic would be way more enticing if you simply created themes for WordPress, Tumblr, and Posterous and charged $ for it. If you can scrape my site and build a blogging platform, then you can easily create the CSS/HTML/PHP necessary for these platforms.
Besides, do you really want to deal with 1000s of abandoned blogs, battling comment spam, and trying to play feature catch-up with these guys? ("Posterous does X. Why don't you? WordPress has Y. Why don't you?") Trust me, you don't
Of course, this means you're now competing with the likes of ThemeForest, et al. But that's not a bad thing. They've proven that people will pay to make their blog look good.
My $0.02