We might be Internet-savvy 😉, but many individual entrepreneurs and small service-providing companies still lack even a basic website. And there lies an opportunity! First, offer them a simple tool to create their own websites. Then, delve deeper into their other business aspects—and capitalize on their complete digitization. The development strategy for such a product can be inspired by this startup.
Project Essence
Durable is a platform where a company can create its website in 30 seconds using AI.
The target audience of the startup is individual entrepreneurs and small service-providing companies.
To create a website, you just need to specify your business category, its name and description, choose a style, and click one button. What AI creates can be edited in a simple visual editor.
However, as a result, the company gets more than just a website—it becomes a comprehensive tool for conducting their business. Beyond the visible iceberg, the website also includes a powerful personal dashboard for the owner and company employees.
A key component of the personal dashboard is a CRM system tailored specifically for small businesses—with a very simple interface yet possessing all the necessary tools for customer tracking and communications.
Moreover, this is not just any CRM, but an AI-CRM, whose toolkit actively uses AI technologies. For example, the CRM can be set to automatically and instantly send AI-written responses to all inquiries received on the site. By integrating Durable with your email, AI can assist in composing emails to clients, utilizing the history of previous correspondence.
From the CRM, it’s quick and easy to issue invoices to clients, and Durable’s integration with payment systems allows for the tracking of payments. Thus, the personal dashboard enables you to view the history of all invoices and their payments.
A modern company website is hard to imagine without a blog containing useful information about the company’s field of work and its news. Indexed search engine articles in the blog attract new users to the company’s site.
However, for a hypothetical plumber who decides to create a site on the Durable platform, writing articles might seem a challenging task, distracting from their main work. Therefore, the platform includes an AI assistant that can write a blog article on any given topic. The AI-written article can be edited and published on the site with one click.
Recently, another tool appeared in the personal dashboard. It’s an AI assistant that can answer various questions about your business (“how many visitors were on my site yesterday”), business in general (“write a marketing plan for the next 4 weeks for me”), or perform tasks (“write a funny tweet for me”).
In beta mode, the platform has now started an AI designer, which can create a logo for your business, business cards, and other elements of the company’s corporate style.
You can create a free website with three pages and three monthly blog posts on the platform. For more pages, posts, and other functionalities, a paid subscription is required.
The Durable platform was launched last fall. The startup’s founder claims that 6 million websites have been created on the platform since then. However, it should be noted that sites can be created “without SMS and registration”, so this does not mean 6 million clients are actively using the sites created in this way.
Nonetheless, such a large number indicates the platform’s fundamental demand. Therefore, Durable has now raised 18 million Canadian dollars (approximately 14 million US dollars) in investments, increasing the total investment in the project to 20.25 million US dollars.
What’s Interesting
As the founder of Durable asserts, there are companies that have been in the market for a long time but are hardly or not at all present online—repair services, plumbers, fitness trainers, landscape designers, freelancers, and other specialists.
As it turned out, there are indeed very many of them. Such businesses, with 1 to 6 employees, have made up the majority of the platform’s clients to date.
It’s also important that such businesses provide services. Those engaged in selling goods can and are creating their online stores on platforms like Shopify.
The trend of website-builder platforms for individual entrepreneurs and small companies was caught not only by Durable.
Last fall, I wrote about the startup Topline Pro, which made a similar platform for creating websites with AI. They mainly focused on home service companies—repairs, landscape design, and similar services. This startup raised 17.5 million dollars in investments, 12 million of which were raised this summer after my review.
The startup B12, which I wrote about in 2021, didn’t focus on home services but aimed for a broader audience, including accountants, financial advisors, consultants, realtors, lawyers, and coaches. This startup raised 28.1 million dollars in investments.
Overall, the service market is currently under-digitized. For example, there are many marketplaces for selling physical goods, some of which are very large. However, in the services market, marketplaces have not yet covered all service providers.
Therefore, the startup Scnd, which I wrote about in October, decided to create a platform for not just individual websites but entire marketplaces for services. It raised 4 million euros in the first investment round.
I came across another interesting phrase in one of the articles about today’s Durable—about how next year, its founder hopes to move to the “third stage” of product development, which he describes as “full automation.”
Durable’s goal is to make “owning your business easier than working for someone else” 😉 To achieve this, the startup wants to create a complete set of AI tools that allow creating, developing, and managing your business.
In other words, Durable’s strategic plan consists of three stages:
The first stage is a website builder, attracting an audience wanting to solve the simplest and most obvious business problem. The second stage is the creation of AI tools that automate individual business processes tied to having a website: CRM for processing requests received through the site, writing articles for the blog, etc. The third stage is a “complete box” of AI tools that automate business as a whole, including marketing, sales organization, financial accounting, taxes, and everything else. This breakdown of the product development strategy into three stages immediately reminded me of the “Tesla master plan,” published by Elon Musk in 2016:
Build a sports car. Use the money from its sales to build an affordable car. Use the money from its sales to build an even more affordable car. Similarly, the startup Siro, which I wrote about in October, structured its strategy. It’s developing an application for coaching salespeople, with the following three stages in its master plan:
The first stage is to record salespeople’s conversations, analyze them, identify weak spots, and send them to the sales department manager, so they can give feedback to the salesperson. The second stage is to send weak points of conversations to the salesperson along with examples of strong salespeople’s responses. So they can learn from the best examples related to the mistakes they make. In the third stage, Siro’s AI machine should learn to formulate specific tips for improving weak spots, using the best examples of strong salespeople. This eliminates the need for salespeople to think about how exactly they can apply the best examples sent to them to correct mistakes in their particular conversation 😉
Where to Run
As a general conclusion, I want to re-emphasize the usefulness of a three-stage strategy for developing your product.
Having such a plan allows you not to stretch out the time for developing a full-fledged ideal product that we would ultimately like to create. Instead, we can gradually move towards this goal—creating workable products at each stage that can be promoted, implemented, and sold:
Not only earning money with which we can finance further development. But also getting invaluable feedback, which will help us better understand what and how we should implement in the next stage. If you don’t have such a three-stage plan, you are either doing something too simple or driving yourself into a “black hole” of endless development, consuming time and money.
So, the first direction of movement is to take another look at the strategy for developing your product 😉
The second direction is to create platforms for small companies providing services.
As I mentioned earlier, this market is currently under-digitized, and there are a lot of individual entrepreneurs and small companies engaged in it. And, as we see, they are already ripe to start digitizing—but for that, they need very simple yet sufficiently powerful tools.
Through which we can get into the rest of their business, which Durable and the other examples mentioned today intend to do. So, this startup and its analogs present a promising example for inspiration and copying.