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
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.
Also the two products are in no way mutually exclusive.
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).
And blogger!
..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.
EDIT2 - The site is responding a LOT faster now, it must have been a one-time issue.
When trying to replace the content of my site (beeets.com) in Chrome 14 I get
www.blogic.com/assets/themer-inner.js:6 Uncaught TypeError: Object [object Object] has no method 'stringify'
so I'm not able to review the product
- EDIT (error from Firefox 7, more or less the same)-
Error: JSON.stringify is not a function Source File: https://www.blogic.com/assets/themer-inner.js Line: 6
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.
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.
Can someone suggest a url to try?
Success!
> but with little Like buttons all over.
There should have been a simple checkbox to remove the like buttons, if you don’t prefer them.
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.
It also pops up a nag dialog when you try to close it, which is a crucifixion offense in my books.
Clicking “start over” disables the confirmation.
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.
Solution: Create a string that contains a lowercase version of the url to do the http:// check or ignore case with regex.
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'.
Great work on taking on such a problem.
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
