Gatsboy
Small Business Websites
Relaunch
Gatsboy stalled – it became difficult to scale because our ambition and technology needs did not match.
We could see competitors delivering sites on WordPress, but our goal wasn't to build websites, it was to build outcomes, that just happened to use websites.
For the last few years, we maintained existing customers, accepted new customers when they arrived, but made no push to scale up, because we knew it was an unsustainable challenge with the current setup.
The other realizatdion was the 'Pay Monthly' payment model. We adopted this model because it's how others in the space had setup.
It's a bad model.
Customers were paying for sites regardless of updates, which sounds good, but in reality builds frustration, lack of value and increases churn.
The mission of Gatsboy is, and has always been, to use technology to improve results for small business owners. We already know the pitfalls of DIY sites and the time constraints founders have to learn and build effective online strategies.
Finally, technology caught up with this ambition in a way that kept our costs affordable, but also scalable.
Just over 6 months go we started a full ground-up rebuild of Gatsboy. Changing our model to $500 / one-off websites built on Framer, connected to our own SaaS backend.
This gave our customers much better flexibility. Framer being a leading no-code website platform they can own, and Gatsboy providing all the modules built-in for one affordable monthly cost of $47.
I really feel like we are on the right direction with a solid roadmap and AI features that really bring everything a small business owner needs into one space.
https://gatsboy.com
As with any business, although the idea can sometimes seem obvious. Building the technology and marketing around that idea takes time and many iterations to get right.
We bootstrapped Gatsboy and focused mostly on delivery than anything else. We needed to load test our processes and ensure the end to end was efficient and easy to scale. Not so straightforward in a service based business.
We found a perfect balance of low-code infrastructure and Jamstack architecture to ensure that we had the best pay monthly websites in the world, built on a solid foundation and heavy optimised for content and SEO.
This was our mission from the beginning, giving small businesses a well-built, affordable website, delivered by their own digital team.
In 2023 we started to focus more on marketing, having most of our customers coming through referrals.
The work we put into the stack meant that Gatsboy could scale with UI designers and a small team of Jamstack developers, all with little training, very plug and play.
Each site is custom and no two are the same, although as we've developed more sites, we have of course built a strong component library, fully available to our team through a no-code interface.
Gatsboy builds on React & GatsbyJS (Which is were the name came from).
We expect to hit 5k/mo this year and continue to refine and grow our service offering.
Building the visibility of Gatsboy has been a challenge, because it was intentionally bootstrapped with no outside funding from day 1.
The initial focus was on SEO (it's an area I know well). Quite quickly we were able to rank for 'Pay Monthly Websites' and this started bringing in leads.
I was expecting more traffic from the SEO, but that didn't seem to be the case, so the plan then extended to broaden our keyword range, which is slowly starting to pay off.
Since the re-launch in August, much of the focus has been around making sure every customer got maximum ROI, as we knew customer retention and referrals were going to be really important.
We are now looking to paid ads to further our reach for new customers and considering which platforms to focus on next.
It's been a slow but positive journey so far, even with a couple of false starts and a downturn in the market.
We have now launched our v3 website along with our customer dashboard and new services.
Gatsboy has been bootstrapped from day 1 and a side business. During this time I've been looking at ways to offer small businesses owners a solid solution to their digital needs, most importantly saving them time, money but offering a good service.
It's not been easy and over the last couple of years we've had to overcome many challenges.
- Talent hire
- Scalable processes
- Tools & systems
- Brand position & messaging
Slowly we've found our voice and our audience, while perfecting how we deliver this service so it remains affordable, but actually delivers!
I'm very proud of what we have created at Gatsboy and I finally feel we are in a position to grow sustainably.
We kicked off our PPC campaign on Facebook with a content campaign coming shortly. So far this campaign is generating good interest in our service and we've welcomed our first new customers onboard.
Check out our website: https://gatsboy.com
I'd love to hear any feedback.
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Site flow is good! I think the abundance of various colors for the CTAs, headelines, etc. makes it challenging to scan. My suggestion would be to scale back the brand pallet so that the desired actions are a bit more clear.
Without much advertising, we have slowly picked up new customers purely based on referrals and our 5-star reviews. We have continued to work on building the various aspects of Gatsboy and there is still plenty to do before we launch our client dashboard, which will be the heart of our plans going forward.
It's always important to prove the concept before you go too deep in my opinion, and that's exactly what we've done, seeing the positive impact we have had on small businesses and the feedback we get drives us forward.
We have an exciting partnership opportunity in progress and we've been approached from two possible investors, which although we are not ready for that, it is promising that they can see the potential of what we are doing.
So this brings us to the re-brand. We've let Gatsboy take natural steps forward and we felt it was time for a brand upgrade that is bespoke and more inline with where we are at this time.
We'd love to hear any feedback.
https://dribbble.com/shots/12066071-Gatsboy-Brand-v2
Check it out:
We are proud to announce the launch of Gatsboy v2, now including mobile apps! As well as our award-winning managed websites.
Great effort from the Gatsboy team to get v2 ready for launch. We have updated our brand, website, systems, processes and user dashboard, all to make things better and more streamlined.
The introduction of managed mobile apps on subscription is a new avenue for our clients to further build a reputation for their business, bring the latest in mobile comms features, without the price tag!
It's a drop in the Ocean but a positive none the less. This week Gatsboy was Top of the rankings for Indie hackers revenue growth. Thanks to our team for the effort and hard-work. The prize really goes to our great customers! Thank you.
We might be gone next week, but check out Growth Ranker for Indie Hackers Start-Up Growth Stats. https://growthranker.com/
We have our first paying customer. Thank you to MPARES from Greece.
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Cool, sounds interesting. From customers viewpoint: Why should they pay a monthly recurring fee instead of annual (one-time) fee? I was just wondering because I think the annual plan is a great deal but the monthly plan does not make sense to me :) Or are there a lot of ongoing tasks you take care of (other than content edits)?
Another thing I was wondering about: You are developing the customer websites with a network of developers or all by yourself? If you pay other developers probably there won't be too much profit left for you...? Oh, and one important notice: Many of your case studie websites (e.g. innovation ladder) do not work! This doesn't make a good impression :) Hope I can help you with these remarks.-
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Hi Christoph, thanks for your message. Sorry for the delay, we've been a little busy :). The monthly and annual subscription are for the same fully managed service, just different ways of paying for it. As with most subscriptions, the annual plan offers better value. We expect most will opt for the annual at the current price point, but we do have some on monthly subscriptions.
We started with a very small dev team on this project building the sites including myself. However, I also run an agency, so have access to a talented pool of developers I can use on Gatsboy. Eventually, the subscription model would allow for expansion of the dev team if needed. The process we have means updates can be made very quickly to sites, therefore we don't need a lot of people.
Thanks for your feedback on the case studies, I will see these are corrected. We are shortly launching v2 of the website after a small rebrand.
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Congrats, well done! Do you get all 1.1k monthly revenue from 1 customer? Out of curiosity... what tech stack are you building the sites with? (pure HTML, vanilla JS, React.js, etc.). Btw: "At Technical mumbo jumbo" you have a typo (relex).
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Thanks Christoph. No, the 1.1k is from multiple customers. We did sell an annual plan which helps. The stack is GatsbyJS / React with SCSS and our custom Gatsby themes & plugins. We also have a custom workflow with automation to help speed up delivery. Thanks for the typo mention, I'll take a look.
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With a successful engagement campaign to raise awareness we launched a low budget sales campaign from the previous audience and converted 3 leads.
Time to drive some traffic. We've gone with a UK focused Facebook campaign using AdRoll tracking via GTM for retargeting. Initial engagement is good, hopefully, we'll land our first customer soon.
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What's your ad-spend look like? Why not use the FB Pixel?
Keep the updates coming!
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Hey Jordan, Ad Spend on AdRoll is currently around £15 per day for remarketing. Once we launch the FB campaign we will use FB Pixel for sure. Currently we just use remarketing and social engagement for traffic.
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Gotcha very cool. Did you just push traffic to the site, or did you try to get them in a funnel with a lead-magnet?
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Just push traffic as we have remarketing running at first. It's good to test the initial interest of a product first without the need to incentivise with lead magnets. Although this is something we will do in the future.
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