Show HN: Drag and drop page building for any site

https://builder.io

by steve8708 • 7 years ago

109 35 7 years ago

builder.io

steve870813• 7 years ago

Hey all, I made this myself and am looking for feedback from anyone with time to spare some Thanks in advance!

abhishektwr• 7 years ago

Looks great. Is this embeddable (editor) in other SaaS applications? This can open new opportunities.

steve870813• 7 years ago

Thanks!

And yes - this is actually totally doable. I've done it so far for platforms like Wordpress, Shopify, and Magento, as well as a couple custom internal admin tools of customers so far.

It isn't something I have standard pricing and docs on yet but I am totally open to doing that. Do you have a use case in mind?

cityzen• 7 years ago

You should be proud of yourself.

steve870813• 7 years ago

Thanks so much, that means a lot!

yodon• 7 years ago

I know we're only supposed to use up votes here and never use comments just for praise but if you built this by yourself you deserve far more credit than a simple upvote of karma. Way to go.

gitgud• 7 years ago

As in a single person made this? Even for a team of 10 that is simply amazing:

- Attractive and professional landing page

- Fully featured demo site, free to try

- [1] Over 10 SDK's built for all popular platforms (react, vue, angular... etc)?!!

I would be happy to have implemented just a fraction of what you've done... Like a sibling comment said; you should be very proud of yourself

Get ready to scale :)

[1] https://github.com/BuilderIO/builder/tree/master/packages

steve870813• 7 years ago

Thank you so much for the encouragement, it really does mean a lot

quickthrower23• 7 years ago

Yeah damn it’s good, I was assuming this was a company posting? Also the plans are good value. And backend/front end integration is well thought out.

My concern for you is there are a lot of GUI site builders out there. So I wonder how this stands out?

jklepatch• 7 years ago

Cool! You should post this on indie hacker as well. How long did it take you to complete this?

steve870813• 7 years ago

Oh interesting I haven't heard of indie hacker, I'll check it out

So far I've been working on this product for about a year and a half, though I did spend almost a full year beforehand just trying to figure out how to approach/solve this problem in the first place

quickthrower23• 7 years ago

One concern for you about pricing. If I stick a varnish cache or cloudflare in front of my site (or your api), I’m unlikely to need a big plan. Free plan could do for a very popular site.

Maybe consider pricing by amount of content and requests?

steve870813• 7 years ago

Yeah, your concern is totally valid. One thing that would hit people who cache the API is they would also be subject to fair use policies for bandwidth usage (namely serving the images used). Pretty much all CMSs have some form of this that basically requires large bandwidth users to pay for one of the higher price plans anyway so not to be losing money on customers

That said if someone wanted to get real fancy they could comb through the content and replace the image URLs with some of their own. You are right, this will have to be sorted out if this becomes a common way people use the product.

Thank you for the feedback

ablekh• 7 years ago

Great job! Congratulations and best wishes.

jmswalter• 7 years ago

Good stuff and congrats! How long did it take you to build this and how did you find your first customer?

steve870813• 7 years ago

Thanks!

I've been working on this for about a year and a half now, though I was able to get my first customer just a few months in.

The first place I went to was ShopStyle, since I had worked there previously and had experienced the problem that Builder aims to solve first hand (non-dev teams needing to build new pages all the time, and devs without time to constantly code up all this new content).

So since I had a good rapport with them and this was a pretty "hair on fire" problem with them, they were willing to be my first customer. I also charged them very little - at first at least ;)

Then I got new customers from word of mouth and from being able to demonstrate what ShopStyle had done (the pages their non-devs were making and how it was helping their business). When people liked the product they were happy to refer me to others who could use it. This was slow but it eventually got me a handful more initial customers, some I knew personally and some I didn't.

Anyway, happy to answer more about the process if you have other Qs or interested in more detail!

Edit: Typo

johnday• 7 years ago

What a fascinating tool. Thank you for sharing it.

ashishw• 7 years ago

Great tool - super useful.

ckpm• 7 years ago

what is different from site builders like wix, weebly etc.?

steve870813• 7 years ago

Thanks for the question! The big difference is that Builder works like a headless CMS - so you can easily hook it up to existing sites with an API.

This is most useful for existing sites or apps that have a lot of custom coded content, but you want non-devs to be able to make and manage landing pages and other content without relying on developers at all

rytill• 7 years ago

If I start messing with a page in Builder, does that make it difficult to go back and start coding like normal again on it?

For instance, if I want to do the page layout first in Builder, then jump in and make one of the components into a messenger with sockets in the code, then tweak a component’s position and add a few more, then jump back into the code - is that a possible workflow?

Ideally I would want to use Typescript and React.

pySilver• 7 years ago

Looks really promising! That would be great to have licensing where one can pay a fee (subscription) without having API vendor lock (so it can be integrated into internal software)

steve870813• 7 years ago

Thanks!

And what you ask for is actually possible in two ways -

One is to use webhooks to side load the data. Aka when people publish content in Builder, it will trigger a webhook sending the data to an API of yours to store and then serve how you like. You can see some docs on that here https://builder.io/c/docs/webhooks (and feel free to reach out for further explanation - I'll create a detailed guide on this at some point)

The second way, which is not available yet but will be soon, is an embedded Builder editor you can work into your internal software. This is not publicly available yet but is used by one customer and will be available more broadly soon. If you're interested in trying that when available shoot me an email at steve@builder.io

Show HN: Drag and drop page building for any site

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