Making Websites a Piece of Cake

Small businesses that are starting to establish their web presence are often faced with only two options: either shell out a significant amount of money, which they may not have available initially, or opt for the more budget-friendly DIY route using tools like Framer, WIX, or Squarespace. While the latter may seem appealing at first glance, especially to those in the tech industry, it can be quite challenging to create a webpage that truly meets their needs.

What if there were a middle way? What if you could have a customized, high-quality webpage without resorting to DIY? Amy, the founder of Webcakes, believes she has found a model that offers small businesses the best of both worlds: a webpage that can be up and running in just two weeks at a monthly cost of only $149.

Baking the Business Model

The significant value proposition of Webcakes is the $0 setup cost for a webpage. With this unique model, customers no longer need to bear the burden of large upfront costs, removing a potential obstacle for most small businesses. Instead, they can pay for the webpage over time through slightly higher monthly costs compared to hosting alone.

For Webcakes, this model pays off because it is template-based. Amy’s cost up-front is close to $1.000 of her time to customise each template for a specific niche, but she can then quickly adapt one of these templates for each customer. Here's a rough breakdown based on the numbers Amy provided:

When building a custom site from scratch, it’s more typical for Amy to charge around $10.000. Let's use this estimate to calculate how long it would take for a template to pay off:

This doesn't seem too bad! Naturally, Webcakes aims to increase the number of customers per template, and small businesses are likely to keep their webpages longer than 15 months. While Webcakes doesn't lock in its customers - it offers a takeout function for customers to retrieve their text and images - switching would still entail significant expenses for the client since they would have to cover the design and development costs of a new webpage. Amy hopes that customers will remain with her service because it meets their needs, not because they feel obligated to do so, which is why the takeout service is offered "no questions asked."

The final point to mention is that Webcakes' monthly package includes unlimited text and image changes to the webpages. Clients can simply email Amy, and she'll update the webpages according to their requests. These costs are not factored into the above calculation and will further reduce the profit margins, depending on how frequently clients require updates. However, Amy’s clients usually don’t have big marketing departments that do A/B tests or require constant updates - the usual change is something like an employee being added to the teams page.

Plans Going Forward

Webcakes has just started with its first client after gathering feedback from the respective target communities. Amy's primary goal at the moment is to acquire more clients and develop the initial set of templates. Once that is accomplished, the process of launching a webpage for a customer should become straightforward and repeatable. This would enable outsourcing the customization process to a junior developer, potentially lowering costs and accelerating the break-even point. Besides that, Amy does not have any plans to further expand the headcount at Webcakes.

Checkout Webcakes