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Launch HN: Weweb.io (YC W21) – Create websites visually using JAMstack tools

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Launch HN: Weweb.io (YC W21) – Create websites visually using JAMstack tools

#1
We're Raphael, Florian and Marc, co-founders of weweb.io (https://www.weweb.io/). We are building a Webflow/WordPress style product, but where users can drag & drop their own React/Vue components and use data fetched from any API.

We started working together on a side project in 2016, it was a mobile app in rails that lets people choose music in their favourite bars. The app didn't bring much value to bar owners, but it was fun to build and we made good friends among our first customers. Aside from our jobs we loved spending time building and iterating on different web products, we even built a simple angular web-app that would let anyone create a website entirely from a mobile phone.

Fast-forward to 2018, we stumbled upon the Jamstack ecosystem and loved it. But one thing surprised us so much that we decided to quit our jobs to solve it: while many developers were switching their websites to the Jamstack, businesses were (almost) always pushing to go back to WordPress or no-code systems because Jamstack sites didn't come with a no-code interface to update the front-end.

The thing is, even with headless CMSes, most changes on a website still need to be addressed by engineers, who usually don't have the time to do it. This situation frustrates marketers, who then argue against their developers' technical choices.

That's why we built weweb.io, to allow developers to use their favorite Jamstack tools while providing a nice GUI so marketers can edit their websites in autonomy.

The main uses-cases where people find weweb.io useful are 1) when they want to ship websites fast, with a no-code tool that's not a black-box for developers, 2) when they want to create websites at scale (hundreds of landing pages) with data coming from an external back-end (API, database, Headless CMSes, Airtable, etc.) or 3) when they have a custom React/Vue front-end and want to let marketers iterate faster on it.

We currently have integrations to fetch data from Airtable, Google Sheets, Ghost CMS, Strapi and any REST API. We are planning to release more integrations in the following months.

We have a free plan where users can build a site and redirect on their own domain name for free! We start charging a recurring fee when these sites are becoming more mature (more than 500 visits / month)

To deploy a site, users hit a “publish” button and we pre-render the site, optimize the images and deploy the files on a CDN (Cloudfront). We are planning on opening the deployment system so developers can use their favorite platform (Netlify, Vercel, or anything) and choose their favorite SSR/SSG (Next, Gatsby, Nuxt, Gridsome, etc.).

We currently support uploading Vue.js components from GitHub out-of-the-box, and make the props editable in our GUI thanks to a simple config file in the component.

Furthermore, we're working on improving our support for React. On this subject, we would be interested to get your feedback on how to interpret React from a Vue app. We tinkered with libraries like https://github.com/akxcv/vuera and were hoping to not have to rewrite our whole app using React. If you people have any advice on this, we would be more than happy to hear it!

We would also love to hear your feedback about the tool. Feel free to give it a spin at https://www.weweb.io/

Re: Launch HN: Weweb.io (YC W21) – Create websites visually using JAMstack tools

#2
I've used Contentful, Strapi, Ghost, Wordpress, Webflow and Netlify CMS in the past so I think I might have a good perspective on this. I think all those tools fall short when you want to make a site with 90% standard components and then one or two interactive custom React components with some Framer motion effects.

I've played around a bit with this product and it looks like it does a good compromise between flexibility and ease of use. As I'm redesigning my company's site in the next weeks I think I'll give this a try

Re: Launch HN: Weweb.io (YC W21) – Create websites visually using JAMstack tools

#3
Great work on launching! I would be interested to know who the target market is - if you’re technically competent enough to know your react from your vue how likely are you to use a visual builder? I’m speaking from a technical background, but also webflow etc haven’t clicked for me so maybe I just prefer the had way. The airtable integrations etc; I know people who would LOVE that and wish they could run their entire lives from the platform so that’s a winner. Sort of in the same way as you used to see people pushing excel to be the “everything” tool, people are now doing with airtable, so giving a nice front end of just running the site out of there is great. Well done guys!

Re: Launch HN: Weweb.io (YC W21) – Create websites visually using JAMstack tools

#4
post #3

Great work on launching! I would be interested to know who the target market is - if you’re technically competent enough to know your react from your vue how likely are you to use a visual builder? I’m speaking from a technical background, but also webflow etc haven’t clicked for me so maybe I just prefer the had way. The airtable integrations etc; I know people who would LOVE that and wish they could run their entir…

We've typically seen technical people using weweb.io when they want to collaborate on the website with non-technical people (their content creators or marketing team). Interestingly, we see teams splitting the work on the website as follows: developers build custom components and upload them from Github on the editor, then marketing people build the pages and edit the content in autonomy, so developers are involved only for highly custom front-end elements. You are right about the Airtable integration, it is the most used feature of our tool so far :D together with the custom vue.js components integration.

Re: Launch HN: Weweb.io (YC W21) – Create websites visually using JAMstack tools

#5
post #3

Great work on launching! I would be interested to know who the target market is - if you’re technically competent enough to know your react from your vue how likely are you to use a visual builder? I’m speaking from a technical background, but also webflow etc haven’t clicked for me so maybe I just prefer the had way. The airtable integrations etc; I know people who would LOVE that and wish they could run their entir…

Even if you have a team of react developers. Faster is still faster. The cycle of design-code-feedback can be much quicker with such tools.

Your react developers can spend more time on custom components, more complex flows, etc.

Re: Launch HN: Weweb.io (YC W21) – Create websites visually using JAMstack tools

#6

I've used Contentful, Strapi, Ghost, Wordpress, Webflow and Netlify CMS in the past so I think I might have a good perspective on this. I think all those tools fall short when you want to make a site with 90% standard components and then one or two interactive custom React components with some Framer motion effects. I've played around a bit with this product and it looks like it does a good compromise between flexibi…

yes, from a no-code edition perspective, it is the problem we are trying to solve. We've seen a lot of users frustrated by their regular site builders because they couldn't do this extra 10% of customization. Another frustration we've seen is that websites built with regular no-code builder live in isolation from the content ecosystem of the company (headless cms, custom back-end / database, etc.). While testing feel free to let us know if you need an integration with one of the cms mentioned above. We don't have Contentful, WP nor Netlify yet but they are on the list :)

Re: Launch HN: Weweb.io (YC W21) – Create websites visually using JAMstack tools

#8
post #5
post #3

Great work on launching! I would be interested to know who the target market is - if you’re technically competent enough to know your react from your vue how likely are you to use a visual builder? I’m speaking from a technical background, but also webflow etc haven’t clicked for me so maybe I just prefer the had way. The airtable integrations etc; I know people who would LOVE that and wish they could run their entir…

Even if you have a team of react developers. Faster is still faster. The cycle of design-code-feedback can be much quicker with such tools. Your react developers can spend more time on custom components, more complex flows, etc.

yes, we've seen that one of the drivers for choosing our tool is often a shorter time to market and faster iteration cycles.

Re: Launch HN: Weweb.io (YC W21) – Create websites visually using JAMstack tools

#10
post #7

Pricing depends (also) on number of visitors, for example, the free tier includes 500 visits per month. So this is hosted by you? This is a tool/service in the space of squarespace, weebly and such?

yes for the free tier we host the website. Starting from the paying tiers we enable self-hosting. Today it is still an on-demand feature but we are planning to enable self-hosting in self-service before the summer. We also plan to have one-click integrations with Netlify and Vercel (we are in discussion with them at the moment).

Yes, the tool is in the space of no-code site builders, we typically see users choosing weweb when they've outgrown their regular site builders like Webflow, Wix or Squarespace and want more customization options.

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