The.com is a startup that aims to make website building easier while also ensuring that web creators get credit for their work. The company, which is emerging from stealth with $4.4 million in seed funding, has created a low-code website building platform. The site builder from The.com uses community-created components you can drop into your site and share with others. During the site-building process, website creators can chat directly with one another.
The company closed on $4.4 million in seed funding, led by NFX, with participation from Sound Venture, VSC Venture, Village Global and Harry Stebbings.
The idea for The.com came from the co-founders. Prior to founding The.com, the founders ran their own web development agency in Boulder from 2012 to 2019. During this time, they experienced the frustration of traditional web development.
We were waiting for someone else to come up with a platform that would solve all our needs. It didn't happen, so we started to build it ourselves.
The.com co-founders are Jeff and Clarke.
Their platform was initially meant to be an internal tool, but it began to draw interest from their current customers who encouraged the brothers to make the product more broadly available and turn it into a business. The brothers shut down their agency business to work on The.com.
There are security and speed issues with legacy platforms. There is a constant struggle with customers asking for deeper customizations, which requires hard-coding and continual work to keep up. Many of the current web-building platforms are geared toward people who are already site designers. The co-founders knew from their own experience that there are a lot of people who contribute to a website who aren't designers.
We need a website-building platform that puts everyone on the same playing field.
It is easy to start a new website on The.com by pressing a button. Users can invite other people to build with them, and then click a button to start editing the site. Instead of starting from scratch, creators choose the pieces and components they want to use. They can pick up a navigation element from one The.com creator, a footer from someone else, and other elements from different community members. As you pick the elements, confetti explodes, giving credit to the original component. In the future, The.com will reward creators financially as well.
The.com has an image.
The goal is to make sure the people who are building the block are getting the most out of it. There is a lot of stuff that never made it to the live sites that the customers didn't like, or maybe it didn't make the cut. He said it would be great to earn from that, over and over.
The site builder has an interesting design. There is a floating window in front of the website being created. It is more advanced than some WYSIWYG designers, with sections for managing the sites. After you add the individual website elements, you can modify them further, just as you could if you were writing or editing website code. You can make changes by using raw Javascript or creating new elements from scratch.
You don't have to click on a preview to see what the changes will look like as you work on the site. If you choose, the elements you have created can be shared back to the community marketplace.
The.com has an image.
The marketplace allows The.com to take advantage of the creator economy trend, where people are rewarded directly for their work. Some of the top creators may be encouraged to use their tools to make their own websites, according to the founders.
People will get more and more popular because of the quality and impressive building that they do.
The community at The.com has a couple of hundred daily active users and is in the thousands.
The collaborative element is one of the notable elements of The.com's website builder. Many of the customers of The.com are agencies or small businesses. Multiple people will be able to update the site together. Users will be able to edit side-by-side in the future, but currently the builder displays a profile icon next to the part each person is editing. You can chat with other site partners about your build with the native chat feature.
The.com has an image.
As the startup comes out of stealth, it is also announcing its pricing plans. The basic plan is free for those who want to kick the tires. The tiers are based on feature set, support needs and volume. Customers range from small businesses to enterprises. Some are using The.com on top ofshopify as a headless option, which increases their website speed and decreases their bounce rate, they found.
The.com has a distributed team of 11 full-time employees and a total of 15 working on the business. They plan to hire in engineering and community with the seed funding.
The founders said a friend helped them get the coveted URL.
It is a friends-and- family discount. We're lucky that this person was involved in the domain world for a long time and had access to a lot of good stuff, but we don't know who the mentor is.
The.com's platform has network effects and composability that are different from the Web 1.0 and 2.0 systems. We need category innovation like this. He said that if you are still using the website building tool, you should switch to The.com.
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