Outsmart Competitors With Agency-First Web Design

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0:59Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Chance and my guest today is Itai Sedan. He is the founder of Duda. It was created to help small businesses connect with potential customers anywhere, anytime, and anyplace. Itai started the company from his garage in Mountain Valley, California. I wonder how many intros have that in. with his high school friend, Amir Glatt, who is now the CTO. In 2008, they both noticed how the internet was shifting towards mobile and the need for better mobile-first experience to extract customers on the go. Over the years, the platform has evolved.

1:36Today, Duda offers a fully responsive website builder, targeting digital marketing agencies and SaaS platforms. Duda has over 1 million websites hosted on its platform. So, Itay, welcome to the show. Thank you, John, for having me. Excited to be on the show. So I've been covering marketing, digital marketing for many years, and I kind of feel like I've seen the evolution of Duda. Talk a little bit about V1, like the very early days when you started this. What did the tool look like at that point? Oh, yeah. We went through quite a change over the years. So when I started the company back in 2010, it was really at the advent of mobile phones.

2:18iPhone came out in 2008 and Android followed shortly after. And the first idea that kind of triggered the launch of Duda was to help small businesses take their website that was built back then for desktop primarily and make sure that it really created a great user experience on mobile phones. If you remember back then, it was a lot of pinch and zoom of sites and the experience was not really there. So we came out with a pretty nifty solution that just took all you had to do, put the URL of your desktop site, click on submit, and we do the magic behind the scenes and kind of optimize it for mobile, created a second website, kind of an MDOT.

3:01And that was the initial product for the first, I would say, three, four years of a company. Yeah. Yeah. And fast forward to today, Duda is really very accepted by agencies as really a full building platform for your entire online presence. So talk a little bit about that evolution, that change that you really saw, because you probably felt at some point the MDOT was a little limiting for what Duda could be, right? So talk a little bit about that evolution and how you've kind of walked alongside the changes in small business marketing in general. Yeah, absolutely. So as I kind of alluded about three or four years in, as we started sensing that small businesses didn't want to build a site for mobile, a site for desktop, a site for tablet.

3:50They wanted to build it once and it runs everywhere. and kind of at the same time responsive web design rose to be the way to achieve it there weren't like great tools that allowed smb to actually build responsive sites so we kind of were thinking okay how do we take the solution that we built really for mobile primarily and add these other screens and worked on our second product which is today our core product and as we we did that we also went through uh rebranding because initially we launched the company at Duda Mobile, then with this new product, we kind of cut the mobile out. And from then on, the company was known as Duda with building a fully responsive website.

4:32But that was not enough. As we did that, now we were suddenly in competition with some very significant players like Squarespace, Wix, WordPress. And four years into the company, a very big question arose of, what is unique about it? Why are customers going to come to Duda? and we were looking at our user base and about 50 % were SMBs, but the other 50 % were these web professionals, web designers, digital marketers. And we felt like first they were, you know, just from a data perspective, they were growing faster. And maybe from, you know, a culture DNA of the company, we felt we understood them better.

5:13We understood their needs. And we were better at building maybe more sophisticated software for a more professional user than, you know, kind of dumbing it down, building simple tools for SUD. So at that point, we made a very significant decision. That was kind of the second big decision almost in the same year. After moving from a mobile product to a fully responsive product, we basically decided to focus on only 50 % of our customer base. And going forward, we said we are going to be a website, web development platform for agencies, for web professionals. And from that day on, we did not spend a dollar more on acquiring SMBs.

5:52We became that platform for web professionals. And that brought tremendous amount of clarity and focus throughout the organization. So my co-founder and CTO knew which features to prioritize, obviously the features that agencies wanted. Marketing knew at what level to message. Sales understood better who were their customers. So really that decision, I know a lot of companies kind of are hesitant about kind of narrowing your customer base and your total addressable market, but actually being much more focused, which everybody always tells you that you should do, really helped propel the company forward, helped us be more unique and helped the product become much better in doing what this type of customer really wanted.

6:41Yeah. And those are two very distinct markets that had very distinct needs. So it makes it very difficult to try to serve both of them, you know, with essentially the same message, the same tool set. So whenever I talk to a technology company, a SaaS company, we can talk about the changes in platform and, you know, the market that have occurred. I mean, I started my business. We didn't have the Internet. You know, talk about like all the changes. Right. But I love asking this question. In your time in doing what you've been doing and being an entrepreneur, is there anything in marketing that you feel like hasn't actually changed?

7:21I think I know from when I launched it and first talking to VCs, and this was like, you know, 14 years ago when I started the company, there was always the question, will websites always be needed? Would it be replaced by social media? Will it be replaced now with AI? The technology has changed, but websites stay a very fundamental piece of any small business's marketing stack. And I don't see that changing. I think we actually ran a survey with our customers, and 99 % said that they still see websites as a very dominant component of their revenue generation capabilities in 2024. for. They actually expect much more from their website.

8:07And we can talk about that very soon. Yeah, I was going to say, I actually think they've moved from being a channel or, you know, to actually being the hub. I mean, the central, you know, part of their marketing. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. They're asking, they want to see more traffic. They want to see more leads from their website, higher conversions, doing a lot more things self-service. And they, you know, they don't want to pay more. So I think that kind of, we can talk about that, about, you know, that causes a challenge for, you know, agencies that are servicing SMBs. How do they continue to service them and help provide that additional layers that they're asking for additional capabilities while keeping costs at bay?

8:50Yeah. I mean, that's a really significant question. I mean, we work with a lot of agencies and a lot of them are, especially agencies that are very focused on tactics. We do websites, we do SEO, we do content. I mean, the pressure on price, you know, for that stuff is, I mean, because there's somebody doing it for$10, AI will do it for free. I mean, or at least that's the perception, right? I mean, so a lot of agencies are really struggling with both revenue and certainly profitability today. Have you found, I mean, first off, have you found that to be true? Second part of that, I suppose, is, You know, what has Duda attempted to do to kind of address that?

9:27It's absolutely true. There is much more pressure to do more for less. And I think, you know, things like obviously AI are key technologies and capabilities that an agency needs to adopt in order to be more efficient with the existing headcount and staff that they have. Duda, as many other players in the market, we've been very focused on adding AI features into our platform. We call those AI assistants, and they really help our customers deliver, build, and maintain websites at half the time than it used to be before. So everything that you can imagine from the obvious things of text generation, content creation, but then to a lot of things that are kind of also behind the scenes around SEO, taking a lot of helping with workflow, taking a lot of those main things, but very important tasks that need to be done on the website and automating them.

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11:11You can try ActiveCampaign for free for 14 days, and there's no credit card required. Just visit ActiveCampaign.com slash duct tape. That's right, duct tape marketing podcast listeners who sign up via that link will also receive 15 % off an annual plan. That's activecampaign.com slash duct tape. Now this offer is limited to new ActiveCampaign customers only. So what are you waiting for? Fuel your growth, boost revenue, and save precious time by upgrading to ActiveCampaign today. Hey, attention all digital agencies. Are you looking to build beautiful, high-performing websites fast? Meet Duda, the platform designed to help you create stunning, responsive sites that wow your clients and boost your business.

11:57Whether you're a seasoned pro or just getting started, Duda's got the tools you need, from custom widgets to seamless client collaboration. We've made it easier than ever to turn your web design dreams into reality. So, why settle for less? Join the thousands of agencies who trust Duda to power their success. Head to Duda.co and start building something amazing today. Yeah, I love the fact that you're using the word assistance. That's how I refer to AI, you know, right now. I mean, maybe there will be a day when it can create from, you know, scratch, you know, original stuff, but I think it's terrible at that right now.

12:36But I think that it is very good, as you said, at, you know, creating efficiencies, doing mundane things, creating, you know, writing metadata, you know, I mean, that's like mind numbing work, right? And AI can probably do that better than a human being in some cases. And so using it as an assistant, I think is the correct way to look at it. We have capabilities inside the tool that with one click of a button, let's say you have 500 images on a website, it will add alt text to all your images automatically. And it actually does it really well. You could go and edit it, but most people don't. And these are very important things in order for the website to rank and to be found for all these keywords.

13:20So, yeah, a lot of focus there. So do you have, so in addition to the tools that you have built in, are you, what are you seeing agencies do? Some of the things we talked about, like metadata and alt tags and creating efficiencies. A lot of people are focused very much on using AI for content creation, which makes total sense for marketers. But are you seeing agencies use it in other ways to run their businesses? Yeah. So we have another, we have multiple examples. We have seen an agency create custom GPTs for each customer. Right. So they kind of load that custom GPT with all the documents, all the information related to that customer.

14:02Tone, voice, brand, right? Yeah, everything. Yep. And that custom GPT is connected to additional tools that could be connected to an SEMRage or an Ahrefs to do that. So then when you need the specific tasks, like you want to know, how is this customer doing on their search ranking? You know, the custom GPT would go and question SEMrush and return that answer. Or, you know, how's the traffic been to that website in the last month? Then it will go to Duda and check that and return that answer. So creating a lot of these efficiencies inside the business, in the agency, where, you know, otherwise it would be just going to many different tools to try to collect that data.

14:45So that's one example. We've seen, you know, a pretty big directory local listings business in Australia really increase a lot of efficiency by embedding high content into the generation of websites. So think, you know, especially today, you want to, in order to rank, you want to add more pages into a website. You want to kind of find one of those keywords that I want to rank for. I want to create additional pages with content related to those keywords. You can use AI today to generate these specific pages, at least to give you a pretty good first draft that afterwards a human can go and review.

15:23they've been able to go from about the creation of 130 websites a month to about 270 so almost like more than doubling and they say that this is the majority of those gains is due to the use of ai for content generation so i'm sure there's a lot of more examples but those are like quick too that i have top of mind i still see a lot of business owners and even some agencies really seeing AI as a threat. I mean, where do you fall on that? Like, is it going to wipe out the industry or like SEO firms not going to be needed anymore? Where do you fall on that? Yeah. I think kind of similar to what you alluded to, I agree as well.

16:05I think that I don't think there's any risk to agencies, not in the near, not in the midterm of being replaced by AI. I think the risk for an agency is to be replaced by another agency that makes better use of AI than they are. I have said that exact thing numerous times. Yeah, exactly. Somebody who's as strategic as you using AI. Right. This is where agencies need to educate themselves, train themselves, embed AI into their workflows in order to make sure that they're not falling behind. So this might be getting a little bit into the technical aspects of Duda, but I wonder if you could explain it for people who are not familiar with it.

16:50You know, if I'm familiar with, say, WordPress, you know, I go and I get an installation and I build the website and then I do all the stuff to it. Right. Explain kind of how Duda works for agencies, right? Because you have a model where somebody can build countless websites, you know, on the platform for all of their clients. So talk a little bit about how that all works together or maybe even compare and contrast to, say, a WordPress. Yeah. So I'd say I'd start with that Duda was built with agencies in mind. So everything that we do, every decision about our roadmap is all focused on agencies.

17:27And how do we empower agencies to be more productive, more efficient when they build websites? And we have kind of broken down the life cycle of an agency creating websites for SMBs. And we kind of try to address different pain points in that life cycle of website creation. So we have multiple different tools. Of course, the bread and butter is the editor itself. And I'll talk about that in a second. But we have multiple different tools to address different stages of that life cycle. So for example, we help our agencies with acquiring customers because we know the value propositions of our website.

18:07So we provide sales training and marketing assets that they can white label and provide as their own. We have tools that help them gather information about a small business. We know how long it takes to get things like just to get the images for a business that you're going to build a website for. How long it takes to get business information, opening hours, email addresses, social media links. We have tools that scour the web and put that information at the agency's fingertips. So again, it's all about efficiency and productivity. And then around the website builder itself, there are a lot of capabilities there that are around productivity and efficiency that make it very easy and quick to build beautiful, pixel -perfect websites in the fraction of a time compared to what it would take you in WordPress.

19:05Now, the nice thing about using a proprietary platform like Duda is that you have a lot of things included that maybe in the WordPress ecosystem, you would need to go into the plugin directory and you get plugins from different players that you don't know how well they're playing with one another and they break. And here actually you have an amazing support team that is sitting, some of them are sitting right here next to me where I am here in Colorado, but they're spread throughout the world so they can give you 24-7 support. And they actually help you with issues that you have. They're all very technical, savvy in HTML, CSS, JavaScript.

19:43So they can really help you if you run into issues. You shouldn't run into issues, but if you do, they can help you get the job done. And then on top of that, I would say we have a lot of these advanced tools that, you know, really for agencies that are not building maybe one or three sites a year. But if you're thinking of taking your agency to the next stage where you want to build tens, hundreds, we have customers building thousands of websites a year. You need these tools. You're not going to get them in the WordPress ecosystem. These are tools that allow you to make, you know, one change in the template and it, you know, and it spreads throughout, you know, all the websites that you created.

20:25It's tools that give you AI and, sorry, API access into a website and either integrate it into your workflow creation process, into your CRM tools, or things that through APIs, you can go and make changes in your websites, your customer's website. There's so many, again, I gave before examples of AI. So there's a lot of things embedded in there. There's things that, you know, I don't know if you know, but Duda is also a leader in terms of core vitals, which is for speed. And that's like just the page speed and load times. We do better than any other website CMS platform out there, significantly better than WordPress.

21:09And that's because our engineers are really focused on improving every single aspect. And that's one of the advantages of having more of a proprietary platform. You can really control these things. But yeah, there's a ton of advantages. I probably touched on a few of them. So I want to end today, our time today, with probably a silly question. And maybe you've answered it a hundred times, but I'm sure other people have asked you, is there any story behind the word Duda? yeah so duda is related to the dude and that is the if you've seen the big lebowski sure jeff who plays the dude there that that was a movie that both me and my co-founder were very fond of i know it since high school and we went to college together so you know initially we when we formed the company we called it duda mobile we didn't think that dude mobile was a great name so we I went to Duda Mobile and now it's Duda.

22:03But still the culture and some of the aspects of that movie, you can see them in our offices today. For example, I'm right now sitting in a room that is called The Dude, but there's other rooms here that are called The Ringer and Urban Achiever and Pinky Toe. So there's a lot of elements from that. It's kind of just a fun thing to have as part of your culture. So I'm hoping happy hour includes white Russians then. Absolutely. Awesome. So, well, Etai, I appreciate you stopping by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. Is there somewhere you'd invite people to find out more about some of the things we talked about today?

22:40You can obviously visit us at duda.co. That's where you can try out the software. There's a 14-day free trial. If you need an extension, ping me directly. You can find me on LinkedIn, on Twitter. Yeah, I think those are the best channels to reach out to us. Awesome. Well, it's really been a joy to watch kind of how you've grown this tool and evolved this tool. So again, I appreciate you stopping by and sharing a few moments with us.