Why pageBuzz is not competing with Large Website Design Firms

There are so many webmasters and professional development companies and they are not at all competing with us. Our market is the small to mid sized business that wants a solution for $20 a month and not $100 an hour to develop something from scratch.

For a company to develop a tool lets say like our drag and drop editor for their website they might spend $10,000 just for that component and as they develop their entire website it will continue to need work as more ad more tools are added.

Web development companies design very specific tools. For example, if you need a shopping cart, you might need that cart to send inventory to another store you have online. To do that, you need programming on both ends to communicate and confirm that data was transferred.

We don't provide that type of service.

Design companies charge tens of thousands of dollars and are being hard hit by companies like Godaddy, Web.com and 1and1 that offer a full suite of services from building to managing your website for you. They offer programming at discount rates and can provide a huge savings over these smaller website design firms.

Again, we are not in that market.

Our customers want finished solutions. They don't want to spend $2000 to add a payment module into a shopping cart, the want inexpensive and functional.

That is not to say they don't need the same tools as larger companies, but their budget is much less.

This is important for larger companies, because they don't want to be chained to a system that does not allow them to create custom programming. If they need to export data to a twitter feed or an amazon store, they want th ability to pay a programmer thousands of dollars to make that happen.

Our customer base typically does not spend that much on software so they expect us to create useful tools for free. But that means at our leisure and when we fell the market justifies it.

So we are not the first company jumping on the Facebook bandwagon and larger companies recognize that they need to do things while they still have some impact.

I am constantly reminded of what larger companies need when they call and ask if our cart can do this and that, and I ask them, if they saw that our cart was $20 a month? There is only so much we can offer at that price.

If they need custom programming, they could be looking at paying a programmer $10,000 or more for the hours to do what they might want.

And despite how huge our market is, there will always be bigger businesses that need those services.

Since our system is more like a shared platform even though it is not shared hosting, we operate like a Facebook or an ebay.

Facebook is not going to let you customize your page by having a programmer install programming in their system. Either is bay, you use the store as is or not at all.

Now we are a little more flexible than those companies, but the principle is still the same.

We provide the programming, our customers lease it for $20 a month.

And we estimate that 80-90% of the businesses are OK with that. Only a handful of companies actually want to be responsible for their own programming and technology, so we feel like our market is bigger even though our price is so much smaller we still can make much more money than typical design firms.

Now when you look at what we do, we do the same work as those big website design companies. We create web based software, manage it and host websites.

The difference is, we don't charge anyone for it. So our customers don't pay us to develop a shopping system. We do it ourselves and they get to use it.

The big companies charge tens of thousands of dollars each time they build a system, even though they have done it for 100 people, they still charge for building it from scratch. In many cases, each customer needs something so specialized that it must be done that way. But not always, sometimes that can used existing solutions and save customers money.

Another big problem with custom programming is support. Since you are the only company using that software, you are actually your own support. There are no warenties, not garantees or returns. If it does not work, you eat it. If it does not work on new browers, you pay more to fix it.

So we look at it like this.

There will always be custom car builders making $200,000 cars for the rich and elite. But it seems like companies like GM, Ford ad Chrysler make so much more money by making the same models over and over by the millions for average people.

Just like most people don't spend $200,000 on a custom car but rather they go to a car dealer and buy one off the lot, businesses like to buy software off the lot.

We always keep up with trends, have the latest models and the newest technology and it is a fraction of the price of building it yourself.

Big companies hire vendors to take vehicle models and add unique features such as axles allowing utility trucks to travel on railroad tracks. Or cranes to lift pallets onto a truck bed.

But how many ordinary people need that?

So we chose to address the market that does not need the custom programs, can't afford the custom programs and probably does not even know what custom programs are or how they work.

So as you can see, the product that pageBuzz offers is very different than all of those design companies and for that reason, we never really crosss paths. We don't advertise to the same people. We don't have the same customers.

So even though you see us on the same Internet as website companies, we really don't compete with many of them at all.

And it is a good thing for them, because it would be hard to compete with $20 a month for all that we offer.

And that is why so many big companies contact us first, they're not idiots, they want to save money. But when it is all said and done, we just can't support what they need at our price point. So we usually refer them to one of the companies we know and have worked with in the past.