Website Planet had the chance to sit down and chat with Dimi Baitanciuc, Co-founder & CEO at Brizy, a multi-platform sitebuilder with 950k customers worldwide. We discovered what makes Brizy a super versatile website builder able to create 90% DFY websites, and how they helped a SaaS company build over 10.000 websites(!)
Let’s introduce the Brizy website builder to our audience. What is it and how does it work?
Brizy is a multi-platform website builder, which is fairly unique in the space. We’ve started in 2019 with the goal of creating a tool for web designers that achieves a perfect balance between ease-of-use and powerful features, and which can be used across a multitude of platforms.
Currently, Brizy can be used as a WordPress plugin (similar to Elementor or Divi) or as a Cloud platform (think of Wix or Squarespace), with a Shopify version coming very soon. This makes our builder really versatile and
a time saver for those who need quick deployments for their web content, across platforms.
We particularly pride ourselves on having one of the most intuitive user experiences out there, so even novice users can create great looking websites out of the gate. Plus, we have sprinkled the UI with lots of triggers for short video tutorials on how to use certain features and tools, which play right there on the spot in a popup. This keeps the user focused and engaged on creating their site, with no need to go outside the builder for further guidance.
Our responsive options allow lots of customisations, but even
without tweaking anything you have the job 90% done out-of-the-gate. Thanks to how elements and structures work inside Brizy, many settings are automatically optimized due to our pre-set default settings. Basically, users only need to tweak certain areas, but not bother to get the basics right because that’s already done automatically. IN fact, we consider this responsive design area one of our strong suits.
For example, in most builders, a 16:9 image or video used on the laptop / desktop viewport will be carried over exactly in the same ratio on smaller screens. This is usually a problem on phones and even tablets given their “portrait” holding, because “landscape” images might just look wrong or tiny.
With Brizy you can scale, crop or even replace images with a portrait image that is more suited for mobile screens… without affecting the other viewports. That’s just one quick example, but the versatility included with responsive design in Brizy is quite powerful and allows for pinpoint control and diversification between responsive views.
With almost 40 elements, global styling and lots of other helping tools, users can customize the websites to their heart’s desire. Basically we have them all: lots of elements, popups builder, 4000+ vector icons, stories, global stylings that allow changes to entire color schemes instantly on all pages in just 1 click, etc. And
everything is included in the same product, not like some competitor tools that need lots of other plugins, add-ons or themes to benefit from these extended functionalities.
Users can start with a blank page and let their imagination guide them, but if that’s too intimidating, we also have a huge library of pre-made Website, Blocks, Pop-ups or Stories templates that will provide a useful head-start.
Moreover, we have a wide range of 3rd party integrations in Brizy, ranging from Hubspot to Zapier to Mailchimp… you name it. We also include the almost ‘obligatory’ WooCommerce integrations and WooCommerce builder, Yoast, Google Maps, Google Fonts, Calendly and probably 30 more. And the icing on the cake is our webhooks integration that lets our users integrate our lead forms with any CRM on the planet.
Brizy Cloud also avails of AWS technology with the possibility of automatically scaling the server bandwidth when the load becomes high. Plus, we have many optimisations and CDN included by default with any website, making it very scalable.
Devs and agencies are our most frequent customers. We offer them B2B functionalities that are pretty rare in the space, like White Label, Reseller packages or even the possibility to deploy our entire Brizy Cloud platform on the client’s own infrastructure (think of Wix on-premise).
What this all means is that
an agency or an IT business can unlock a completely new revenue stream by licensing our builder platform, rebrand it 100% as their own using White Label and resell the website creation functionality to their own users. Basically, this allows SaaS turn-key functionality without the development overhead. Of course, they can use Brizy without any of the above, just like they would use a B2C focused website builder, but it’s a bit less frequent in our sales experience.
For example, we have many clients that use our reseller plans, from education & learning to faith based companies that offer their users a platform where they can create the websites themselves, for a monthly fee.
As for customer care, we offer help-desk and chat support, with extensive written knowledge base and video tutorials. On top of that, we have long form academy courses, where in-depth lessons are presented and explained by our video authors and experts.
How does your mission differ from the other site builders around?
Brizy being a platform agnostic means that our users are not stuck in a single environment. The content you create in WordPress for a magazine or blog can be easily brought in Brizy Cloud for a quick landing page or same pages and content inside a Shopify shop (soon). This is incredibly helpful for agencies that have to create multiple projects for the same client and have to deal with multiple platforms that are best suited for the task.
Each type of project is better suited to a certain platform: blogs on WordPress, landing pages and quick presentation websites on Cloud based, while shops on Shopify.
With Brizy you can create the content once and deploy it anywhere using the same tool, same interface etc. Otherwise, you would need to use lots of different builders to create or re-create the same content on multiple platforms, which takes a lot of time and usually brings subpar results, with higher costs nonetheless.
Imagine Adobe Photoshop working only on the Mac platform for example. Sounds a bit strange, right? But that is the case with most website builders out there, they lock users in a single platform, whether they like it or not.
Who are your typical clients and what problems do they have when they come to you?
We’re mostly seeing that Small & Medium sized Agencies are the heaviest users, with resellers and freelancers in close proximity.
As previously described,
we solve 3 problems for those core clients:
- offer a powerful yet intuitive website building experience;
- provide multi-platform versions of our builder, to easily go cross platform in order to deploy the web project inside the best suited platform.
- give them specific B2B functionalities like White Label, Reseller, Client Management, On-premise deployment of our website building technology.
What they usually need is to have everything in one place and at an affordable price point. Many times agencies use lots of different tools in their stack, which can get quite expensive and hard to manage, with support being spread over multiple providers. Also, the training for the employees that actually build the websites gets difficult when for each platform you need to learn a new tool.
Many clients try every competitor out there and learn the pro’s and con’s of each solution. Sometimes they arrive at us and like what they see, sometimes they stick with what they have due to being accustomed to their existing stack, but never-the-less we get a nod from them, which makes us know we’re on the right track. Also, we work together with our bigger clients and offer help with integrations, custom work and maintenance.
And what makes them eventually stick with you?
Our core strength is the builder UI + UX, and the fact that they can create anything they can imagine and the business functionalities detailed above.
In fact, when we talk to our most faithful customers, small and big, we try to understand how their workflow and results have changed. And usually we get something along the lines of “we build stuff more easily, with better platform versatility, at affordable costs”.
Things get easier and faster for them to do when using our platform. Plus, the fact that we offer them a new revenue stream with the reseller functionality, makes a pretty big difference.
Can you share one success story from your customers? What was their pain point, and what results did they get thanks to Brizy?
One of our bigger customers is a SaaS Learning & Education platform from Asia. Before becoming a client for us, they had impressive growth in their user base, but struggled to find a way to expand past their core offerings. They always envisioned allowing their existing users to build websites and landing pages, as part of a more complete package, but failed to find a turn-key builder platform that offers everything they were asking for, including White Label, Reseller, etc.
Since working with us,
they grew from only a couple hundred websites to over 10.000 websites powered by Brizy Cloud platform, in just 9 months.
What do you see in the future of your industry, and how do you plan to cope?
The rise of AI is definitely something that will be in the future of web design, and most likely in all tech futures. Everything nowadays needs to be AI powered or enhanced, although many of them feel a bit gimmicky.
Of-course, we do not disregard this trend, as it will probably be very transformative for entire industries. That’s why we are working hard on building AI features and entire experiences driven by LLMs, but always thinking about the actual usefulness and future-proofing.
If you had unlimited funds, how would you improve your product?
Even with unlimited funds, the spending would still go into hiring the best people for the job. One thing we’ve learned over the years is that
improving your team is better than improving a certain feature or functionality.
If you get the best people available in your dev team, in marketing or sales, then no headwind or temporary setback will be able to topple a strong foundation.
But if I were to choose a certain area of our product to improve, it would need to be a killer feature and would cost an arm and a leg to develop, then I’d say the “
Build your website with AI” functionality is not a complete gimmick.
