Can you share a few details about Dazzly’s founding story and its journey to where it is now?
With Computer Science and Commerce degrees from The University of Auckland, and with years of commercial IT experience under their belts, Marcus Feeney and Lewis Anderson founded an IT company prioritising customer service and making IT easy. With a combination of technical expertise, understanding how their businesses worked, and a bit of savoir-faire (not common for technical partnerships in New Zealand), they soon gained many clients, and through listening to their needs, found a large gap in the website design market in Auckland. During the next 5 years, they would develop a formidable reputation within Auckland for designing great custom websites that genuinely represented the branding and reality of the business, no matter how big or small. As their reputation increased, so did demand, and without access to skilled developers, that meant pricing had to increase. Naturally, this led to only the largest businesses being able to afford the service (basically, the situation of traditional website design & development today). Affordability became a problem for the smaller businesses, which make up the majority of all businesses in New Zealand or any country. This didn’t sit well with Marcus and Lewis. The websites they were making were now beyond the financial grasp of most people. There had to be a better way. When COVID arrived, it only accelerated efforts to ensure that Dazzly would become real, see the light of day, and be able to help many people. Personal and financial comforts were put into second or third priority. The hours were gruelling, but in late 2020, Dazzly was launched. The basic notion of Dazzly.co is that it makes the process of creating a website extremely easy. It is a website builder platform where someone with no IT experience or sense of design can craft an online presence in an hour or two. All you need to do is input photos and write a little about your business, and that is easier than ever now, too. Dazzly has been on the market just over 4 years now and has proven a godsend for hundreds of businesses in New Zealand, Australia, and now some in the US too. Dazzly has saved businesses hundreds of thousands of dollars in up-front website design costs and enables them to control their growth and digital presence for a very small monthly fee. High-quality website designs are now democratised, putting people first and profit second. 2025 is already a great year for Dazzly, it is just simply a case of just how many people will we be helping now? The sky is the limit.Can you elaborate on the scope of services you offer to your customers?
The Dazzly website builder eliminates the need to engage with professional service providers such as designers or SEO providers because it enables you to do this yourself by using photos and a small amount of writing – at competitive rates. Dazzly is so easy-to-use, mobile-friendly, and customer-friendly, we totally focus on ensuring that our customers get off to a great start. Through customer service and also a check-in once the website goes live to ensure that they’ve ticked all the boxes and have an understanding of how to grow their website enquiries, should they wish to. With the above being said, we also have local partners in many areas of New Zealand (and some in the US now too), whom we can refer Dazzly customers to who may need a bit of extra assistance in a particular area. In many cases, this can be a little bit of design help, but it can also be potentially to trusted local service providers such as vehicle sign-writing and local accounting service providers, who we know can provide a good service at an affordable rate (sharing the same values we do). Dazzly is a company that always puts the customer first and trusts that through our hard work and good website delivery through customer service that our customers will recommend Dazzly to others. Additional website/digital/online related services we offer:- Domain Registration;
- Website Hosting;
- Email Hosting;
- Integrated SEO;
- Article Writing Assistance & more!
What makes you stand out from your competitors in the competitive field you’re in?
Dazzly is the website builder that is most suitable for the smallest of businesses. Any-sized business can use Dazzly. The templates can make you a small, medium, or even a large website, but if you’re looking for a quality solution that you can do entirely on your own (DIY), even just from your phone or laptop at home, there is no better solution on the market than Dazzly. Our website builder interface is a list-based interface, it doesn’t involve drag-and-drop. Although we know the benefits of a drag-and-drop interface, and we think our competitors have amazing software too, from listening to our customers, we really know that those without design inclination, really prefer to just enter their data (photos and text) and have the software take care of the design elements for them. At the end of the day, many businesses have always operated on word-of-mouth; the website world is new to them, and they just want a basic but professional presence online in the first instance, and to know they can build it up from there if desired. Dazzly offers all of that and more. For a low monthly fee, you can sign up with no credit card or commitments and build the entire website design yourself, and then think it over, before deciding whether you’d like to go ahead. Dazzly is made for the majority of people out there who just want a good website, online presence, and to grow it. EVERYTHING in Dazzly can be done from your mobile device or phone on the go. Website creation, launch, management, and growth. We are trying very hard to raise our reputation as the easiest mobile website builder platform.What is the next step or focus for Dazzly going forward?
With the recent release of our third-generation Service Warrior template, this will be our flagship template going forward, so the entire infrastructure is more streamlined, and improvements, particularly in the design customisation, will be coming out hard and fast over the next couple of weeks/months. Continuing to expand within New Zealand, solidifying our place as the #1 Website Builder. Pushing ahead with expansion into the US, with a number of states already standing out in terms of customer acquisition. Exciting times ahead and lots of small businesses and families to help! Naturally, this comes with further team expansion, but no matter the changes ahead, we will always stick to our original values of making the complex (IT/websites) simple and be dedicated to customer service and ensuring a great experience for the customer. Dazzly really helps people because their businesses survive and grow, and that in turn means we succeed as a company – it’s a positive feedback cycle.. We’re really proud of Dazzly and how many people we’re going to be able to help in the next 5, 10, and 15 years of trading. We’re changing the way the world makes websites. We’re solving websites.To learn more about Dazzly, you can visit www.dazzly.co
