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Startup aims to revolutionize website creation

Marshall Watkins

By: Marshall Watkins

In Silicon Valley, a entrepreneurial hotbed defined largely by elegance and simplicity, Strikingly, a mobile-friendly website creation service, has taken a circuitous but ultimately promising route to defining itself within the market, aiming – in the words of one previous slogan – to “conquer the world with one page.”

Originally conceived of as a Kickstarter-like crowd-funding platform, the startup pivoted in focus as its founders encountered a relative shortcoming in projects’ ability to showcase their initiatives online. The team subsequently coalesced around the idea of enabling effective and simple online presentations, responding to a shared desire among their prior users.

“Right around this time, the one-page style was taking off, as mobile devices started to become the main browsing channel,” noted David Chen, Strikingly’s CEO. “We got inspired by the simplicity of the one-page design, and saw an opportunity to build the simplest website builder and actually solve the most fundamental problem on the Internet: how to build a website.”

Strikingly’s product, a single web page, which users can scroll through as if moving through a presentation, targets organizations, generally small businesses, that currently lack a web presence and that would benefit from simple and mobile-optimized outreach to potential customers.

The startup has enjoyed success in both fundraising and expanding its user base, graduating from the Winter 2013 Y Combinator Class while raising a $1.5 million seed round and witnessing growth of more than 40 percent in revenues and users over the past seven months.

“It was certainly unexpected, especially given that we haven’t done any marketing,” Chen conceded. “We were focusing on products and users exclusively starting from day one and the growth has been pure word of mouth.”

Chen emphasized that, despite the startup’s mobile-first approach, few features have been omitted from the desktop or tablet experience.

“Although the mobile-first approach simplifies website format itself, it leaves enough room to incorporate most of the features a regular user would need,” Chen said. “It has not been a problem for us so far.”

Looking toward the future, Chen said that the Strikingly team plans to integrate a payment processor into the site, as well as encouraging user-driven developments through an app store and, internally, expanding the firm’s staff.

Check back in the weeks to come as The Daily looks into more of Silicon Valley’s most exciting startups.

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About Marshall Watkins

Marshall Watkins is a senior staff writer at The Stanford Daily, having previously worked as the paper's executive editor and as the managing editor of news. Marshall is a junior from London majoring in Economics, and can be reached at mtwatkins "at" stanford "dot" edu.
  • we need to start pushing back

    Why is the Daily “look[ing] into more of Silicon Valley’s most exciting startups” this summer? Why doesn’t the Daily look into and report on a bunch of the exciting research done on campus?

    I have nothing against Strikingly in particular; I’m sure the people working on the product work hard and do their best. But there is nothing inherently interesting about internet-media or consumer-product driven startups. They are not good or interesting simply because they receive a lot of VC funding. Their purpose is simply to make money. Indeed, the marketplace is full of things that are the very opposite of interesting. Moreover, there is nothing for an enterprising reporter to /do/ when reporting on consumer-market startups. The products are simple and transparent (well, except for their manufacturing provenance, which is usually anything but simple and transparent). And, finally, by their very nature, businesses already get a lot of exposure. What can the Daily add, and why should it want to (unless it is criticism; we need more of that)?

    In contrast, as reporters at Stanford, you have the opportunity to share with your readers the profound research that occurs on campus every day and that often gets little or no exposure in a popular setting. You, a reporter and Stanford student, can work to understand something complicated and then write about it in a way that will inform the reader. Isn’t that why you’re a journalist: to analyze and report on stuff that really matters?

    Or does the Daily specialize in pasting anodyne buzzwords together into things that resemble clauses save for having any meaning? “a[n] entrepreneurial hotbed defined largely by elegance and simplicity”: holy cow, dude. Those words: they are, for reals, words. Beyond that, I can’t really say. But let’s suppose for a moment that those words, taken together, actually mean something. Why is it a good thing to make a geographic area be /defined/ by anything in particular at all? Isn’t variety what we want? Not some designed homogeneity: some glossy, white, smooth, shiny, manufactured surface that appeals to the shallowest of human emotions, covetousness; but, rather, messiness, complexity, hard ideas, stuff that matters?

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