One of the fun things about startups is how quickly things can evolve. Startups can make strategic decisions in 24 hours that a company like Adobe would debate for a year. They might not always be right, but they sure can try a lot more things and adapt more quickly to changing markets and new insights.

At Webvanta, we’ve recently made a major shift in our customer focus and go-to-market strategy. We had been focusing on small businesses as our customers. We’re keeping that strategy in our back pocket for later use as the business evolves, but we’ve decided to focus on web designers as our customers.

Our product is still much the same: it’s a hosted platform for quickly building and deploying powerful web sites. What’s different is that we’re now focused on providing this platform to web designers, to enable them to deliver better solutions to their clients.

This has a huge benefit for us: the web designers get to find, and interact with, the small businesses. That’s something that we came to realize was going to be hard for us to do at scale. It gives us a lot more leverage, since the folks we’ll be setting up to use the platform will be building sites on an ongoing basis, not just once.

The new strategy also enables us to target a wider range of sites, still including small business sites but no longer limited to that. Our platform is also great for information portals, membership sites, and more.

We’ve been meeting with a wide range of designers to get feedback on our offering, and the feedback has been great. We think there’s a real opportunity here to tune the platform to their needs. The way designers have been building sites involves a lot of unnecessary pain that we can take away.

If you’re a web designer and are interested in being a beta tester, send me a note at michael at webvanta dot com.

More news soon…