Tigran Nazaryan, CEO of 10Web, explains how his AI website builder stays competitive by focusing narrowly on WordPress and Elementor rather than expanding to other platforms. He trained the AI on existing sites to transform any URL into a widget-based layout, and relies on YouTube and word-of-mouth for growth instead of converting legacy plugin users.
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Being on WordPress, right? Like you said, they're a growing market, they're a huge platform, they have so many plugins, they have templates, they have tools, and they're constantly updating. You know, you see these updates every single week, they're changing. How are you guys managing to maintain, you know, your AI solution to be able to match up to that, you know, stay up to date and stay relevant with— and still stay, you know, up to date and compete?
That's a great question. Really, WordPress is changing very fast. It now transforms, you know, being transformed to whole site builder with its core vanilla WordPress without plugins where you can edit different parts of website. So we really try to follow what are the trends of WordPress. It was just blogging platform when it was built. More than 10 years ago, 15 years ago. But now it's a full solution for building websites, for different types of websites, and for building them without coding. So we try to follow these trends to see where WordPress is going to and what's the use by its customers. And we also built our AI builder for Elementor, which is the most popular page builder and site builder plugin for WordPress. So we made the choice Elementor versus others, and we preferred it. It's really popular and it's stable, and millions of people are using it every day. And also use a large datasets of websites to see how they're built. I mean, what tools are people using for creating websites? And we want to adjust our AI builder to different types of websites. I mean, how it works, so you just input the URL of website, the AI transforms that website or web page into WordPress and into widget-based layout. So we train it on different types of websites and make it working well for different types of input websites.
Got it. And then, you know, obviously you guys are using AI automation. We know, we understand, you know, super versatile. It's a growing technology. What else is kind of on that product roadmap for 10Web, and are you guys planning to expand to other platforms, segments, industries, or, or just kind of make your current solution, you know, bigger?
We built all this solution for WordPress and for Elementor-based page builder plugins, and we don't try to expand it. We want to perfect this. We don't expand it to other site builders and/or other platforms. We want to perfect it for WordPress. We see the future is with WordPress because it's growing. It's becoming new and fresh every year. I mean, it's a 15-year-old platform, but it's still cool. So we want to improve our AI, the way it creates layouts, the way it is integrated with different types of widgets. I mean, a variety of widgets in final recreated website. And also, uh, wanna perfect our PageSpeed solution by making it really perfect with all types of web pages and websites.
Got it. Um, switching gears, you know, a lot of our founders are looking how to accelerate the growth of their SaaS company, especially if they're in a in a really saturated market like what you guys are in. Can you share in terms of marketing growth what channels, what strategy has worked best for you guys so far?
We tried, we experimented with different channels for ads, different socials. For example, for us YouTube really works well. We see great potential of content in— of creating content in YouTube, educational content to grow the awareness of people, explaining them the need to optimize websites, to choose good hosting, and the way it relates— it is related with their business. So it worked for us, but of course You should try to see where are those people using your product. Are they on LinkedIn or are they on Facebook? What the word of mouth, it works as well for our product, especially wow effect when people use AI builder and say, wow, it's magic. How did it build website? So it works as well.
Nice. So YouTube, word of mouth has worked really well. Anything that you'd say you've tried where it was, you know, I think equally important is what you've tried and failed and what hasn't worked and why.
Yeah, that's interesting actually. Fails are usually more interesting than success cases. We had some, plugin customers, clients, and people using our plugins, which were our legacy business. So we tried to convert them to the platform, and to some extent it worked, but not the way we expected. I mean, to, to convert them to hosting and the whole platform instead of just being user of single plugin. It didn't work well. So there are different types of people. I mean, you should, you should know who is using what product for what purpose, and whether you can offer them additional value, and whether they need or not that value. So in case of plugins and our plugin users, it didn't work. So we couldn't convert much of them to hosting customers.
Interesting. So just that channel specifically, you know, it seems like it would be a good fit, right? They're using plugins, they're on WordPress, probably the same target, but for some reason it didn't actually lead to the right conversions of maybe just the stage they're at or the size of the company, right? Or the industry. Yeah, cool. So, you know, obviously you're the CEO of a leading SaaS company, over 70 employees now, is that right?
Yes, about 70 people.
70 people, you know, obviously super demanding. What kind of skills have you had to develop over these last, you know, few years to be at the height of, you know, meet the challenge you're at? And how do you currently measure your leadership success?
Uh, you would agree that the transformation from scientist to engineer to manager and then to CEO, it's really challenging. And I would say that learning is super important and do not say no to the things you don't know and the things that are new for you. I mean, I learned a lot of things and I still continue to learn. And this is super important for especially founders and CEOs.
Right, so it seems like being open-minded and right communicating it and being, yeah, being open-minded. You don't have to know all the answers all the time. Exactly.
And also feedback is very important. The way measuring success for me, I think it's feedback, not only, I mean, in terms of business growth, but also feedback of employees, of customers, of other co-founders as well. They were crucially important for me to grow from developer to CEO.
And then obviously, you know, as a CEO, the bigger the team gets, you're always being grabbed for, you know, attention from all over the place, right? From the work you need to do, from your team, from, you know, putting out fires and growth and all that stuff. Do you have any kind of productivity hacks or maybe Strategies for maybe new founders in this space who maybe could think about that now and, you know, improve their time management?
Perhaps first thing is just to manage stress. Do not postpone, do not procrastinate, just do what you should do. First time is hard, second time is easier, and then it becomes a routine. So having stick to your schedule, try to focus on the most important things and eliminate, what you can delegate, what you cannot do, skip, and still it's okay. So, and also communication skill, perhaps for me it was really important 'cause I'm introvert.
Hmm.
And I guess a lot of people, especially technology people, they are introverts, but being manager and being founder or CEO, it requires communication skills. So you still can be introvert, but you should communicate really well.
