Orson helps entrepreneurs and creatives build efficient websites. Orson.io website creator helps you make your own website based on professional templates built with the best web design and marketing principles. You can design your website as you want just by drag and drop. No code required. Create your own website totally optimized for Search Engine Optimization and follow the the suggestions in the website builder in order to boost your online visibility.
Kevin William David interviewed tsifei chan, Co-Founder at Orson to know more.
Hi Tsifei, So what is Orson?
Orson is the easiest way for entrepreneurs and designers to create professional and visible websites without a single line of code.
Tell me more about the problem you are trying to solve?
Internet is everywhere and yet, it is still very complicated to have a beautiful and visible website. Making a website visible should be as easy as editing a document on Word or Google Docs.
Having a website is great but being visible on Search Engines with their website is better. At Orson, we believe SEO is the answer to help them build a better website.
How is Orson different from what already exists in the market?
The thing is, most SMEs don’t even follow the most basic rules of proper SEO.
We want to make entrepreneurs successful thanks to their website and their SEO. Orson.io’s editor’s main focus is on SEO thanks to Orson Bot, which will give you SEO advice along the way as you’re creating your website.
When you publish, it will check and make sure you properly filled out the title, description and will even provide you with precise pointers on how to do so.
The target audience is companies who want to invest in SEO and want to be able to make and animate their website without coding.
Who uses Orson? What types of roles do your customers have at their companies?
New entrepreneurs use Orson.io to launch their startup or company in order to collect emails. Entrepreneurs who already have a website that’s not performing well in terms of design or SEO and want to create a new one. Marketing department who use Orson.io to create websites so they can be autonomous without calling their IT department.
Web agencies, freelancers who create websites on Orson.io for their customers to give them autonomy for the future. They can really customize Orson.io websites with HTML/JS and CSS.
How are your customers using Orson? Could you share a few different use cases?
French Tech is a French government organization which promotes entrepreneurship all over the world using Orson.io to create websites for each of their hubs all around the world. It allows them to have an amazing template where each country’s coordinator can then adjust the content to their country.
They launched 12 websites in 12 cities in 2 weeks.
Some example:
http://www.frenchtechticket.com/
http://tokyo.lafrenchtech.com/
Parlons Terroir is great web agency who targets green revolution farmers and create amazing websites for them to help them to promote their new type of agro-services all over France.
http://www.parlonsterroirs.fr/
http://www.lafermedes3vaches.fr/
https://www.fermedetravailles.fr/
Have there been unique use cases for Orson that you hadn’t thought of or expected?
Some big companies contacted us in the past to create a template with them so they can offer it to their different franchisees or customers in order to unify their online communication.
Were there any early ‘growth hacks’ or tactics that have contributed to your current success?
Our main growth hack is to create side-project related to our business which is great not only for the product itself and its exposure, but is also a great source of valuable backlinks, which only goes to improve our SEO standings.
Some of the amazing projects we’ve created so far:
Mashup Template: People who can invest time in coding with amazing Free HTML5 and responsive Templates
Bootstrap Magic: Bootstrap theme editor
Logiciels Saas Frenchtech: Curated list of French resources and tools for startups
What were some of the biggest challenges while building the product early on and how did you solve them?
One of the biggest challenge at the beginning building the product was to prioritize features that we wanted for the MVP. We didn’t have tools to connect with users such as Intercom or Zendesk, so we were doing it the old way: meeting our users, checking what they were doing on their screen.
What have been some of the most interesting integrations you’ve added? Are there any that have been particularly impactful for you?
On Orson.io, there were quite a lot of users who created their website with bad quality images so we implemented Unsplash as an open gallery for our users to get instant access to their amazing, curated collection system.
We have also integrated Google Visual API to check for low-quality images on our customers websites to suggest better quality image based on the content of their initial visuals.
Before we end, What are the top products that you depend on to run the company & how do you use them?
Intercom — We use Intercom everyday to exchange, get feedback from our users and customers. Really great product, getting a lot of improvement everyday.
Slack — We use internally but also our commercial partners partners, webagencies and freelances which use Orson to create amazing website for their customers. We exchange on the best practices, on how to answer to customers questions and how to be efficient.
Codebase — Ticketing system that we use to develop our product. It’s really great to make the product amazing. Our Marketing and IT department are very familiar with the software and it’s quite pleasant to use.
Originally published at siftery.com.