Armenia’s 10web brings AI website building to WordPress

Image credits: 10 web

Generative AI has shown remarkable results in increasing productivity in a wide range of areas, including website building. Today, there is no shortage of tools that can generate web designs by simply writing what you want in a prompt, including established players Wix and homegrown startups like Relume. Armenia-based company 10web is entering the race believing it has an advantage.

10web allows users to quickly generate websites built with WordPress, a widely used content management system, using text prompts. WordPress is notoriously difficult to use for beginners. Unlike Wix and Squarespace, WordPress is open source. This means that many features are not provided out-of-the-box and require more advanced web design skills. It also doesn’t come with hosting services, so users have to manage more backend tasks.

Thanks to its customization options, WordPress is still used by around 40% of all websites on the internet, according to estimates from w3techs. Shopify follows him in second place and is in the midst of a direct-to-consumer e-commerce boom as vendors look to build online stores with the help of Canadian companies rather than relying on Amazon.

To make WordPress more intuitive to use, 10web’s Yerevan-based engineering team has integrated generative AI models such as Llama 2, GPT-4, and Stable Diffusion into the site-building platform. “Building a platform for WordPress is not structurally easy,” says Arto Minasyan, co-founder of 10web and owner of Krisp, a startup that uses machine learning to remove background noise from audio. , such tools require significant development effort.”

“You need a very good hosting infrastructure. You need a managed service that supports security, backup, and uptime for WordPress. All of these things are very difficult because each website is essentially an instance. ” he added. “In contrast, if you’re building on a closed-source solution like Wix or Squarespace, all you have to do is build one backend and generate a few pages for each website.”

Given the size of the open source community of 2 million developers, Minassian believes that focusing on solving WordPress usability will ultimately pay off. Founded in 2017, his 10web currently operates with positive cash flow. About 20,000 of its users are paying customers (Minassian notes that some SMB customers have hundreds of websites). A total of 1.5 million sites were generated in his 10web.

10web has two monetization methods: charging per website or per traffic. The company plans to add a payment system that allows users to bill their customers and 10web to take a portion of the bill as a fee.

The company currently generates $5 million in annual recurring revenue and is expected to reach $25 million in ARR by the end of next year, Minassian said. The founders attributed part of the company’s growth to Armenia’s favorable location. Like other former Soviet Union countries, Armenia has a wealth of affordable engineering talent.

“We have AI talent, but it’s probably four times cheaper in Armenia than in the US. And here we have access to the best possible AI talent,” the founder suggested. “But if you are a California-based web builder, you have to compete with Google, Amazon, and OpenAI, so attracting the best talent is not easy.”

The up-and-coming tech hub in Armenia’s capital gave birth to the country’s first unicorn, Picsart, and offers a strategy for the country’s startups to follow. Given the relatively small size of Armenia’s economy, Armenian entrepreneurs have historically targeted their businesses abroad, particularly the United States. They hire engineers in Armenia to leverage domestic technical talent, while hiring marketing and business development personnel in the United States. This strategy is also shared by 70 companies on 10web. Strong staff. And of course, being based in the US can be advantageous in raising funds.

“99% of Armenian startups target the US market,” said the founder. “If you want to raise less than $1 million, you can raise it from Armenian VCs, but if you want to raise millions in seed and tens of millions in Series A, you have to go to the US.”