HeyI.Am (Anna)
Dead simple personal website builder that started as a side project and grew into a small startup with a few hundred users
www.heyi.am
Dead Simple Personal Website Builder
HeyI.Am started as a side project I was working on with my husband. A friend of ours was looking for a new job and had some trouble creating a personal website with the site builders that existed at the time. We created a POC that turned his LinkedIn page into a basic website, got some great responses and decided to keep on working it.
As it works with 2 people startups, both of us had to learn a lot of new things, which was an amazing experience and although the startup itself failed - I wouldn’t get to where I am today without it. I was doing design and UX, market and competitor research, front end development, social, A/B testing, analytics, running usability sessions and mostly, talking to users - a lot.
Research
We did both market and user research, including user interviews and some “guerilla” user testing with our POC, and decided to focus on fresh graduates looking for a job and wanting to stand out. Back then, 7% of all Americans and 15% of millenials had a personal site, with around 10 million unemployed at any given time and 21 million students in higher education in US alone.
Design Blocks
Our website builder had a lego-like, block building approach. The users we were aiming at were struggling with the current website builders and didn’t need the full control those builders allowed or the complexity this control added. They wanted something that looks professional and shows their personality, but can be done quickly.
In HeyIAm, the user could choose the blocks he wanted to use, replace the icons, colors, graphics and content - but not move around any specific objects on the page. This would ensure the site always looked good and removed some of the complexity we saw in existing website builders.
Content is King
Few months after we started working, LinkedIn removed the ability to import the data from the user's profile, and we had to figure out a work around that would be as easy and valubale to the user. We created simple instructions with examples, that were embedded in the template itself, to help the users fill in useful content.
Experimenting
Over the year we were working on HeyI.Am we experimented with a lot of things and iterated on the go, learning from our users. We conducted user testing, looked at analytics (Google Analytics and Optimizely), ran A/B tests and reached out to our users via email (which is something you can easily do when you only have few hundred users).
We tried having multiple templates for different purposes (all had the same optional blocks but different arrangement, images and text) and tried having only one; we tried requesting a sign-up before accessing the builder and tried allowing the user to build his site without signing up; we tried different texts, toolbar locations and order of items on the landing page; and we collected data.
Over time, we created:
- A site
- The builder itself
- Analytics and account management page
- Email campaigns
- Blog & social presence
- Deck for investors
- Mobile app for exchanging digital business cards
Best Feedback Ever
One of our users wrote to us saying we helped her get her dream job!