July Update
A feature in the App Store. Major product leaps. The market is clear. We’re growing our team.
July was our most exciting month yet. Here’s what happened, along with some perspective on where we are in the market:
We got featured!
Apple featured us in the App Store’s top slot. As you’d expect, this brought a huge rush of new downloads that multiplied our customer base as the spotlight rippled throughout the App Store in over 100 countries.
The reaction has been overwhelmingly positive. People love Universe. As of today, we have 299 reviews globally with an average 4.5 stars.
The App Store also shared Universe on its Twitter and Facebook pages, which have a combined reach of over 19 million people.
The attention has been an awesome acknowledgement of what we’ve built, but more importantly it’s expanded our reach enormously. The diversity of creators and use-cases is staggering. To name a few: a Saudi-based jewelry designer, a multi-talented rapper in Atlanta, a helicopter charter service in South Africa. I’ve been sharing some of the most interesting ones I come across on my Twitter.
Even with the surge of usage, our product held up without a hitch. In fact, we shipped some major updates:
Multipage sites
You can now create sites with multiple pages. This is our most requested feature by far, and it blows open the kinds of things you can make with Universe. People, like this Swedish soccer team, started taking advantage of what’s possible immediately.
We built this feature watching lots of folks “hack” Universe to create multipage sites (by creating many subdomains and chaining them together). We knew we could make it far easier. It was a nice reminder that desire paths are a product designer’s best friend.
A smarter Magic Builder
In June we shipped Magic Builder, which was our biggest product leap since first launching in March. Instead of putting you straight into our editor, we ask you a few questions about the site you want to build, like: What kind of site do you want to make? Where can people find you online? What color best suits you?
And then we build a site for you, ready for you to customize.
This was exactly the leap we needed. Even though our editor is super easy to use, there’s something about the Socratic method that’s universally understandable.
We took it a step further this month and made the Magic Builder even smarter. Now, we recognize the content of your answers and intelligently lay out your site based on what you’ve entered.
We’re really excited about where we can take Magic Builder. The possibilities of using AI to augment the creative process is tantalizing.
Learn the ropes
We also introduced a How To section. It’s a guidebook for making awesome sites, filled with tips, tricks, and videos. We think it’ll help a lot of people get the most out of Universe.
A Clear Market
The spotlight amplified what we’d been seeing before: Universe is working. It’s empowering a whole new generation of people to build the web.
This is a new demographic of internet users: people whose primary device is a phone. We’ve long believed this was the future, and we’re seeing it pan out. These aren’t necessarily people without access to a laptop. Rather, they’re folks who turn to their phone when they want to do or learn or build something. Ben Evans recently wrote a good piece on this phenomenon.
Universe is the first website builder built from the ground-up for mobile. Companies like Wix and Squarespace have built robust, professional-grade tools. But their origin point was desktop. Even Weebly, which has a mobile app, is hampered by the expectations and mechanics of translating a desktop editor.
When you start on mobile, you come up with an entirely different interface. You forget desktop paradigms like tab bars. You make building websites fun.
To that end, we’re heads down improving our product. Our focus is two-pronged: make the product more accessible and make it more powerful.
What we hear overwhelmingly from our customers is that they want more. More pages, more options, commerce, blogging, analytics, custom branding. We’ll get to all of it.
But to do that, we need to grow our team. We’re hiring on all fronts: iOS, web, design, growth. You can learn more about these roles here. We have a giant opportunity, and we’re going to capitalize on it.
Lots more to come.
