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September 20, 2024

Building websites faster with AI

Inside Relume

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Inside Relume: Building websites faster with AI

In this episode, we explore how AI is changing website design and development.

Today, we’re excited to have Dan Anisse, co-founder of Relume, an AI website builder that helps design and build websites faster.

Dan's journey began with a clothing business and evolved into tech, where he co-founded an influencer analytics platform before launching Relume.

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Show notes

Timestamp

00:00 Introduction

00:58 Dan’s journey

04:40 Doing the work

05:44 Agency lessons

08:34 Juggling client work

10:54 AI website builder

14:11 Getting acquired

15:55 Real value of community

18:18 Relume’s next steps

resources

Links

Dan Anisse’s LinkedIn and Twitter

Relume’s website, LinkedIn and Twitter

Show notes

Transcript

[00:00:00] Dan: The best thing we did was effectively leverage our components to create an output that users can use and also incorporate into their workflow. Otherwise, you can look at different AI tools and they can, bring you value, but even if it's AI, they still need to solve a problem.

[00:00:17] Kaz: Welcome to Zypsy Spotlight. I'm Kaz, co founder of Zypsy, a design and investment firm that supports startup founders with brand building expertise.

[00:00:24] Kevin: In this episode, we explore how AI is changing website design and development.

Today, we're excited to have Dan Anisse, co-founder of Relume, an AI website builder that helps design and build websites faster.

Dan's journey began with a clothing business and evolved into tech where he co-founded an influencer analytics platform before launching Relume.

Let's deep dive in. We're your cohosts, I'm Kevin.

Dan started his journey with a closing brand that gain quick traction, but it was his move into tech that shaped his path forward.

[00:00:58] Dan: I was studying economics and also parallel to that, wanted to learn about real world scenarios of like actually building a business.

That's was the catalyst to start to go down into that space. Built a clothing business, which scaled and did pretty well. Also failed on that spectacularly where I didn't learn about inventory management for running a clothing store.

Quickly got a lot of traction and then obviously failed. And then from that experience, I went into another startup where I was like, let's dive deeper into something that, doesn't have inventory as an issue.

And I did a a comparison website. So that's when I got my first taste into the tech world. It was part of building a team, being part of product. That's when I was able to really grasp and understand the principles of design and product and how to actually build something that's good versus something that, doesn't get traction because there's a lot of times where we'd be releasing products, not getting traction.

So quickly learn about, How to iterate product, how to build a good product. And that's where I was also lucky enough to meet my co founder Adam who came on board. So this was about seven years ago now where we first came together and started working then, which was really cool.

So that's where we developed a good relationship and built out that startup and we pivoted into another version of the comparison website into an analytics company because we're doing a lot of work with influencers. We thought to ourselves there's something deep here about figuring out how to best work with an influencer.

We pivoted that and built out a analytics platform that was analyzing influencers on both YouTube and and Instagram to, help determine the probability or increase in the probabilities of successful influencer campaign. That did really well. It resonated with a lot of other ecom companies because I think what I learned from that experience is that we experienced that problem ourselves of fluctuating results from influencers. So that was the catalyst or the driver to go and build an influence analytics platform.

And from that, because we were solving that problem for ourselves, it's really important because it comes up again, which is a good lesson for me because then I was able to see the adoption of that product being used significantly quicker and then our original comparison website. So understanding the problem, going deep into that problem and really getting true, meaningful insights was something that I learned really well in that startup. And we were then lucky enough to get acquired After about one and a half, two years in, it was called Lumio.

Going from clothing to data, tech and it was something that I really loved, really enjoyed. And that's really was the foundation of my learning, my experiences.

And then that's when it came back. And with Adam, we wanted to start another company again. We had that experience that we wanted to then push and drive into something new. We wanted to compound our experiences and make sure we didn't just, get all these learnings and just park them and not use it ever again.

And then that's what was, the main motivator and the main driver behind creating an agency. We believe that creating meaningful insights is important to start a new company. And we thought the best way to, manufacture these insights is by creating an agency in a vertical that we had a hunch in.

There was something in the no code freelancing space. So we thought the best vehicle to explore insights into that world was to develop a web flow agency. And that was the main reason, the main driver behind creating Relume and we started off as an agency and developed a lot of insights as intended which was then, the main reason why we landed on the Relume library as our first product after creating that agency.

[00:04:40] Kevin: Dan talks about how getting their hands dirty in the field, provided the clarity they needed to shape their product from day one.

[00:04:46] Dan: Adam created this really cool future letter to yourself and it outlined the criteria of why we're starting this agency, the reasons behind it and what we expect to come or what we expect after one year.

It was a letter to ourselves and letters to the founders. And it was purely done for that reason because I think the best insights you get and not necessarily going to be sitting in a room coming up with ideas. That's my experience from like my previous startups where I built something in three, four years and then we built something in two years built something in six weeks and that got more traction than the first startup because it's a meaningful insight. So I think that's been such a strong lesson for me.

That's why when we start this agency, we're actually getting their hands dirty with this stuff. We're going to learn about other stuff. We're going to learn about this industry more because we are that persona. I think being in that persona gives you more of a deeper understanding as to their problems, their ins, how they work and I think that's why we're able to then translate that across to a product that was received and adopted because we knew what that persona needed.

[00:05:54] Kevin: Coming up, Dan breaks down how they use lessons from their agency work to build Relume library.

[00:06:00] Dan: Specifically Relume was an agency that was building in Webflow. We were churning out builds design and build. So we'll be going from all the way from concepting like site map, wireframe concept design and then do it on Webflow.

So we're doing the full experience from that. It could have went so many multiple ways. Like we, we kept an open mind. We didn't try to force an idea out or force a concept out, but we were very present as to okay, what are we doing consistently?

What are the problems that we're experiencing? And I think where that started to surface or where that necessarily a problem, but what we saw that we're consistently doing was using the same set of wireframe blocks or components to build out websites in Webflow. So we're looking at all our previous, probably 10 bills that we did, and we thought to ourselves, in these instances, we are repeating a lot of the wireframes that we using across multiple different projects, but it's also proven to save us a lot of time.

Effort and energy by using this wireframe kit. So we created our own wireframe kit internally. We're using this for different clients and we found that these Webflow wireframe components were a lot more effective way to building from scratch. So instead of just completely redoing the nav header, border and doing it all from scratch, we're reusing our own internal library.

And I think that became more and more clear to us that this is a better way to build websites from scratch. And most importantly, this doesn't impair the design process. We were still able to, create beautiful websites from a design perspective, but still save a lot of time in the wireframe stages.

So that was like the moment. And then it was about one and a half years in after the agencies, when we then decided to say, okay, cool, this is the product we've been looking for let's convert this internal design system that we've created and correct the real and library and what the real and library was in its first initial version, what does this was a set of over I believe 500 components inside of Webflow components that were a wireframe style. And then we released that we built that in no code use the stack of Webflow member stack to put that all together and then released that out in Jan 2022.

So that was the the first release of Relume library, which is just a set of Webflow components in that wireframe style.

[00:08:34] Kevin: Up next. Dan explains how having a co-founder and clear roles help them juggle client work while developing their product.

[00:08:42] Dan: It's focus and deep work, right? You want to build a product, but then you still got to maintain the existing clients that you have. You still need to build out, do the work on the agency side. So managing those two was, I think one of the biggest challenges, but I think what we did well was I think the first thing is starting this with the co founder, like having someone else.

I think is one of the most important thing, important decisions that we made. If it was probably just Adam and I by ourselves, I really believe, really wouldn't. Have existed or wouldn't have been able to pivot it from agency to product. So first and foremost is identifying your co founder but then what we what we did intentionally was focus on our roles, so how we're able to then divide up the business was then I was focusing more on the agency and then finding talented designers and developers to help build out the projects on the agency side which then freed up a lot of time for Adam to then go deeper into the Relume and library and actually, do the deep work that's required to build a product.

So I think dividing your roles and also being, very focused of like when we had that time, use that really wisely. We didn't waste time. Divided the agency up into almost two distinct different parts. So it was called the Relume roster at the time where the roster was like a a group of really talented individuals who were building who designing and building websites and then separated that from the product side. So I managed the Relume roster. I don't manage the initial build and concept for the Relume library. But then that allowed us to still maintain cash flow, which is important from a business perspective. So maintain that the cash is still coming in wealthy.

Had freed up time for Adam to just go deep into building that product. And that's what enabled us to be able to do both at the same time. Cause it is a challenge. I know that the bright lights of, big client customer contracts is pretty appealing, but we also then had the foresight to turn down a lot of projects because we knew that, 30, 40, 50 K project, it sounds good from a cash flow perspective, but that's also the opportunity cost of us not having the ability to go deeper into the realm library from a product perspective.

[00:10:54] Kevin: In this section, Dan explains how meeting their CTO and the rise of AI shaped Relume's transition from a component library to an AI website builder.

[00:11:03] Dan: During our, hiatus of coming back from Germany and starting the Relume agency, Adam and I went into a, like a startup program called Antler to help generate ideas. And we didn't generate any ideas, but most importantly, we met our future founding CTO Daniel Slater.

Slater was someone we got along with really well. We didn't end up doing anything at the time, but what ended up happening is after we released the Relume library in January, 2022. We then went back to Slater and said, yo, we've got something here. I think we've got some traction. There's an MRR, there's some customers.

I think we can I think there's, this is the nucleus or something great. So we were lucky enough to get Slater joined on as our CTO which then meant we had the base and the foundation to, to build whatever we want. We had every, everything covered from product, from technical I guess from like scaling commercialization.

So us three then built out that team all throughout 2022 to continue to facilitate more of the components in Figma and Webflow. And then at the end of that year, obviously AI started to become a lot more powerful in terms of ChatGPT 3, I believe was at the end of 2022.

In 23, that's when we said to ourselves, okay, cool. We know that AI will play out in our world whether we like it or not, there's going to be some impact into what we're doing. So how we thought about implementing it was ensuring that we would be using AI, but also leveraging the components at the same time.

I think there was that crossover of like, how might we obviously implement AI, but still facilitate or like still enable the components to, to work within this process. And that's when we went deeper into the sitemap tool as our first release with the anticipation, obviously that map into a wide frame.

And then that essentially became, the AI website builder going from sitemap to wireframe and the wireframe. Essentially mapping back to our components and that was in our opinion, the best mix of actually solving a problem for our customer or actually being part of the workflow of our customer, but also then using AI and components at the same time.

We broke that up into first releasing the site map builder and then releasing this AI site builder in August 23, which essentially then brought that all together. And I think the best thing we ever did was effectively leverage our components to create an output that users actually can use and also incorporate into their workflow.

And that's really important to us is that building AI products that actually incorporate into a user's workflow. Otherwise, you can look at different AI tools and they can, Bring you value, but even if it's AI, they still need to solve a problem. And that's what we were focused on.

And I think that's why we got some traction in August when we released AI site builder tool, because people are able to export the designs out and to Figma and Webflow part of it was part of their workflow and it actually helped improve their process.

[00:14:11] Kevin: Next, Dan shares his perspective on how rejecting acquisition offers is helping them learn and grow by sticking to their own path.

[00:14:18] Dan: What we're, intentionally doing is focusing on forging our own paths. So we really want to see how far we can take it from a business perspective, but also from a learning perspective there's so many things that I believe we we will learn by forging our own path and going down our own direction because it's almost going to force us, we can't lean ourselves into some sort of board or we can't lean into or get acquired or get an acquisition obviously means that changes the trajectory of the product potentially. So I think what we've just really want to focus on internally is just doing our jobs of building awesome product. And if raising money or getting an acquisition helps facilitate that, then that's when we'll consider it.

And that's when we'll obviously we will open up more sort of discussions around that. But I think as of now, internally, we believe the best chance of us learning the most and building awesome product is just remaining without any other external capital or an acquisition.

Maintaining or being independent will just allow us to focus more on building awesome product, which again will be able that facilitates the growth for us. Our philosophy is just building great product and making sure that everything that we do is aligned and geared towards that because that's our primary focus at the moment. And right now we just believe that, any external funding or an acquisition will hinder that product for now, as I know these things change and I'm not fixated on saying that's forever, but I think that's just how we're thinking about it now. And that's what we think is the most important decision for us moving forward.

[00:15:55] Kevin: Dan talks about the value of community input and how it helps Relume develop better solutions for designers.

[00:16:02] Dan: The first thing we did when we created Relume library was align with the Slack community because what we figured out really early on is that the input from the community really helps us align our product and solving our solutions to actually solving their problems because talking to them firsthand, having direct relationships with them, and also just, building a product around the community's desires and needs is what I think we did at the start.

And it's what we continue to doing. So even until date when we're releasing a new feature or when we're exploring a new feature, we get them involved in multiple steps. So exploring a new feature before we actually come up with a solution, we want to make sure that our assumption of this problem is actually real.

So talking to our customers and via Slack organizing calls through the Slack channel and then getting on the calls and just talking through that problem that we have an assumption on. Once we lock down that, okay, cool. Yeah. That problem is real. All that workflow, the problem in their workflow is present and it's confirmed with multiple different sources.

That's when we start to come up with solutions. We return back to the community and say, based on that problem that we're talking about, here's some solutions or directions that we're thinking about in terms of what we want to build.

So having that direct relationship, I know, obviously this is like standard product the, how you build a product one on one talk to the customers, but I think the difference is here is having more of a relationship with your community, I believe helps create a better outcome in those calls and in those user interviews, because when you engage with the community want to give back and they want to help a lot.

Getting someone to jump on a call to help is a lot different to just like facilitating calls with random users who don't, Not necessarily know you. They know who we are. We're present in the community. We talk in the community. We dm, we talk to all of them. So I think having the relationship with designers in our community enables us to have better engagements when we're talking about product and product features, which I think then in turn ends up helping us develop and create a better product in the end.

So community to us, I think is being one of the most important decisions that we made at the start. And it's something that we we'll continue to foster definitely over time.

[00:18:18] Kevin: To wrap up, Dan takes us through how Relume's next big focus will be on solving challenges in the design phase.

[00:18:25] Dan: Looking at the designer's workflow, we're obsessed with making sure we're building solutions that actually fit in the designer's process. That means that we're going to continue to obviously flesh out, not only creating a sitemap and a wide frame and reload, but we want to help start helping the design process or the design stage and the design stage is broken down to, style guide builder, creating concepts or creating a style guide, creating concepts.

And then once the concept has been approved and applying that to the wireframe. So we're pretty focused right now on building solutions to this design stage because we truly believe that we can continue to help designers win not only in just sitemaps and wireframe, but also for the design stage for whether or not they're working with the client or whether or not they're working in a team we want to be there.

So right now we're focusing on building out which is our first release in this design phase which will pretty much enable designers to, use inspiration and use different sources of images to help create a style guide using AI. And I think that's going to be a really exciting step in Relume's journey as a product, because going into design is a big leap from just being in original we've always been white frames. So going into design is going to be a big leap for us, but also I think that's what excites me the most. That's what gets me really pumped to see the same way that we have helped solve the wireframe stage, I believe we can apply the same, logic and theory to the design stage, which I think will most importantly unlock a lot of efficiencies in that design process for that designer.

And I can't wait to see how that impacts the process.

[00:20:04] Kevin: If you liked this Spotlight episode, please leave us a review. Every review really helps. Follow us on Twitter at zypsycom if you don't want to miss an episode. That way, you'll be able to see every time a new show goes live. That's all from us today. Thank you for listening to this episode of Zypsy Spotlight.