The days of hiring a developer to build a rudimentary brochure website for your company are long gone. With the advent of the Cloud, and improvements in web building applications, many business owners now build their own sites. Enter Basekit, the DIY site-building platform founded by brothers Simon and Richard Best alongside Richard Healy. The service allows users to build their own fully hosted websites within a browser using templates and web apps. The trio took the idea to start-up accelerator programme Seedcamp in 2008 where they triumphed and, more importantly, secured the seed funding to really get the venture off the ground. Juan Lobato invested soon after, but liked the company so much he decided to come on board as CEO. Here, he explains why the company’s timing was spot on.
We're a product technology company providing an easy and very compact way of creating a website. We offer a better way to create websites and the apps that live within those sites.
Anyone creating a website for commercial purposes. We target small businesses so our customers are either the owners themselves or the professionals and freelancers that build the websites for them. The split depends on the market. In Brazil most of our customers are web professionals building for small businesses. In the UK there's a balance, so half are web professionals and half are small business owners building their own sites. We currently operate in 10 markets: the UK, the US, France, Germany, Brazil, Spain, Mexico, Argentina, Columbia and Chile.
I'm not the founder of the business but came on board as an investor after Basekit won Seedcamp. When I met the founders I asked, 'why Basekit?'. They had a strong belief that web applications should be built within the web. It allows you to really leverage a lot of what the internet has to offer because you're building those applications from within it. In the past, applications were built on a desktop or laptop but now this concept of building a web app within a web app is becoming more relevant. At the time, I was looking at hosting and IT services within the Cloud so that's why I became interested. I made an initial investment but we soon realised it needed some more finance and at that point we all became more committed and engaged.
It's the way we have understood the trends around technology, especially web applications. The Cloud has really matured over the last couple of years. Because we were the company that came last to try to solve the problem, we understood the trends better than some of our competitors so our technology is more updated. We may not have been the smartest, but we had the best timing.
We have development in Bristol, online marketing and development in London, support for partnerships in Barcelona and are opening an office in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Whether we have a physical base somewhere really depends on the size of the market there. We needed a good hub to get tech talent so Bristol was a no brainer for us, and the office space and salaries are much cheaper. In terms of the London office, it's very international. You can fly in and out of London to anywhere which is important for international business development.
It was building the team. We started with four and needed 10 other guys to build the business. Trying to get those guys is very difficult because you need to convince them. You can't pay a huge amount of money so some people have to take a pay cut to come and work for you. It took us about 18 months to get that right - to find our partners in crime. Now we have about 40-50 people at any given time.
There have been some great milestones such as the first deal we put together with a big hosting company or the first sale we did in Brazil. But the major breakthrough for the company was definitely winning Seedcamp and getting funded. It put Basekit on the radar. Before that it was just a small company in Wales and there's no way NESTA or myself would have noticed them unless they'd gone through Seedcamp.
It sounds ruthless but it's not to put up with people too long. If you're not right for them and they're not right for you, you should cut the relationship as soon as you can. That's the most common mistake for young entrepreneurs, even really driven guys. Be focused on people. Be good to them, but don't put up with things you shouldn't. If you feel that somebody isn't right for your business, the sooner you tell them the better.
In this video, Juan evaluates the UK and Europe as a place to grow a company. He sums up the entrepreneur-friendly tax policies available to UK start-ups and offers his suggestions for ways to improve the start-up market.
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Nesta Operating Company, a company limited by guarantee registered in England and Wales with company number 7706036 and charity number 1144091. Registered as a charity in Scotland number SC042833.
