And this was the start of Brizy, let's say. Of course, Brizy was launched in 2018. But everything that we've worked on before was basically leading to Brizy. We saw this writing on the wall, early 2016, 2017, everything was clear that was going in the front end. Everything will be visual, everything will be low code, no code, drag and drop. And we've set our minds to build a website builder that is multi-platform, which we'll probably address in this interview.

And we launched Brizy WordPress in 2018. Then Brizy Cloud followed in 2019. And we are preparing to launch Brizy for Shopify. So, this is something that we've been working on. So, we'll have a third platform in the ecosystem, Brizy for Shopify. And recently we've launched Brizy AI. So, we are multi-platform and multi-purpose. And it's a great time to develop products like this, especially with the rise of AI.

Host: Amazing! So, there are great things to look forward to. And just to add on to that, I just read your interview online, where you mentioned that when you started creating Brizy, you wanted to quote 9 to 5. And you mentioned that after quoting 9 to 5, you actually worked 9 to 9. But when you're working for yourself, hours don't matter. I really appreciate that.

Dimi: That's absolutely correct. When you're doing what you love, and we've basically poured our hearts and energy and money and everything into Brizy, you're not having a job, it's more of a passion. Us being all four of us product guys, and worked in companies before that build products, and we are the products at heart. So, we love the product.

Host: Amazing. So, Dimi, when you launched Brizy back in 2018, what gaps in the industry did you spot that drove you to create this platform?

Dimi:  We launched in 2018, yes, for WordPress. We've looked into the market, and we identified two primary gaps, let's call them, that were holding back, in a sense, agencies and also individual creators. First was the complexity and steep learning curve for the tools that were available at that point. Many website builders, despite being labelled as drag and drop and easy to use, were still yet too technical and maybe a bit unintuitive for the average user, especially those without coding experience.

So, this complexity goes to frustration, you waste time, and ultimately, of course, you lose productivity. And the second one was the lack of white labelling. And this is an important part of our business right now, the white label solutions where agencies and SaaS businesses or enterprise partners that we have are offering our solution, white label, as a third party integrated directly in their systems to their clients.

So, this is crucial for agencies and bigger partners for brand consistency and to provide a seamless experience for their clients and users. So, Brizy was mainly created to address these gaps by offering an intuitive and very powerful and customizable platform or a no-code platform, let's call it, that empowers users to build with our tools, to build a website without any prior need of a technical experience.

Host: So, Brizy is clearly a blessing for non-coders or amateurs who are just starting to build websites.

Dimi: Yes and no, and I'll tell you what I say, why I answer this yes and no. It is yes, but at the same time offers more than that. So, I look at it as when you're going to the pool, right, when you're going to the pool, and you have that kids pool where it starts slow and then goes deeper and deeper.

This is exactly the right parallel with Brizy as well, because if you want to get in the shallow end, where it's very easy to use, it's fine, you can build websites. But if you want more advanced functionalities and more advanced features, they are there, you can use them, you just need to advance a bit inside the pool and go deeper into the swimming park. And the tools are there to be used, but that's why I say it's easier for starters, but also available, all the tools are available for professionals if they want to build with blogs, custom assets and things like this.

Host: So, the more you explore, the more you learn.

Dimi: That's absolutely correct. Exactly. Yeah.

Host: Moving forward from identifying these gaps, why is it vital for brands to have compelling websites these days and what are the key elements to keep in mind while creating websites?

Dimi: Well, in this tech enabled world, in this tech commercial world we are living in today, probably a website is most likely than not the first point of contact with a potential lead or a potential customer or even with partners. So, it's very easily identifiable as a crucial element to your overall brand experience or because it's the first thing that customers or users are experiencing, your digital card or your website.

So, an impactful website and a compelling website is no longer a luxury, it's a necessity right now. And more importantly, it's also affordable. So, there is no point in not having one.

And in fact, it actually helps you a lot with your business. It serves as a digital business card or as a storefront or a marketing hub or it's mainly a key to communication tool, let's say, with your potential clients and partners and visitors. And in a world where consumers are bombarded actually from left and right with the information and choices and everything, having a well-designed website and very easy to navigate and visually appealing, it can set you apart from the competition and doing more business and it can help you in that regard as well.

Yes, if I were to conclude and say maybe a website needs to be quickly to capture attention and to convey the value proposition of your business very effectively, this is what I would say a good website needs to do. And of course, to provide an easy and great user experience. And we have all the tools in Brizy to let you build such a website with no skills required.

Host: Absolutely. The first impression is everything and especially on the websites. It becomes the face of the company.

Dimi: Exactly. Exactly. It's sometimes probably more important than anyone from the company because it's your client's first interaction with your company and with your brand.

Host: Now discussing on creating something impactful, turning a business idea into a success is really tough. What hurdles or challenges did you face in making Brizy and how did you overcome those challenges?

Dimi: It's a very good question. And there were challenges and there are still challenges and there will be challenges always. Transforming Brizy from a business idea, I think it was something gradual. Because we worked in WordPress for a bunch of years, and we understood, and we understand that space. Naturally, because we saw that writing on the wall that everything will go no code, low code and in the front and very visual and easy to use.

It was gradual. In 2017, for example, we've created a small team inside the company that worked on this prototype interface project. That is back then when we sold the premium teams, WordPress teams, via a company called ThemeFuse that later on transformed into Brizy. And that prototype that this research and development team worked on proved successful and that transformed to Brizy.

So, it was a gradual implementation of idea. It didn't come like this overnight and we implemented it overnight. But it was gradual. And transforming this business idea into a website building tool has indeed been a challenging journey, especially with all the competition around. Because we got and I early on got this question a lot.

Why bring another mushroom into the sea of mushrooms, right? Because there were options out there. It was filled with obstacles that tested our resolve and our creativity to find out solutions there. I would say that one of the most important ones is balancing the simplicity with power.

This is one of the biggest challenges we have, because in order to create this tool that was intuitive enough for the beginners and also powerful enough for professionals, it was pretty challenging. And many websites either cater to one of these categories. It's very easy to use, but it's so easy to use that it's not powerful enough.

And or it's very, very powerful, but it's very complex. Hundreds of options all over the place. And you need a very hard learning curve or it's a very hard steep of the hill to climb in order to learn to use it.

This was the biggest challenge we have, this simplicity and power balance. And the solution here, I think, was our UI and our user experience, how you are using the builder and how we've incorporated and spread all the media options and all the features around in such a way that lets you interact with them in a need-to-use basis. And we engage with our community as well and our partners, our white label partners, and we are still engaging constantly with them in order to get that feedback loop.

And so, we can iterate and quickly modify or quickly refine our platform. So, maybe a bit of a long-winded challenge, but it was an important one. Another one was competing in a desaturated market that I've talked about, right? There were website building tools out there and we enter in a space where you may wonder why another tool, but the website building industry is very competitive.

There were already some established players dominating the market. So, breaking through all the noise and to make Brizy stand out was a significant challenge. We focused on making it unique.

I was talking about that usability, UI, UX, and our white label angle. This is something very important for us because we are offering, and there are not many tools out there that are offering this solution. We are offering our platform via APIs and via all the features that encompass a white label third-party platform.

For other businesses, agencies, SaaS businesses, enterprise partners to brand it as their own, integrate it very tightly inside their own products and offer it as their own website builder to their users. So, this is a very important point on how we overcame the competitive part. And I would say scaling the platform is another challenge, but this is something constant that goes always because as you grow, as Brizy grows, so the technical challenges grows and demand servers, ensuring that the platform would scale efficiently to handle the growth of users and everything.

So, this is something that we're constantly investing in and taking care of. And another one that every business, especially the digital one, faces is adapting to the marketing, the market changes, right? So, AI comes along or other technologies. The digital landscape is constantly evolving.

So, the trends, technology and everything are something you need to keep your ear on the ground always and be closely connected with the industry trends. Get the feedback loop from your community. And one important example here, I would say, and a good example to how we overcame or how we are approaching these market changes is our recently launched Brizy AI.

And probably we'll discuss this a bit later, that lets you build websites in under 20 seconds. So, a journey filled with challenges that are continuing to go on, but we listen to our users and we'll continue to improve our platform. And in this way, we've been able to turn these obstacles into opportunities, let's say.

Host: Thank you, Dimi. Thank you for sharing that information. It's exceptional to see how you and your team managed to balance expansion with so much effectiveness. It's really inspiring.

Dimi: Thank you very much. I would not take too much of the credit. I'm working with some very smart people. So, I will leave the stage to them to take the credit. And I will, of course, share it with them after our interview.

Host: Yeah, quality of a true leader. So, moving on, with Brizy serving both individuals and large companies, how do you tailor your strategies to meet with such diverse needs in the industry?

Dimi: It requires a multi-faceted approach, I think. We recognize that different strokes for different folks, right? This is the expression in English.

So, we recognize that the individual user and large companies have a different need and expectations, of course. So, we've structured our offerings in such a way, in plans and also in features, in such a way to cater to these different segments. So, we have the individual users and small businesses that are building the websites for themselves.

And for them, we've built this segment is mostly self-served. So, we're not catering to them like we're catering to enterprises and to B2B partners, to our white-label partners. We have an academy for the individual and small businesses for them to learn how to build to learn the tools and to learn how to build an effective, optimized website.

So, this is one of the segments. And the other one, which becomes more important for us, and we're focusing more on this segment, is the agencies and the larger companies. We offer more advanced features for them, like our white-label solution, API integration, elements building, and a slew of solutions like this that let them seamlessly integrate our platform inside their products or offer it under their own brand.

This is very, very important because it's valuable for companies that need to maintain brand consistency across multiple client projects. If you're offering a white-label solution as your own, it talks to time to market. It talks to cost effectiveness as well.

How we are building the tool, and this is something very important, I think, how we are looking at it. We are building the tool for the first category, so for the end consumer, right, that is using the platform. But we are distributing the tool through the second tier we've discussed here, the second clientele or the customers, through the agencies and larger companies.

So, the idea here and the mentality and the vision here, build it for the end consumer, someone that doesn't know coding, so make it stupid easy to use and with a great user experience, but distribute it through the partners, agencies, SaaS businesses, and the larger enterprise partners through our white-label solution. So, this is the vision and the mentality we're operating on. And the strategy to meet the needs is we're offering, for example, tailored solutions for some of our bigger partners.

We are willing to do some custom work for them and things like this in order to ensure we cater to their needs. We also ensure scalability and flexibility, right, because if you are a partner or an agency and you start growing with us, it's important for us to be able to sustain that growth so you don't hit a ceiling, a hard cap. Support is, again, very important to provide support and customer success, especially for agencies and for bigger partners.

And last but not least, offering flexible pricing models. This is something we are very in tune with, and we try to offer very flexible pricing models to cater to all this, right? If you're a small business, we give you a plan that is catered for you in terms of pricing. If you're a larger business, we can discuss, do a demo, go through the sale lifecycle and offer you a custom plan based on your needs.

So, this multifaceted approach, with this multifaceted approach, we ensure that Brizy remains a valuable tool for our partners, clients, and consumers.

Host: That's really an impressive approach, especially acknowledging each segment's huge needs for its impactful progression. Speaking of innovation, Brizy's new AI website builder sounds very exciting. What cool features does it offer and how do you see AI transforming website creation as of now?

Dimi: The introduction of Brizy AI marks an exciting evolution, actually, in how websites can be created. It makes the process of creating websites more intuitive. You just give it a couple of inputs, your business industry or your business description, and everything gets created by the AI.

Copy images, choosing the right template for your industry, and so on and so forth. So, it's more intuitive, it's more efficient, and the result is tailored for the individual needs. It's a great start to start building your website, or if you're an agency or SaaS business, to offer this as a white-label solution to your partners or clients.

We recently introduced something very nice, like a cherry on top, and it's very interesting and pretty sexy. We recently introduced a Google My Business integration, and what this does, we are connecting to Google. And if your business is on Google already, add it into the Business My Google library, which what business is not there, right? We can extract all the information from there.

So, industry, some images, copy, and things like this. And Brizy AI will create the website directly connecting to your Business My Google profile. And that is very, very interesting and nice because it brings in, I think, I'm not sure we have the testimonials implemented yet, but I'll need to check that in.

But it brings in, eventually will bring in testimonials, real testimonials from your business. So, it's very, very interesting. It's clear that AI is transforming website building as we speak into a more accessible and efficient experience.

It's very clear that. And the main, I think the main idea here is to allow you to focus on what's more important for your business, right? Growing your business, not necessarily sitting there and doing everything from scratch. So, you use the AI to go 80, 90 percent, and then you just go in and use the Brizy builder to just modify a bit and adjust and maybe add a couple of more pages when you want. But the idea is to help you spin a website and start faster.

Host: Absolutely. So, I have an extra question on this topic, just to pick your brain. How do you think the infrastructure would look like in the near future where AI is integrated in the search engine itself?

Dimi: If the AI is integrated in the search engine itself, this will take some time until, in my opinion, until it will happen. It's interesting. And there are open AI, you can use their voice to find out all sorts of things.

But let's not forget that in search, Google still is king, right? And Google, I think they are having a bit of a conundrum here, so to speak, because everything is based on ads on Google, right? And on text, on search, on copy. So, bringing in the AI voice might be a bit challenging, I think. And it will be some time until this, I think, until this will come to pass, because I fear that Google doesn't want to renounce text searches so fast.

But we'll have to live and see what will happen. As for me, I think it's a pretty good thing to, I mean, it will be something very, very interesting to have AI-based voice search rather than text only.

Host: Thank you, Dimi, for that answer. So, could you tell us more about Brizy's cloud services and how they benefit the users?

Dimi: Yes, of course. Of course, Brizy cloud is actually an important part of our Brizy ecosystem and one of our multi-platform CMS options. And it provides only one solution, let's say, for creating, managing, and hosting websites.

And why I say all in one? Because if, for example, in WordPress, you can use Brizy for WordPress to build your website, but the infrastructure, hosting, domain backups, custom security certificates and everything you need to handle for yourself in WordPress, and probably your hosting offers you some or part of those. In Brizy cloud, you don't have to worry about anything because you'll get everything included. That's why it's an all-in-one solution.

Besides automatic backups, SSL certificates, regular maintenance and updates made by us, scalability and performance optimization, you also get a global content delivery network, which we employ. So, everything is handled by us. It's an all-in-one solution.

And you don't have to worry about it. You just build your website, start with AI, and then build your website. And you are good to go to handle your business growth and focus on what's most important.

So, all this offers a simplified website management, of course, and faster time to market on top of a very cost-effective solution. So, I would go for Brizy cloud any day of the week if I had the chance. But what I would like to mention here, and this is very important, and this is where multi-platform angle comes in, which no one in the world offers right now.

If you're starting in Brizy cloud, you don't have to have any worry because if at some point your client or you or your partners that you're working with decide to switch to WordPress and say, look, we need to go to WordPress because we have, I don't know what plugins we need there. For some reason, you need to switch there. Nothing is lost because we've created this layer that communicates between our platforms because the builder, guess what, is the same in all the platforms.

And you can go from Brizy cloud, save the designs and move them to Brizy WordPress and continue your work there and build your website on Brizy WordPress. So, this is the power for agencies on this multi-platform angle because you are building it once and then move it if you want to WordPress or if you want to cloud, you have the option to move it. You're not locked into the cloud and need to rebuild the website from scratch.

Of course, there are multiple advantages here like support in one place. You don't have to learn multiple tools and cost effectiveness if you are building, and you don't have to learn multiple tools. So, it's very, very interesting, this multi-platform approach.

Hope I've covered the Brizy cloud part.

Host: For sure. It's clear that Brizy cloud adds significant value to its users as it streamlines the entire process for them.

So now focusing on the competitive landscape. I know we spoke about pricing earlier, but how does pricing play a role in staying competitive and how do you decide on pricing models for your products and services?

Dimi: Well, pricing plays a crucial role in gaining a competitive advantage, especially if it's a highly competitive industry like our website building and cloud services space. I mean, the right strategy here can attract a broad customer base, drive revenue growth, of course.

What we do and how we approach it, we've built, of course, started the competition and started the baseline and benchmarked all the builders out there and see how they are doing it because we got a disadvantage to come later at the table, but at the same time, an advantage that we can look at what's at the table and try to do it better or more affordable or more easier. And we started everything, and we've built, I think, our pricing very competitively. First of all, we look to cater to all the potential customers from the end consumer that is mostly self-serve to the range of bigger enterprise partners and bigger SaaS businesses that are integrating our product in a white-label environment.

And what you see on the website, for example, those are fixed plans, but we are on the agency part, bigger agency parts and SaaS businesses, enterprise contracts. We have a flexible model where we negotiate, and we adapt prices based on our clients' needs. And we found out that this works very, very well for us.

And guess what? Our partners love it as well.

Host: So, it's combining value and accessibility. And lastly, looking to the future, what website building trends do you see dominating the industry and how is Brizy getting up for them?

Dimi: This website building industry, like all the industries, but especially the digital side of things, are constantly evolving and very fast in the last years.

Several emerging trends are likely to be the future of the industry, maybe in the next 5-10 years. I would put my money on AI, because I think this will be something very prominent in all the industries. You can see very easily now that everyone is trying to catch this wave of AI and implement something related to AI, just to have that AI in the title.

Luck has it, and it's not our doing here, that AI and website building fits very, very well. So, it's not just a buzzword with Brizy AI, it actually works and it's something very, very cool and it helps you. So, I would bet my money on AI.

No code and load code development will continue to grow, I think. So not only in the website building space, but anything that lets unexperienced people and unexperienced users to build businesses and to build communities and to build products without the necessary skills. So, this will grow as well.

And AI, I think it's tightly built in this no code, low code example. A lot of more people will come online, I think. So mobile and accessibility will be very important in the next years.

So responsive designs, mobile first, will continue to be important. And I will put money on that as well, if we were to make a bet. And regarding this, Brizy offers actually all the tools to let you build responsive and mobile-friendly websites.

It's a low code and no code and also offers the AI part. If I were to go a bit further, I would say maybe integration with some augmented reality or virtual reality or something like that. I'm not sure how that would look necessarily, but I think this might be an interesting thing to keep our eyes on, because this might play a bigger part on the website building part or on the experience, online experience part rather.

Because we are looking at websites right now as a two-dimensional text on a page. But the future websites probably will not necessarily be that. Who knows?

Host: It's probably going to be more immersive.

Dimi: Probably more immersive, exactly. Just to wrap it up here with this question, Brizy is committed to continuously innovate, and we're trying to keep our ear to the ground. And we're investing in the research and development and try to be on the cutting edge and explore new technologies and trends.

We're trying to stay ahead of the curve as much as possible and to ensure that Brizy remains a cutting-edge platform, let's say, that meets the evolving needs in the industry and the evolving needs of our users and partners.

Host: All right. Thank you so much for sharing your wisdom. It's been a pleasure and so much fun exploring the evolution of Brizy and the future of website building with you. Thank you so much. Thank you.

Dimi: Thank you very much for having me. And thank you. Thanks, everyone, for watching this. And thank you again.

Host: Thank you all for tuning in. I'm Sayali, your host, signing off.

Stay tuned for our next episode of Extra Mile by Hightech Nectar. See you soon.