Fisherman Raises $1M To Build The “No Effort Web” For Small Businesses
Having a digital presence has been a lifeline for many small businesses amid the COVID-19 pandemic. With public health ordinances across the country prohibiting or restricting gatherings in small businesses like restaurants, these firms are relying more on their online presence to still maintain and grow customer demand for their services. Not everyone can build a website for their business. Although there is a plethora of low-code/no-code tools out there, technological expertise and familiarity still acts as a barrier to adoption of these tools. Ameet Kallarackal and Nick Loeper worked closely with small businesses to build Fisherman as a solution. Fisherman automatically builds and maintains business websites within five minutes. The Boston, Massachusetts-based startup has recently raised $1m from Good Growth Capital, Lorimer Ventures, SSC Venture Partners, The Food Loft, WePay CEO Bill Clerico, Privy CEO Ben Jabbawy, Venture Lane CEO Christian Magel, Trail Ridge founder Pete Behrens, and several other angel investors.
Frederick Daso: One would assume that you have a website up and running for your business if you’re a business owner in today’s world. Yet, this isn’t the case, even with sites like Wix and Squarespace that make it easy to get a website running instantly. How have small businesses gotten along without a digital presence all this time?
Ameet Kallarackal: Website technology has been around for decades now, but it’s estimated that up to 30% of the 25 million small businesses in the US still don’t have a website, and that’s not even including the large percentage of businesses that have outdated or ineffective web presences. No-Code Do It Yourself (DIY) tools like Squarespace and Wix have made it significantly easier to create an affordable, good-looking website, especially for millennials who are comfortable configuring software products. The threshold of technical know-how to build and maintain an effective website using one of these tools is still too high for many business owners. These business owners have traditionally relied on foot traffic and word of mouth to get customers.
Over time, consumer trends have shifted, and over 80% of purchasing decisions now begin online. The optionality of small business services has increased with the power of search engines, eCommerce trends, and more efficient delivery logistics, and customer loyalty is declining as a result. These trends have been accelerated by COVID, which provided a forcing function for brick & mortar businesses to figure out how to survive in a world without foot traffic.
Daso: Why haven’t barriers to making a website decreased fast enough over time that results in a plurality of businesses lacking a digital footprint?
Kallarackal: Despite the emergence of new technologies like API-driven data collection, reusable design, and static site generation, there are significant Go-To-Market barriers to sell websites (and most other software products) to brick & mortar small businesses. SMB’s willingness to pay for a website is generally too low to make the costs associated with selling it to them worthwhile for most vendors. As a result, most vendors that try to solve this problem end up forking at the road: either becoming a low-cost self-service option with an inbound marketing strategy OR a higher cost option with dedicated sales & support teams.
Of course, this still leaves out the massive population of SMBs that are neither technically knowledgeable enough to do it themselves nor willing to pay a high dollar value for a more hand-holding experience. Ultimately, the rest of the market is big enough where these vendors decide it’s fine to ignore this cohort, and Silicon Valley generally agrees that Saas companies should run as fast as possible from “tech laggard” customers. Essentially, the barriers haven’t decreased after literal decades because most companies and their investors have been too scared to do the dirty work. For us, this represented an opportunity to carve a niche in an otherwise congested market, and we rallied our mission cry around this call to democratize the web once and for all.
Daso: What kinds of small businesses still lack a dedicated website? Are there similarities in the demographics of these SMBs owners that reflect a lack of willingness towards technology adoption?
Kallarackal: We think of our TAM as including any small business that markets and sells the majority of its products or services in person today. This includes everyone from restaurants, retail, plumbers, accountants, sole-proprietor law firms, contractors, and more. These are generally independently-owned businesses that have relied on foot traffic, word of mouth, and print advertising to grow their businesses. There are demographic similarities across segments, but I would argue that it’s less about the lack of willingness to adopt technology and more about a lack of understanding of the value of technology.
As technologists who intimately understand the value of SEO, website UX, loyalty & engagement, and digital marketing, a big part of our team’s job is to educate our customers. We work with resilient, adaptable entrepreneurs who want to do whatever it takes to help their business prosper. They also get solicited and burned by a lot of vendors, so they’re often justifiably skeptical. We need to build trust through education and then take care of their technology needs using automation.
Daso: Why did you choose to start with restaurants first? What makes them unique among other types of small businesses to use them as a beachhead market?
Kallarackal: When we were just getting started, we conducted market research and product tests with various business types. Our customer base still includes a shoe repair company, law firm, liquor store, and others from these tests nearly three years ago. We knew we wanted to focus on a single vertical segment at first to make sure that our automation software could get the output to be as close to publish-ready as possible and the sales and marketing efforts that tend to vary across verticals.
Ultimately, we decided to start with restaurants because their owners were consistently excited about what we were building for them. The ROI we were able to demonstrate was highest for restaurant websites. With COVID’s impacts on the restaurant industry, we decided to go even deeper into restaurants, build more integrations, and partner with more ancillary Restaurant Tech services. However, many business verticals are increasingly moving online, and we see a lot of opportunities beyond. We’ve architected our technology to work for any vertical, and we’ll soon be launching solutions for other types of businesses.
Daso: Fisherman, in some sense, is an automation tool. How did you decide the key pieces of information needed to build a standardized process to create functional and aesthetically pleasing websites for your customers?
Kallarackal: We spent a lot of time looking at small business websites and talking to early customers to understand what was important to their business. Given our value propositions of speed and no effort, we’re always considering how to automate various elements of the digital marketing stack. As a lean team, we’re focused on building high-ROI products and generally delay features or designs that might seem useful but don’t create much value. Every time we take a support call, we ask for feedback on existing products and market research questions on new product initiatives, which helps create feedback loops for our roadmap.
Daso: Websites are relatively easy to create yet hard to maintain. What key steps do you take for Fisherman’s customers to lower their time commitment for website upkeep?
Kallarackal: One benefit of our software-driven “Do It For You” model is that we get the unique ability to control aspects of all of our client websites. This means we can conduct tests across our customer base to see what drives better results and make bulk updates to customer websites based on the latest website performance, SEO, and design trends. We also integrate with a variety of data partners to ensure that information stays synchronized across multiple platforms. We provide access to a simple Content Editor where clients can make the most time-sensitive edits themselves – hours of operation, menu, contact info, etc. Lastly, we have a dedicated Support team that can handle edit requests and questions on behalf of customers to text or email requests and focus on operating their business.
Daso: What lessons did you learn from your first startup, Campus Insights, that you’ve transferred today in building Fisherman?
Kallarackal: The core business of Campus Insights was conducting UX Research. I gained a deep understanding of the value of talking to users and gaining meaningful insights from them. We worked directly with the product teams at clients like Venmo, GoFundMe, and AirBnB, so I learned a lot about the broader product management lifecycle and the importance of constantly iterating on products on feedback. We built a remote team of exceptional people, and I learned a lot about recruiting, interviewing, onboarding, managing, and building a remote culture. Most importantly, being part of the complete startup journey from founding to exit at Campus Insights gave me the confidence to start Fisherman and dream big about scaling a software business.