Generative AI has revolutionized productivity in various industries, including website design. With an abundance of tools that generate web designs through simple prompts, the competition is fierce. Established players like Wix and up-and-coming startups like Relume, all offer this innovative technology. However, a new contender, 10web, claims to have the upper hand.
Based in Armenia, 10web offers a unique service, allowing users to quickly generate websites using WordPress, instead of the traditional and complex approach. WordPress, a popular content management system, is notoriously difficult for beginners to navigate, requiring advanced web design skills. Additionally, it does not provide hosting services, resulting in users having to manage more backend tasks.
Despite its complexities, WordPress still powers approximately 40% of all websites on the internet, thanks to its extensive customization options, according to estimates by w3techs. In second place, Shopify has experienced a surge in popularity as a go-to platform for businesses shifting to direct-to-consumer ecommerce, utilizing the Canadian company to build their online stores instead of relying solely on Amazon.
To enhance the usability of WordPress, 10web’s engineering team, located in Yerevan, has integrated generative AI models such as Llama 2, GPT-4, and Stable Diffusion into the site-building platform. This remarkable tool requires an immense amount of development effort because, as co-founder Arto Minasyan explains, “architecturally, building a platform for WordPress is not easy.” Minasyan also owns Krisp, a startup that uses machine learning to remove background noise from audio.
“You need to have a reliable hosting infrastructure, a managed service for WordPress security, backups, and uptime. All of these tasks are extremely challenging because every website is essentially its own entity,” said Minasyan. “In contrast, with a closed-source solution like Wix or Squarespace, you just build one backend and generate pages for each site.”
Minasyan is confident that prioritizing the usability of WordPress will yield great success, given its massive open-source community of two million developers. Founded in 2017, 10web currently operates with a positive cash flow and boasts approximately 20,000 paying customers, which includes some SMB customers with several hundred websites. In total, 1.5 million websites have been generated using 10web.
The company’s revenue model consists of two options – charging fees per website or based on traffic. They also plan to introduce a payment system, empowering users to charge their clients, with 10web receiving a commission fee.
Currently, 10web generates $5 million in annual recurring revenue and is projected to reach $25 million in ARR by the end of next year. Minasyan credits the company’s growth to its desirable location in Armenia. Like other former Soviet Union countries, Armenia boasts a large pool of affordable engineering talent.
“Armenia has AI talent that costs around four times less than in the U.S. Here, we can access the best AI talent available,” suggested Minasyan. “However, if you’re a web builder based in California, you have to compete with Google, Amazon, and OpenAI, making it challenging to attract top talent.”
Armenia has recently emerged as a tech hub, with its capital city producing the country’s first unicorn, Picsart, providing a blueprint for other startups to follow. Due to Armenia’s relatively small economy, many entrepreneurs have expanded their businesses overseas, specifically targeting the U.S. They employ engineers from Armenia to take advantage of the abundant tech talent while hiring marketing and business development teams in the U.S. This is the same strategy used by 10web, with its 70-person staff. Additionally, having a presence in the U.S. can be advantageous for fundraising purposes.
“99% of Armenian startups target the U.S. market,” disclosed Minasyan. “While you can raise less than $1 million from Armenian VCs, if you’re looking for a few million in seed funding or tens of millions for a Series A, you have to go to the U.S.”
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