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Small companies and individual businesses account for over 99% of all enterprises in the United States and the United Kingdom. This group not only has much lower spending willingness than large companies but also has diverse and non-standardized demands. James Clift, CEO of Durable, has encountered many such small companies in his multiple entrepreneurial experiences. He realized that entrepreneurship requires understanding marketing, accounting, taxation, employee management, and a series of matters unrelated to the work itself, unlike just demonstrating excellent performance at work. What Durable is trying to do is to let AI solve these problems, turning individual businesses such as plumbers and yoga instructors into "super individuals," and making the "full-stack" entrepreneurship difficulty approach the single-point "work."

In the future, everyone can "be their own boss," becoming a free choice instead of work.

• The role played by AI in products will bring differences in product experience. "AI assistant" is a generic concept, and most Copilot products focus on specific workflows, while Durable focuses on "business," encapsulating the process and returning to the business to create more user-friendly products.

• Compared to competitors, Durable's products revolve around the principles of "de-employerization" and "simplicity," simplifying entrepreneurship and making the experience of entrepreneurship approach "employment." The content generated on the webpage is all generated by AI without user participation. At the same time, the front-end simplifies interaction, with AI assisting users in navigating between different functions and documents, improving the common but not user-friendly problem of tool products.

AI Native Product Analysis          

Durable

1. Product: Durable

2. Product Launch Time: December 2022

3. Founder:

James Clift, serial entrepreneur. CEO of Holopod, VisualCV, and Workstory

4. Product Introduction:

Durable, an AI website building tool, helps small and medium-sized entrepreneurs quickly start their businesses

5. Development Story:

• Established in September 2021

• Raised $6.25 million in seed funding in December 2022, led by Altman Capital (the venture capital firm of Sam Altman's brother Jack Altman)

• Raised $14 million in funding in December 2023, led by Spark Capital

01. What is Durable?

If asked which people AI will first change the lives and work of, construction workers, bakers, nurses, and other professions are certainly not the easiest options to think of. Durable is an AI business tool aimed at these groups of people.

Durable is a startup company aimed at making it easier for small businesses to start and operate. It provides a set of tools, including website builders, CRM, invoicing software, and AI assistants. In December 2023, it announced a new round of $14 million in Series A funding, and the startup has raised a total of $20 million. Spark Capital is the lead investor in this round of funding, and all previous investors, including Torch Capital, Altman Capital (a venture capital firm founded and operated by Jack Altman, the brother of Sam Altman from OpenAI), Dash Fund, South Park Commons, Infinity Ventures, and Soma Capital, also participated in this round of funding.

The Durable team is based in Vancouver, Canada, and founder James Clift is a serial entrepreneur. Since high school, James Clift has been doing his "business." From local life services such as window cleaning to providing website design for local businesses, then to a recruitment platform, and finally to an AI website building platform, Clift has been entrepreneurial around "how to do business." In Clift's multiple entrepreneurial experiences, he realized that becoming "your own boss" requires understanding marketing, accounting, taxation, commercialization, customer support, employee management, sales, payroll, and a series of details unrelated to the work itself. What Durable is trying to do is to let AI replace all of this and make the "full-stack" entrepreneurship difficulty approach the single-point "work."

Since its launch a year ago, it has been used to create over 6 million websites, mainly helping small companies provide basic online services. Specifically, users can use Durable to quickly create a website for an online service and manage and track it.

02. How does Durable combine with AI?

Website building tools are not a new track. In fact, the history of website building tools is almost as long as the World Wide Web and browsers. From the earliest FrontPage and Dreamweaver, which required knowledge of HTML, to modern website building tools such as Wix and Wordpress, which are no-code drag-and-drop, website building products have been iterating along with the changes in the Internet and user needs. How does Durable combine with AI to differentiate its product from previous products?

1. AI Website Building Tool

When users use Durable, they focus on "business." When using it for the first time, users only need to provide the business's brand name, industry, business location, and website language, and Durable will quickly create a website homepage based on the information provided by the user. The style and content of the website are all generated by AI, and users can choose to edit the webpage directly to further optimize it.

In addition to the homepage, users can also choose to create subpages, such as a Team page introducing the business's team members. At the same time, the website created by Durable will automatically adapt to the browsing experience on tablets and mobile phones. After saving the created webpage, users can choose to make the webpage public immediately, and once public, anyone can access the webpage based on the URL.

2. AI Website Optimization

In addition to website creation, Durable also provides website data analysis functionality to help users track website visits. It also uses AI to assist users in SEO optimization and creates blogs to attract traffic to the website. Furthermore, Durable can generate personalized comments for the website based on the styles of platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and Google, helping users to conduct marketing at a lower cost.

3. AI Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Invoicing

In addition to helping users create websites, Durable also provides AI CRM functionality to help users better support their website's customers. For example, Durable can help users directly access payment functions on the website, quickly reply to and summarize customer emails, and generate personalized email guides to encourage customers to leave five-star reviews on the website's Google review page.

4. Durable Assistant

Durable Assistant is Durable's conversational AI assistant, which can help users grow their "business" by providing marketing plan suggestions, answering user questions, and assisting users in completing certain actions. How is this specifically understood? And how does it differentiate from ChatGPT?

The key difference between Durable Assistant and ChatGPT is that Durable Assistant focuses on helping users grow their "business" and integrates searches for "documents" and "functions."

For example, when a user expresses a desire to promote their website, Durable Assistant will provide simple suggestions and references based on official blog content. When the user further expresses a specific requirement that Durable can fulfill, such as creating a Google ad, the Assistant will directly help the user navigate to Durable's Google ad creation page. It can be anticipated that as the platform's functionality becomes more complex, the Assistant can provide significant assistance.

03. Durable's Vision

Website building tools are a long-standing and fiercely competitive category, but Clift believes that Durable is targeting an underserved market. Clift stated that Durable targets small companies, including those with possibly only one person (or individual businesses), such as plumbers, personal trainers, and so on. If these groups are also included, it will be found that there are a large number of "small companies" that exist, but they lack software and systems, yet have a need to provide online services.

Small companies and individual businesses account for over 99% of all enterprises in the United States and the United Kingdom, but they are a very complex group. This group not only has much lower spending willingness than large companies but also has diverse and non-standardized demands.

Although at least dozens of startups and large companies have already targeted these small companies and provided programs to help manage teams, accounting, banking, payroll, and other matters, Clift believes that Durable still solves new problems with the power of AI.

In CEO Clift's view, AI is a democratizing force, and Durable plays a role in democratizing enterprise services. Firstly, with the help of AI, small and medium-sized enterprises can obtain more practical and applicable tools and services at a lower cost than before. For example, Durable is currently providing logo creation and brand building tools for its customers, but if such services were provided by consulting firms, the prices would be high. Secondly, for Durable itself, AI can help them expand their business more easily without the need for highly customized products and sales strategies for very different customer profiles. The democratization or universality of AI exists for both enterprises and customers.

According to Clift, Durable's ultimate goal is to become an all-around assistant for "super individuals," providing proactive suggestions on how to better operate the company. This "proactive AI assistant" feature is expected to be tested in the second quarter of 2024.

Reference:

https://techcrunch.com/2023/12/12/durable-cements-14m-to-build-ai-powered-tools-for-small-businesses-in-service-industries/

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