Today I will share a story behind one of our core products Shimbi CMS.
In 2005, when Shimbi Labs started its operation from my drawing room, we designed our first official website www.shimbi.in using HTML (Unfortunately, we don't have a backup of it.).
The website was colourful and simple to navigate; we used some flash animation (Flash was popular then!). I was updating it on a regular basis. However, the website built in static HTML needed more time and effort for an update. Well, as long as the frequency of updates were up to one or two per month on the portfolio page, it was okay.
By 2006 January, things got busy at our end. Customer's projects occupied our web designers, and my co-founder and I got busy in acquiring new customers, slowly Shimbi Labs website left untouched. On one weekend, the fact of not updating my website struck my heart. We, the company that aimed to help other businesses to get their websites, were not able to maintain our website regularly. I was upset.
Very next morning, we decided to shift the website to a content management platform; as CMS will help us to update our website frequently and easily from anywhere and anytime without disturbing our web designers. At that time, we looked at popular CMS options for Shimbi Labs website such as Wordpress and Joomla. Wordpress, then was more like a tool for blogging than a website CMS, and Joomla was complicated to use and relatively new platform. After the days of deliberation, we decided to build our own CMS for Shimbi Labs website.
That is how Shimbi CMS 1.0 born.
We worked on Shimbi CMS according to our requirements. At the same time, we started receiving several requests from our customers from Japan to build their websites using Shimbi CMS. Such demands also encouraged us to continue developing Shimbi CMS new versions.
In 2008, we decided to work on Shimbi CM as a full-time project. We decided to build it as our main product with one goal in mind: to help people get online without the needs of technical skills or a big budget. Later in 2011, we renamed it as CMS Budo, and in 2014 we started shipping it as Budo - a hosted version of CMS Budo using SaaS model of delivery.
Also, read our story - How We Funded and Developed Our Products Through Services (Bootstrapping)
During all these years, we developed a deep understanding of small business owners requirement, difficulties, and solution for their online presence.
This blog is just one example, posted by our CMS Budo user
Today thousands of small business around the world use Budo for their website. However, for us, a number of subscribers are not as significant as we wish to see the number of people updating their websites more often than their Facebook timeline. With our product, we want to help every small and medium-size business go online and grow their business.
We firmly believe that every business and professional needs online presence. Moreover, to build an online brand with a business website, it is always essential that the business owner has full control over the website, instead of depending on the outside agency.
Our product will empower small businesses to take control of their online identities, and provide them with the creative freedom to build their online brands.
Our vision is to help small business to grow beyond their physical boundaries, provide them with a creative tool to express themselves, and build a personal and professional brand.
Please share your experiences of building and managing your business website. What sort of difficulties you face while updating your website. What is your wish list from Budo?