Build vs. buy vs. white label: how to scale your business with new products
If you’re looking to scale your business and increase the volume of your small business customer base, one of the best ways is to expand the services you offer with new products.
You might already be supporting small business owners through digital products, business banking, broadband or hosting, but if you add in digital products like website builders or e-commerce stores, you can give your customers a more complete package – and more reason to sign up long-term.
But it’s not always easy to expand into offering digital products. You need a way to launch and scale these products in a short space of time, one that guarantees a return on investment and doesn’t end up becoming a much bigger project than you intended.
When you’re looking to launch a new product, you have three options for how to add that to your offering – either build it yourself, work with a referral partner, or source it from a white label partner.
The challenges of building digital products
You have three challenges to overcome in order to make the product launch a success.
The first is to provide your customers with a software solution that’s as robust and dependable as any other on the market, and delivers the key features and user experience that your customers expect.
The second is to win their trust in the product you’re offering, even if your company isn’t known for selling website builders or online booking systems.
And the third is to bring all of that to the market quickly.
Needless to say, that is incredibly hard to do if you’re building a product from the ground up. There’s a high risk of costs rocketing, development taking too long, or the final product being out of step with what customers need.
What about a referral product partnership?
One other alternative to building your own software is to partner with an existing website builder brand, and offer an incentive for small business owners to sign up via one of your packages.
On the one hand, this can solve the challenges of needing a robust product quickly – you can get access to a market-tested software solution that’s ready to be used by your small business customers from day one.
Depending on the program, this can still give you the benefits of white labelling. For example, we offer our own KitStart referral program. Instead of providing an unbranded product, we create a co-branded KitStart website that connects to your ecosystem – meaning your small business customers still interact with the BaseKit platform via a referral link from your brand, and you have access to monitor signups and behaviour.
But if you partner up with a site builder that already sells directly to consumers, you’re less likely to have that level of integration and insight. In that case, a referral partnership program can be as simple as providing your customers with a discount code for signing up with your partner.
White label software can be the better choice for many companies
1. It’s unbranded
A white label website builder is unbranded by nature. That means that you can apply your own branding to the platform, giving your small business customers a more cohesive user experience. When they’ve purchased the website builder from your brand, they know who to contact if they have questions or need support, but they also know who to recommend when they meet other small business owners in need of digital products.
2. It’s easy to scale
What makes white label products such a good solution for scaling is that it ticks each of these boxes. With a white label solution, you’re not just buying a product that’s already been built – you’re buying one that’s already gone through extensive market research, testing, development and refinement.
That means your new white label product has already been proven by real users and developed in line with their feedback. Not only is it ready to launch as soon as the integration phase is complete, but it’s a reliable product that your small business customers can trust to support their business in multiple markets.
3. It’s robust from day one
While partnering with a white label website builder allows you to launch a mature, user-ready platform, that isn’t just about ensuring feature parity with other established site builders. It’s also about being able to guarantee you have a robust digital solution that’s capable of supporting the kind of growth you’re looking for.
If you’re looking to offer new digital products as a means to scale, then you need to be certain that those products can handle the new volume of customers you’re planning to attract. That’s difficult to achieve if you’re building a brand new platform from scratch, and the investment you’d need for that level of infrastructure and server capacity would likely make the project too unprofitable to begin with.
A white label website builder will have been designed with exactly this need in mind. For example, the BaseKit platform has instances of supporting over 100,000 websites simultaneously, with an average uptime of 99.9%, all the while maintaining speed and stability for the small businesses hosted on the platform.
Meanwhile, we continuously monitor and update our security measures and policies to be sure that scaling the platform doesn’t leave any openings for attackers, and we provide 24/7 sysadmin and security support for partners.