• 13.12.23

BaseKit 2023 Year in Review

Last year we laid foundations for future growth, not just in our commitment to performance, but purpose as well. This year, we’ve certainly witnessed the fruits of those foundations and are proud of the journey we’ve carved, as we continue on our mission to be a force for good through our partnerships and social and environmental responsibility.

Here, CEO Simon Best looks back on another year of growth and change at BaseKit.

Demand and diversification

2023 has seen a solid focus on diversification for BaseKit, as we’ve sought out new opportunities and avenues to place our tech in the hands of small businesses around the world. We’ve pivoted our marketing efforts into new sectors and launched new solutions to drive our tech democracy mission wider. As a result, it’s been really exciting to see attention and demand for our products within the banking, fintech and SaaS markets in particular.

Banks and fintech companies work with small businesses at scale and so they are perfectly positioned to add value via BaseKit’s sites, stores, and bookings products to help them transact online. SaaS companies often need websites to deploy features of their existing product. Building out these features themselves requires significant investment of time and money, so BaseKit’s simple products and easy API integration mitigates this investment and makes coopetition a more favourable approach to add value at speed, and increase loyalty for SaaS businesses.

With this demand, we have seen more opportunities for new partnerships. This year we’ve signed a record number of new contracts with exciting partners in several sectors. As we continue to explore new sectors and geographies we’re learning about what these new partners need to be successful. This year we launched several new business models including a referral model (KitStart), an agency model (Built with BaseKit) and are fine tuning our API model for growth in 2024. I’m excited to see how these avenues develop next year and beyond.

Partner growth

We’re positive about the year-on-year growth many of our existing partners have witnessed selling our product to small businesses in many markets in 2023. This has been largely driven by our ever-improving delivery team who are working even more closely with our partners to ensure they have everything they need to thrive.

In particular we’ve also seen a strong uptake of our bookings product, where we’ve quadrupled uptake from partners looking to appeal to customers who increasingly want to diversify their businesses to sell services as well as products.

We’re also continuing to learn from our small business customers in order to help partners grow. This year we rolled out improvements to our store onboarding which resulted in a 75% increase in store activation in the six months after the release. We have always believed it is important to build super simple and intuitive experiences for small businesses and this data shows the impact this approach has had.

Stand out moments

One of the biggest stand out moments for me this year was becoming a B Corp certified company! We are on a mission to build a business that has a positive impact on people and the planet, and the certification reflects our fantastic team’s ongoing commitment to this. We will continue to embed B-Corp’s principles across the business, giving careful consideration to the social and environmental issues of every decision we make.

Personally, I’ve been excited by the work we have done in our community efforts this year. In particular it has been amazing to see the team’s commitment to supporting our charity of the year, Fareshare South West, which helps to tackle food poverty by redistributing surplus food to those in need.

From helping to re-label thousands of rice krispie bars, to packing hundreds of winter family food parcels, and completing a bike ride, we’ve supported in many ways. We’re now also making our way (virtually) around the coast of Great Britain – walking, running, and doing other sporting activities to help raise money. We’re happy to support such a fantastic cause, and it’s been fun and healthy too!

I’m also proud to have celebrated BaseKit’s 15th birthday this year. It’s been an incredible journey bringing the vision we had to life. We always wanted to create great products that millions of people would use every day, and I’m prouder than ever to see that happening 15 years later, and to be able to continue to build upon that vision going forwards.

Looking to the future

Next year, I’m particularly excited about the pace of AI and we will see website builders and other digital business products make big moves. Despite not yet witnessing great examples of website building with AI this year, as generative AI evolves at pace it won’t be long before we see it aligning much more effectively and seamlessly with website builders. This will be a game changer and the winners will be those products that embrace AI at their core and don’t just sprinkle in AI features.

As we move into 2024, I’m looking forward to doubling down on our core website product and its API. We will be improving the quality of websites that can be built with BaseKit by providing a new set of features for design excellence – featuring AI where we think it adds the most value. This will help users to create even more beautiful websites with the same simple user experience that BaseKit is synonymous with.

We’re also building out our API to allow developers to build websites programmatically. As AI-driven website creation takes hold our API will better enable AI and SaaS companies to plug websites into their experiences.

As we continue to enhance our offering, to strengthen the positioning of existing partners across the globe, and support new partners, from agencies and web pros to SaaS and fintech, we’re heading into 2024 in a strong position to continue to successfully execute our brand mission and I’m excited about what we can achieve in 2024 and beyond.

 

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