Rapidly building websites to scale: An interview with Duda Co-Founder and CEO Itai Sadan

Itai Sadan

Co-Founder and CEO of Duda , the professional website builder for digital agencies and SaaS companies. In 2008, he noticed how the internet was shifting towards mobile and developed a tool that made websites mobile-friendly. Since then he has evolved the platform into a fully responsive website builder targeted at businesses, agencies, and SaaS platforms. There are currently, over 900,000 active published sites on the Duda platform. Before founding Duda, Itai held business development, product, and engineering positions at companies such as SAP and Amdocs. At age 21, he also founded InterSight, a startup for data storage. Itai has a BSc in Computer Science and Mathematics from the University of Ben Gurion in Israel and resides in Mountain View, California.

Russ - Hi Itai. Thanks for joining us today. Business News Digest is excited to get to know you and learn about the work you are doing with Duda.

First off, how did you start Duda?

Itai - Like any other respectable startup, I started Duda from my garage in Mountain View, California. I founded Duda with my high school friend, Amir Glatt, who is now our CTO. Back in 2008, websites were still largely being formatted for desktop, but as the iPhone grew in popularity, Amir and I noticed that Amazon and eBay were doing an excellent job optimizing their sites for mobile. We then thought — what about a dentist, the local pizzeria, or the other 200 million small businesses out there? How can everyone develop sites that work flawlessly on mobile devices without having the budgets, resources, and skill sets of these wealthy tech companies?

So we jumped at the opportunity to create a tool focused on making mobile-friendly websites that were streamlined for customers on the go. This put us on the map as a modern solution to small business needs, but we didn’t stop innovating there. Although having a great mobile web experience is still at the core of our platform today, we have transformed Duda’s functionality into a broader site builder with a variety of functions that web professionals need in order to develop responsive websites that look great on any device. It has evolved into the premier professional website builder for companies that offer web design services to small businesses, which I’m happy to say has brought us enormous success.

Russ - Can you please explain what led you and Amir to make Duda a platform for web design companies?

Itai - We took great notice of the frustration many web professionals experience daily due to the lack of suitable web design platforms. So we decided to create the solution. Our team developed a product that integrates all of the components needed for professional-grade web design to effectively serve digital agencies and SaaS companies that create solutions for small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs). Sites built on Duda are lighting fast and complete with ready-to-go SEO. This simplified the workload for agencies and SaaS companies while delivering beautiful web designs for their clients. Reducing site build time by 50% allows designers to scale their businesses in ways that weren’t practical before. 

We saw that web professionals — particularly agencies and freelance web developers — need to build their brands as well. With Duda, they can truly make our platform their own, and rebrand everything from the editor interface and dashboards all the way down to the presentations and tools we provide to assist them in client acquisition. And once they acquire clients, we make it simple for them to get working with our content collection tool. Instead of emailing the client back and forth, the platform has capabilities built-in for SMBs to upload all of the assets. A web pro can also import images and other business information from their SMB client’s current website and Duda will import the assets from the old platform and use them as the basis for the new one. This allows an agency to start building a new site for a client much faster.

Our platform also has integrated capabilities to help web professionals manage client feedback on sites that are under development. This streamlines the client revision and review portion of the web development process. We even offer features that allow the client to make certain changes themselves — complete with roles and permission settings. We understand that communication and client collaboration is key when building trust and a relationship with clients, so we make it easier than ever to make this a top priority for agencies. 

In addition to serving agencies, we also support many technology providers that offer their solutions to SMBs using the Software as a Service (SaaS) model. These vertical SaaS platforms provide a full software stack for a particular industry, so they tend to want to integrate all the tools required to run a business in a specific industry into a single solution — one that an SMB can get from a single provider. 

Small businesses know that having a powerful, fully functional website is essential to their success. Because of this, forward-thinking SaaS platforms also are now using Duda and its robust APIs to offer SMB websites integrated with their vertical SaaS offerings.

Russ - Why are web design professionals making the transition to Duda?

Itai - The most common thing we hear from web design professionals is that Duda improves their business. For example, we regularly hear from our agency customers that they can build websites for their clients in a third of the time it would take them with other solutions, without sacrificing their creativity. This has a huge positive impact on their bottom line, and is a huge boost to their overall productivity.

For example, one reason agencies are attracted to Duda is because it has remarkable team collaboration features. They can share assets, designs, and templates across their team using the platform. If your agency has multiple designers and a great template for displaying photos for a client, you can save that into a library that other designers in your agency can then use on other projects. This speeds up creation time immensely for their future projects. Agencies can develop a library of designs for clients over time instead of having to reinvent the wheel for every project.

Another reason web professionals use our platform is that we are constantly innovating and we have aligned our platform with Google’s current best practices for optimizing web page load times. Every time you publish or update a site in Duda, it is automatically optimized for speed. This is incredibly important, because Google’s latest algorithms are built to favor sites that load the fastest and are optimized for mobile devices. Google states that websites get an estimated 7% fewer conversions for every second a site takes to load, which is a huge reason why companies are transitioning to our platform.

Also, in June 2021, Google’s Core Web Vitals will result in major changes to the way websites are ranked and takes user experience into consideration. We conducted a survey of web professionals, and nearly 30% of the respondents stated that none of their existing client websites have been proficiently optimized to meet Google’s new standards. This is alarming when 92% of those surveyed believe that the changes will have a moderate to significant impact on website rankings. We recognize that optimizing for Core Web Vitals can very well give a site the edge needed to rank above its competitors, so we are making sure that all sites built on Duda are ready for Google’s transition.

Russ - In what ways is Duda unique compared to other website builders, such as WordPress?

Itai - Overall, Duda makes web design a lot more painless than its competitors. Duda is stacked with easy-to-use features that allow designers to build sites at a much greater scale. Major differentiators between us and a service like WordPress include that Duda is extremely simple to set up, our updates are hassle-free, we have fewer security issues, and our platform makes administrative tasks significantly easier. 

In addition, Duda offers far superior customer support for our users. Our award-winning customer service team is readily available via phone call, email, chat. Stellar customer service and support have always been an essential component of the Duda brand, but the coronavirus pandemic actually drove us to expand our service and launch new customer support channels to ensure our customers succeed in these challenging times. We’ll always adapt to make sure our users have the best customer experience possible. 

Russ - I understand that Duda also has a great emphasis on being an educational resource. Can you expand on that?

Itai - One of the many reasons our users can integrate Duda into their businesses so quickly is because of Duda University. Duda University offers both quick and practical courses and comprehensive certifications. We give our users the resources to learn everything they need to know about our intuitive website design platform. Duda University is open to anyone who wants to invest in their career and business as a web professional. Our courses and certifications are geared towards designers, developers, and agency owners who want to improve their skills and earn recognizable credentials to drive growth and success. This has been particularly helpful for the many folks who are looking to make extra income due to the pandemic. 

Our online learning resources provide the education needed to quickly succeed in one of today’s most desired professions. I’m proud to say that we currently host nearly 900,000 sites on Duda and that will only grow as more businesses learn the benefits of our platform.

Russ - I have to ask, where did you get the name Duda from?

Itai - We actually got the name from ‘The Dude,’ which is the main character of our favorite film, The Big Lebowski. The Dude exemplifies our brand because he rolls with the punches and is always there to help his peers. In short: “The Dude abides.” 

Russ - Thank you for your time, Itai. It’s been a real pleasure talking with you. From all of us at Business Digest Magazine, we wish you all the best with Duda as you continue moving forward.

Russ Turner

Director at Business Digest Magazine

Director at Academy of Business Digest