Tech users and Non tech usually encounter a situation where they have to install a piece of plug-in or any code on our website to know how it looks and functions. What if, I told you that there was an easy way out?
Eager makes it easier for website owners or businesses to preview and install software onto their website. The mission of Eager is to bring the high quality apps and libraries being developed all around the world to every website owner on the internet, no matter how small.
Before founding Eager, Adam Schwartz and Zack Bloom, have the experience of building open source projects which garnered over thirty thousand GitHub stars. It quickly became clear however that many website owners struggled to install projects, and many more would never find them.
The way these apps were installed hadn’t changed since JavaScript was created in 1995. A project would include some JavaScript and CSS files, and leave it to the website owner to figure out the magic incantation required to configure and install the app. Adam and Zack decided that it was time it got a little easier. In March of 2014 they founded Eager to make what contribution they could.
Beyond the Eager App Store itself, Eager advocates for a common vocabulary around app installation. With this common standard, when an app is added to the Eager App Store, it doesn’t just open it up to Eager’s users; it opens it to the world.
“Since we’re a marketplace, we suffer a chicken-and-egg problem. We need apps to acquire sites, and sites to entice app developers. We’ve observed however that site owners aren’t interested in installing an app store, they’re looking to install a specific app that gives them immediate value. So we’ve focused on promoting apps which deliver immediate value to site owners (https://eager.io/app/ZYBle8qUhKFJ) and on making Eager the easiest way to install those apps.
Similarly, open-source developers don’t care as much about our install base as they do about how interesting our product is and how it can help them reach more users. We’ve been contacting them and working with them to create apps for the store, and add install buttons to their existing sites“Zack says.
They are working on using their app promotion strategy to grow, until they have around 10k sites, at which point they can start to entice larger companies to make revenue-generating deals.
The vast majority of websites are owned by non-technical people. On the other side, there is a world of high-quality client-side tools and open-source projects out there which these people simply can’t install. For them, Eager opens up the potential to use something like InstantClick which was previously only accessible by people who knew what HTML was.
Even for people who are more technical, Eager allows them to preview plugins on their site, place elements wherever they wish, and have a generally better management experience than copy-pasting some code they later forget about.
Using Eager opens up a whole set of advantages for any website owner. Faster response time for JS and CSS, Reliability through 100% uptime, Automatic dependency management, Real version management. For design consultancies and other companies which make websites, Eager also has the advantage that it reduces the complexities of their workflows.
For example, a single Eager account can have multiple “Sites”, and manage the apps installed on these sites under one roof.
On the developer side, Eager provides a much better means for app developers to get users of their apps. When they built PACE (http://github.hubspot.com/pace/docs/welcome), they found that bounce rates were huge because they were asking thousands of non-technical website owners to paste a script and link tag into the head of their pages.
By making installation easier, we lower the COCA of SaaS apps which want to place something in their customers’ page. As they grow, they hope to become the place where a user would come when they need to add something like comments or a lead generation form on their website. Those users become customers who the SaaS app would never have been able to acquire otherwise.
We hope to create an app store where anyone who can build an app can generate revenue and build a business. SumoMe (http://sumome.com) and Filament (http://filament.io) are competitors, in that they provide a similar offering.
They are, however, repositories of a handful of apps they themselves have built. We are a platform, through which anyone who can write an `install.json` file can add an app to the store. About half our current apps weren’t written by us, and our hope is to gather thousands of apps.” He explains.
Adam feels that, If either company decided to move in the direction they are going in, they could become a threat to Eager, But from a technical standpoint, they claim to already outpace them, and they have no plans of slowing down.
WordPress plugins, SquareSpace and other CMS are a threat in a way because they provide all-in-one experiences.
“We see Eager as a complement to a good CMS in that no CMS is likely to ever have the resources or inclination to invest in an app platform the way we will. Partnering with SquareSpace and similar CMS is something we plan on pursuing in the future to help them deliver high-quality apps to their customers. Google and Segment.io have Tag Managers which allow people to paste snippets of code into their sites. We are currently working on using our app promotion strategy to grow until we have around 10k sites, at which point we can start to entice larger companies to make revenue-generating deal.” He says.
Their target audiences are website owners and developers of website software. They plan to monetize through an App store, which has free and paid apps, where they take a small percentage from the revenue of the Paid apps. And Saas businesses acquire customers.
