UENI Builds the Website For You, Because DIY Doesn't Finish
UENI refuses to give small businesses a website builder, on the grounds that most never finish one. Its founder and her interviewer disagree, at length, about what happens next.
On this page
Everyone in the website-builder market sells the same thing: tools, and the freedom to use them. Christine Telyan’s argument is that freedom is exactly what her customers do not want.
There are a lot of great do-it-yourself website builders out there, but most of the businesses that register for those sites actually don’t complete the journey. It’s estimated it’s about 10 to 20 percent.
Christine Telyan, co-founder and CEO, UENI
So UENI does not give them a builder. It builds the site for them — “responsive and relevant to their business from A to Z, including professionally written text” — sets up their Google My Business listing, and pushes their details onto other platforms. Telyan’s own name for the category is unglamorous and precise.
“We’re kind of an agency for the masses.” The business signs up, answers a few questions, and receives a finished site. The entry product is free, and at the time of this conversation UENI was not trying to convert anybody.
The mismatch she is selling into
The market thesis is one sentence: “80 percent of customers go online to find local businesses, but only 20 percent of small businesses in Europe — and less elsewhere — have a proper online presence.”
Latka pressed on why the incumbents haven’t closed that gap, given Wix, Weebly, Squarespace and Google Sites all have free tiers. Telyan’s answer is about the specific shape of the reluctance, and it is the most convincing part of her case.
“They are afraid it’s going to cost too much. And even when it’s free, they don’t have the time, or they think they need technical skills. Even with a do-it-yourself website builder, they’re not sure what exactly they need to do. What content do I need to put on my site? What layout? As a plumber, do I know what text I need to write so that it’s attractive to my customer base and it’s going to be optimised for search? That expectation — that they’re going to know that and be able to do that themselves — that’s difficult.”
Latka conceded the point three times, and then made the objection that runs through the rest of the interview: “Unless you have big rich people behind you writing you massive cheques, I actually don’t think it works.”
Twenty thousand, and counting fast
UENI launched around the start of 2015 as something else entirely — a consumer-facing search platform for finding the cheapest, nearest, best-rated local service. The pivot to serving the businesses instead was about eighteen months old, and the current freemium model had begun in the summer of 2018.
Latka wanted the balance-sheet number rather than the growth rate, and had to ask three times to get it. Telyan kept redirecting to the trajectory — 200 to 300 businesses a day, aiming for 500 a day by the end of March, targeting 150,000 to 200,000 by year end.
His response to the 20,000 is worth quoting, because it is more generous than his reputation suggests: “I love that. I can sense that you feel like that’s low, but everyone starts at zero. I love it when people are like, this is where we’re at, now here’s how we’re getting to 150, here’s the assumptions we’re making, here’s how it’s going to work.”
Paid plans run $9.99 to $19.99 a month and add a custom domain, professional email and listings on about twenty platforms. Target cost to acquire a free user: “three to five pounds — but it’s often going to be very much less than that.”
The arithmetic that doesn’t close
The central exchange is Latka running the numbers on the plan as stated. Assume UENI hits 150,000 free users. Assume it converts 5 percent, at the low end of the 5-to-10 percent range Telyan takes from comparable businesses. Assume $10 a month.
“That would put your paid monthly revenue at like $75 grand a month — so still less than a million bucks in ARR, even if everything turns out, on $18 million raised. How do you grow into the last valuation you raised at?”
Telyan does not dispute the arithmetic. She disputes that subscriptions are the product.
These businesses are relying on us as their storefront. Will we run transactions through the platform? Will we, through partnerships, do other kinds of relationships with other businesses and then do a revenue share? Those are other potential areas to explore. How many businesses out there really have such a large engaged base of small business customers?
Christine Telyan, co-founder and CEO, UENI
It is a real answer — a fragmented, hard-to-reach market is genuinely valuable to whoever assembles it — and it is also, as she half-concedes, unbuilt. She calls the conversion numbers “kind of arbitrary” and the LTV assumptions “right now speculation.” The runway to find out: “about a year and a half, two years.”
Churn, when the customer goes out of business
The most interesting operational detail is that UENI’s churn is mostly not about UENI. “Most of the people that are leaving are leaving either because their business closed, or in some cases they’re looking for a more custom solution for their online presence.” She puts the rate of attrition in the base at seven to nine percent.
Latka reached for the cautionary comparison and named it precisely: Constant Contact, where Gail Goodman “burned through 50,000 churned customers every quarter,” the public markets did not reward it, and the company was sold. His point was that a base of small businesses is structurally leaky no matter how good the product is.
Telyan agreed on the structure — “for us it’s actually a structural consideration you have to take into account” — and declined to give revenue churn on the paid base, because the paid base was not what she was managing. “Right now I’m growing the free base today, so I don’t have good data to share with you to answer your question.”
What she does measure is engagement rather than logins: actions taken in the last thirty days, page views, and business inquiries — “those calls, booking requests — that translates into real revenues for the business.” “It’s a free base, but it has to be an engaged base.”
A note on the revenue figure in this URL
This post’s address claims UENI reached $3 million in revenue. Nothing in the record supports that number, and the record itself is not in a state to support much.
The GetLatka profile carries four revenue figures for UENI, every one of them flagged as an estimate, and they do not form a sequence: $10 million recorded for December 2020, $2,584,615 for 1 December 2023, and $16,280,000 for 6 December 2023 — five days later — then $32,078,420 for October 2024. A company does not go from $10 million to $2.6 million to $16.3 million in five days. Two of those four are wrong and there is no way to tell which from here.
The February 2019 figure of $150,000 now carries an estimate marker too, because Telyan gives no revenue number anywhere on the tape. What she gives instead is the count: 20,000 businesses, 45 people across the UK, the Czech Republic and Ukraine, and a plan.
Asked what she wished she had known at twenty — eight months pregnant, sleeping four hours instead of her usual seven and a half — she gave two words that fit a founder arguing with an interviewer about whether her market exists: “Be bolder.”
Sources — Christine Telyan interviewed by Nathan Latka, recorded 11 February 2019. Revenue, headcount and funding figures from the UENI profile on GetLatka, with dates as recorded.
