Why I picked a Bangladeshi tech company over the Silicon Valley darling
“I think your website sucks big time”
That was part of a reply from an investor to one of my monthly updates.
I knew he was right, but the criticism still stung a little bit. Mainly because I had built the website myself, and I didn’t think it was that bad.
“No, no, he’s right. It totally sucks. No offence.”
And that was the feedback when I checked in with one of our other investors. Okay, okay, I get it. It sucks. Time to do something.
I had originally built our website using a no-code tool called Dorik, which I had found via ProductHunt, where they had been “Product of the Week” around the time I was looking for a website builder.
I thought Dorik was amazing. So easy to build an attractive front-end. My only real experience with website building prior to this was amateur stuff in Wordpress, and also building a hobby website in Bubble, where making good marketing webpages is… challenging shall we say.
What’s interesting about Dorik, is that although it looks like something straight out of Silicon Valley, it is in fact from… Bangladesh.
I’m a fan of companies that originate from smaller countries (I wrote “smaller” before I checked Bangladesh’s population — 170 Million! OK, so I meant… non-usual-major economies) , so although I was using Dorik 100% because I found it to be the best website builder, I was additionally pretty pleased to also support the economy of a developing country.
Isn’t this meant to be the great beauty of the digital industry? That you can build a successful company anywhere? Even somewhere like Bangladesh or Ireland?!
However, now I had this urgent task to get a new website up “quick and dirty”. I planned to use a freelancer to help us, and since it seems like every startup uses Webflow — the darling of Silicon Valley — we figured we would have to fall into line, switch to Webflow, and hire a Webflow freelancer.
First we tried to play with Webflow ourselves, since it too positions itself as a “nocode website builder”.
Woah — ok although I guess it technically is “nocode” there is a massive difference between using Dorik and Webflow. With Dorik I, a non-technical person, was able to do almost whatever I wanted nearly immediately. With Webflow that was next to impossible. There would certainly have been a learning curve to build anything there.
Still, we resigned ourselves to our new tool and started looking for a Webflow freelancer.
Meanwhile, I happened to mention to Dorik support that I was likely to move to Webflow soon. That set things in motion…
They contacted me and offered to build me a new website design themselves when I told them reason for our pending migration. Free design? Sign me up!
I told Dorik’s designer what I was looking for, based on some other “deep tech / data infrastructure” companies I liked that are similar to my own company, and over a couple of weeks they built a template for me.
In the end, I still hired a freelancer (via the Dorik facebook group) to help me implement the design as I lacked the time to do it myself. Also, as a non-designer I was aware I would probably murder Dorik’s design in the implementation!
The freelancer (who was apparently based in Slovenia, which fits my “non-usual-major economy” criteria, but is actually a small country) did substantially re-design the template so we ended up with something that looks reasonably unique (at least for the data infrastructure space!).
Is Dorik perfect? No - I am sure you can still get a “fancier” website using Webflow. When you look through really polished Webflow websites, there is something that gives them that extra 5% “fancy”. Not sure what it is — something about the element loading transitions maybe.
However, if you are earlier stage, on a tighter budget or want to build yourself, then Dorik is perfect. In my humble opinion, the features that it lacks to take it to “enterprise” level (well, “scale-up” I guess), would be full site backups and better multi-user roles control. Plus I would *love* to be able to make a larger expanding header menu…
I fully expect that as Dorik continues to develop, it will close the shininess gap with Webflow. That said, I don’t exclude the possibility that we eventually move to another CMS, like Webflow, especially when we hire more people in marketing and they want to work with a platform with which they are more familiar.
So all this leaves me wondering if Dorik could be come Bangladesh’s first international tech unicorn? It almost surprises me that, despite its Product Hunt success, it remains relatively little-known in the startup world. I hope more Western agencies start to adopt Dorik as an alternative to Webflow, as I really think it is a fantastic choice for early-stage tech companies.
You can see our old “sucky” website here, and the new, current version here. Do you like the new design? Let me know in the comments!
