CMS2CMS is the web based service that helps to move content from the existing CMS to a new one easily and fast.
Today, we had a quick overview with Mr. ‘Ruslan Savchyshyn’; Director and Founder in Ukraine.
CMS2CMS : CMS Migration Tool
1. What is it exactly that you do and what your start-up is all about?
We’ve designed the first-of its kind CMS migration tool, which lets users migrate their website content to a new content management system. It supports a number of CMS at the moment, and still more are coming soon, so there are multiple migration combinations available.
CMS2CMS is actually a SaaS, so clients don’t need to install any plugins to run their migration. Everything that’s needed is Internet access.
We also cater for clients with no profound technical skills. The tool’s got a simple comprehensive interface and is very easy to use.
2. When has your startup been founded? And what stage is your startup currently at?
It’s been a little bit over 6 months since we launched CMS2CMS in November 2012 in beta version, and after final release was in February, 2013 the tool is now fully functional.
However, it is constantly being developed and improved with new supported CMS platforms and features. We’ve got very ambitious plans and frequently get requests from clients for the new options they’d like to be added, so there’s a good way to go yet, and we’re not gonna stop.
3. What is your startup’s business model and how does it work?
CMS2CMS works on a pay-as-you-go model. There’s no membership fee or anything like that, clients only pay for their data migration.
The pricing is flexible and depends on the number of content pages to migrate. Apart from posts and pages we also move many other website elements like images, users, comments, categories, tags, internal links etc – for free.
What’s more, CMS2CMS clients have the opportunity to calculate their migration cost using the Migration Estimator, even before they initiate the process. The prices are quite affordable, starting from only $29.
4. How did your team meet? And who in your team does what?
Our team is talented developers, designers, QAs, marketers and support managers who are working hard to deliver the unparalleled product to our clients.
Oleg is the Executive Director, Max is the Project Manager and he’s also a fantastic web designer in charge of public site and application appearance. We also have Danylo as a Team Lead, Misha is responsible for development and Yaroslav does a great job as a QA.
5. What, exactly, makes you different from existing options, what will make your product and/or service stand out in the marketplace? In other words what’s unique about you and what’s new about what you make?
Well, traditionally, moving website content to a new platform requires using an import plugin, which is not always working or existing for a certain combination, a script, that actually requires solid programming skills and time, or hiring a developer, whose services are quite expensive.
We present a whole new approach – even with no previous experience or skills clients can migrate their website very easily – literally in a few mouse clicks.
What’s more, automation makes the process very fast – 15 minutes on average.
Unlike other tools that may cause the migrated site to be down throughout the process, CMS2CMS guarantees 100% uptime for the source website, so it doesn’t cause any inconvenience to the visitors.
We also let clients perform the data migration if they haven’t got the new website live yet – using one of our test sites.
6. What is your growth like? And what milestones has your startup achieved so far?
CMS2CMS is growing very rapidly. Since its launch we’ve already conducted over 1400 migrations and have got a whole lot positive responses from our clients.
It has also caused a stir in the media, with a bunch of reviews and articles describing our migration tool.
We’ve got partners all over the world who successfully use CMS2CMS to perform website migrations and claim that it’s been a real timesaver.
7. Who are your competitors? And what is your start-up’s competitive advantage over them?
We don’t have direct competitors since CMS2CMS is the unique product. However, import plugins and web design&development agencies provide similar services.
In case with plugins, they aren’t always available for a certain migration combination. For example, there isn’t any extension for WordPress to Drupal migration, while CMS2CMS handles it successfully.
As to web studios, their services are expensive, so we win in the price field, but lack their individual approach- the whole idea of automation doesn’t allow to deal with each case individually. In fact, we are looking to partner with web developers and provide CMS2CMS as a tool for content migration letting them increase their efficiency and save resources.
8. What obstacles did you face and how did you overcome them?
The biggest challenge for our team has always been resource shortage. There are so many ideas waiting to be implemented, so many new features to introduce – and so little time. The way out is to prioritize all ‘to do’ tasks – from urgent to those which can wait and perform them correspondingly to the plan.
9. What are the key things about your field that outsiders don’t understand?
Some users tend to believe that automated tool means a tool with limited functionality, which is not the case.
Still, website migration is an extremely complex process, and CMS2CMS caters for its most time consuming and important part – content migration, eliminating the need to copy/paste everything or master programming. However, design and functionality conversion so far isn’t included in the range of our services due to the fact that automating these elements is very hard to implement and hasn’t yet been achieved.
10. Why are you going to succeed?
First of all, we’ve got excellent product with no сounterparts.
Second, we’ve put together an awesome team of professionals
Next, we all work very hard to reach our goals,.
Finally, we have strong faith in our success, and realize that it depends on everyone of us – equally. Aren’t these the components of success?
11. If your startup succeeds, what additional areas might you be able to expand into?
We aspire to become the most popular and accessible means of website migration in the world. Actually, we’re working to make this venture easy and attainable for all types of users.
Apart from that, we have huge ambitions in extending the functionality of our product to embrace all elements of website migration, like SEO, design, extensions etc.
12. Why did you choose this idea and concept to build your start-up based on?
MagneticOne (the developer company of CMS2CMS) constantly works on new solutions to improve efficiency of the online business and make it more profitable.
4 years ago we launched Cart2Cart, shopping cart migration service. It’s in high demand among online merchants, who desire to switch to a new shopping cart. So, we thought that a great number of website owners, who wish to change their CMS platform, could use a helpful tool as well. This is how CMS2CMS appeared.
13. What have you learned so far from launching your idea?
We now realize that there’s no limit to perfection. Attention to details is very crucial in order to make the product really awesome. And we also find the greatest inspiration in our clients. We learned to listen to them and the ideas brought by our clients are the ones that drive us forward and help to design the tool that would totally suit all their requirements.
14. Six months from now, what’s going to be your biggest problem?
I believe and very much hope that we’re going to be concerned with two major issues:
1. How to keep up with the increasing surge of customers willing to use our service.
2. Maintaining the rapid growth & development rate for the product.
The initial response to CMS2CMS on the market was very good, so I expect this tendency to remain. In our turn, we are working really hard to be worth the loyalty and trust we’re now getting from our customers.
15. What’s the benefit for the customer/user?
The whole idea of this service is to ease the website transition process. Whether it’s a programmer, a website owner with basic technical knowledge or a blogger, no one wants to waste their time for website migration.
So, the goal of CMS2CMS is to save user’s time and efforts (and sanity) for migration and make it the task accessible for everyone, not only for the “gurus”.
16. How did customers / users find out about you?
CMS2CMS went viral as soon as it was launched. Our clients wrote posts about their migration experience, shared the info in the social networks (mostly Facebook, Twitter, Google+, StumbleUpon) and recommended us to their friends in forum discussions. We are also getting reviewed from time to time, so clients can reach them via articles too.
17. Who are your current customers / users? Who are your target customers / users?
We are targeting webmasters, web developers and designers, website owners and administrators, and of course, bloggers – and they are our current users.
Of course, for individual website owners, CMS2CMS is usually a one-time service. With webmasters and developers, it’s a different story – they frequently deal with various kinds of migrations and can use our tool multiple times. We created Partner Program for them, which is a great way not only to save efforts for migration, but also get extra income.
18. Where do new customers / users come from and what makes new customers/users try you?
Lots of clients find us through Google, others come from Facebook, Twitter, via friends referrals.
We also made it maximally easy and for clients to try us. There’s Demo migration that’s provided for totally free and is easy to set up (it actually moves a limited number of content items from one client’s site to another) – it’s 100% risk free for a user.
Another innovation we recently introduced – clients can try the data migration even if they haven’t got the target site (the one they’d like to move to) ready yet. We migrate their data to one of our test sites and let them check its front- and back-end, to evaluate the results.
19. What do your customers / users say about your product and/or service?
We often hear that CMS2CMS is surprisingly easy to use and very fast. We get many thanks from clients to whom our product proved to be a real timesaver. We encourage any kind of feedback, and are extremely pleased to know that the tool works out great for our clients – that makes us feel we’re moving in the right direction.
Apart from that, clients frequently provide suggestions and ideas on the new features that we do our best to introduce.
20. How are you going to scale?
We’ve got huge plans on new supported CMS platforms and brand new migration features that have never been brought to automation before. We want to cater for website owners using various platforms and break the limits for them. There’s a whole lot of things in store for you, just wait and you’ll see.
21. What’s the biggest missing feature? The one thing customers/users keep asking for?
It’s hard to give one answer to this question since the features change quickly. As I already mentioned before, we work hard to react to clients’ requests and implement the sought-for features as fast as possible.
Still, we’re lots of requests for new CMS platforms to be supported, which aren’t that easy to integrate as each CMS is unique and needs to be very well studied.
22. Are you going to internationalize? And if yes how are you planning to expand your start-up’s operations accordingly?
We’re actually already international company, and never targeted for the local market only. Before the launch, we projected our service to be available from any spot on Earth, and so it is.
Internet has no boundaries and neither does CMS2CMS. Our clients come from all corners of our planet – from USA to China, Norway to Australia.
23. How big do you think you can get? Why? And how you are planning to achieve your goals?
With number of Internet users and website owners growing at a huge pace – It is an extremely ambitious goal, but we plan to become the most popular means of website migration in the world.
The recipe to success is having a fantastic quality product, never ceasing to improve and refine it, hard work and dedication to ensure customer satisfaction. If our customers are successful – we are successful too.
24. Are you looking to hire a new workforce? And if yes, what job vacancies do you currently offer and where can potential applicants contact you at?
In future, as the company grows further, in most probability we’ll have to extend our Team with the new professionals. It is the most valuable asset for the company, so we’ll be looking forward to welcoming new Team members.
As for present time, however, I don’t think we have got any job vacancies open.
25. Are you looking for partnership opportunities or funding from Venture Capitals (VC) or other funding sources? Or your business is self-sustainable? And if the first option applies where can potential partners / investors contact you at?
Yes, we’re open to discuss partnership and investment opportunities. Also, we’ve created a Partner Program for webmasters, developers, CMS vendors, hosting companies and freelance specialists. For all the information concerning CMS2CMS Partnership, please visit http://www.cms2cms.com/offer-for-partners-and-resellers/ or contact us at partner@cms2cms.com
26. What advice do you have for fresh entrepreneurs?
If you try, you either succeed or lose, but if you don’t take the challenge – then you definitely lose. So, believe in what you’re doing and work hard on pursuing your goals – that’s the secret of success.
