Founder here. It's been a long way since the beginning [1]. We started as a "design to code" tool where we tried to automate the process of design hand-off. We had hundreds of converted projects and worked with great customers like IDEO, Zillow or DocuSign. The problem was that customers weren't coming back (even when we delivered the best code possible - we had human intervention to guarantee perfect outputted code).

We learned 3 points: 1) it's technically extremely challenging to get 80%+ conversion accuracy for all designs consistently; 2) we don't want to have a fixed cost (human validation) for every project delivered (we want to be 100% SaaS); 3) we don't want to be discardable - after getting the code our customers had no motivation to stay on the platform.

At this point we started talking to our customers (mainly web agencies and SMB owners) about what would be the easiest way to publish websites [2]. Many startups have questioned this and built great tools to help solve the problem (Webflow, Squarespace, Wix, etc).

This seems like a solved problem, right?

It turns out people want something simpler... like the document tool they use everyday for virtually everything [3]. This was the moment we decided to focus 100% on a new tool: a Markdown editor to help you create a personal profile, a landing page to capture emails, or something a bit more elaborate. Fully responsive and free.

To be honest the product is still in an early stage. There are basic features that aren't implemented (like version history, multi-page websites or collaboration).

Even at this stage I think this can help some people, so go ahead and check it out! [4].

We can now publish custom websites as easy as writing a blog post.

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[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20624140

[2] I'm happy to discuss our pivot decision

[3] We interviewed 33 customers. By the way, I was amazed and completely surprised about this conclusion.

[4] https://zecoda.com/