What has Findkit offered to a digital agency called Dude? Comments by Dude’s CTO Roni Laukkarinen.
In what cases has Dude used Findkit for site search or archives?
We’ve been using Findkit mainly for blazing fast search and filtering features. However, we have also built some feeds with it, like for events on Business Tampere site.
Otava uses Findkit in both their main site search and guides filtering and search at oppiminen.otava.fi. One more notable company to mention is Musiikkitalo – a concert and event venue in the centre of Helsinki where we use Findkit to make easier for people to find events and service they have as the content base is pretty massive. To name a few.
How are you planning to use Findkit in the future?
The main selling point of Findkit for us is the effective indexing engine and the superior speed that the search feature has. So we are most probably going to use it with the path that has been already paved for us – search and filtering, that is.
We have previously built searches with Relevanssi powered by JavaScript or Vue.js, but Findkit provides us much faster and automatic search. So it kinda took the place that Algolia, AddSearch or similar had in the past, because Findkit is much more affordable and flexible for an agency like us.
What kind of white label solution has Dude ended up with?
We have two search products, one for Relevanssi-based search features for the customer who don’t see the value in a monthly-based search and another for Findkit-based search features which we sell as a monthly-based product on top of our WordPress upkeep product.
When organizations purchase the Findkit-based search product from us, they know they will have 100% full search which intelligently looks for any mention from anywhere on the site and is – on top of that – blazing fast. So it is in fact “a real time indexed search” of sorts by Dude which uses Findkit engine in the background.
What kind of billing model do you have?
We bill our customer just a bit over what we pay for Findkit licenses, because small and medium businesses rarely see the value of a monthly-based search feature. However we want to keep building better search features and this is still profitable business model for us as we can add it up to our upkeep model and it’s not a cost factor for us. Findkit takes the risk server-wise and we don’t need to spend time optimizing server-side things, so there is a huge value for us.
We continue on improving our sales pitch, but most customers listen when they hear it’s an indexing engine and not just a form on a website. The billing model is still a work in progress for us and we need to finalize our own product and customizing around the search feature more carefully. We’ll get there some day, but for now it’s mainly a brochure and a line in our offer basis.
What about the feedback from your clients?
Our clients have generally loved their site searches. It’s so fast and it’s a huge selling point for us when pitch it as “an upgrade” to the old search. Sometimes Findkit searches even too much and in development phase there’s often this indexing stage where not everything is going to be needed to include in the search.
Those clients that we have built custom filtering features for are very pleased of the swiftness of it. An excellent A+ reception all around.
How has Findkit felt as a technology to developers?
Vanilla JavaScript is familiar to our devs, so the tech that is using CLI tools, npm and configs is perfect for us. The documentation is very clear and on top of that we have built our own documentation on how to build Findkit features dude-way.
How has the collaboration worked with the Findkit team?
We have a shared Slack channel and open communication. We can throw ideas, suggest improvements and ask questions. We’ve got quick answers to our questions and it’s been overally great! Glad to say some of our suggestions have been implemented in production. Accessibility is one of our core values so it’s great Findkit teams takes it seriously.