“Websites are pretty hard to create, or they cost a lot of money to design and maintain, and for what? In the end they don’t generate traffic unless you continuously invest in advertising. Now there’s another way.”

Nicolas Fayon and Benoit Vallon are the co-founders of PageYourself.  PageYourself is a new way to promote a brand, business, product, or service with the very first website on Facebook: the f-Site™. The f-Site™ is a new kind of website composed entirely of apps. It appears right on your Facebook Page and enriches your fans’ experience. The f-Site empowers you to foster a strong community, generate traffic, convert it into fans, and convert fans into clients or active supports.

The Page Yourself f-Site is a new website standard on Facebook. It allows you to customize your page like never before with a suite of apps and design elements. With it, you can enhance how visitors experience your unique page, grow and engage your community.

BusinessInterviews.com: How did you come up with the concept for PageYourself?

Nicolas: Benoit and I aren’t new to internet (who is these days?). We’ve been building stuff on it since childhood. I was 14 when I started creating websites, and I started to make money at that time. My parents were a bit alarmed when checks written out to me started coming in. We met while working together at a previous start-up. The entire product (the f-site) and service (the do-it yourself engine) we provide was borne from frustrations with not having online tools we needed in our daily lives. Lucky for us, studies from 2012 on have supported these needs. 2012 was the first year in the history in which website traffic went down; social networks and mobile use grew as a result!

Websites are pretty hard to create, or they cost a lot of money to design and maintain, and for what? In the end they don’t generate traffic unless you continuously invest in advertising. Now there’s another way.

Social networks, on the other hand…They can be incredibly powerful for those with thorough knowledge of and strategy on how to take advantage of their prowess. But who does? Most business owners, small and large, can’t afford to take the time.

And this is what we hope to solve right now with the f-Site. The f-site is a new website standard: the first website within Facebook, consisting of viral apps you can design yourself, easily and for free. With an f-Site, you take the best qualities of websites and pair it with the strengths of social networks to create a new kind of website embedded with powerful marketing and acquisition strategies. The best part? There’s no need to have prior knowledge in marketing, code, or design.

BusinessInterviews.com: What does it mean when you say that “the f-Site is hyper-connected to Facebook’s Open Graph?” What distinct advantages does that provide your customers with?

Nicolas: I won’t go too much into the technical details, but as I’ve mentioned, the f-Site is entirely made of apps. Every app has its own goal—notoriety, engagement, showcase, data collection, etc—but is also tied together within the f-Site, Facebook’s Open Graph, and all the other sharing features. A concrete example might make it clearer. Let’s say you’re a PageYourself user. You’ve created your free f-Site and add the following apps: Product Showcase to display the array of your products, Newsletter to obtain subscriptions directly from Facebook, Contact Form so your customers can reach you at any time, App Downloader to enable your app inside Facebook, and a Quiz Contest to encourage fans to interact with and share your page.

Every single one of those apps is connected to the Facebook sharing features. In other words, when a Facebook user interacts with an app, their interaction is shared with their network. Their interaction will appear on their friends’ News Feeds and has the potential to appear on their Timeline. A certain percentage will undoubtedly click through, if interested. Thus, the snowball effect.

BusinessInterviews.com: What’s one marketing strategy that’s worked really well for you so far?

Nicolas: Well, perhaps it’s cliché; but our first focal point has been listening to and analyzing user feedback. We’re clearly not into the advertising model; there are alternative methods to drive traffic more intelligently and at vastly lower prices. And so, we are concentrating on a content marketing strategy. So far, so good! How does it work? We create content for our blog with best practices and tips that our users (and more generally, everyone) can use.

Advertising strategy vs content marketing strategy is the same difference between a bad salesperson and a good one. A bad salesperson is in your face, trying to sell you their product or service now, and focusing on the short run to drive sales up. A good salesperson doesn’t have to do any of the above.

He or she just offers advice and tips on how to improve and mentions how his or her product helps. And at the end, s/he leaves you with a business card. The whole point is, if you are trying to sell, you are classified by your prospects as a seller. With a gentle approach, you avoid your customer or client having their defenses up trying to maximize their resources and minimize their risks. And most of all you become an expert.

In the end, of course, it’s your choice. What I’m trying to say is that if you have a quality product, there’s no rush to make people pay. Provide them all the resources they’ll need to make the best purchasing decision and you will be rewarded, sooner or later.

BusinessInterviews.com: What’s the biggest risk that you’ve ever taken and how did it turn out?

Nicolas: That’s a very good question, and we’ve actually taken a big one. The classic startup path is to get an MVP, raise money (in France, 200k-500k with Business Angels), finish the product, and then start selling. Then comes the second round (1/3 m most of the time with VCs) to go boom.

We took a financial risk by avoiding that first round because we wanted to finish the product on our own. We formed a team of highly motivated and talented people, and we concentrated on taking the product to the next level with all the user feedbacks we received. So, we were bootstrapped, we still are; we’re going to keep going that way as long as possible, which is risky but is really worth it.

BusinessInterviews.com: What are some trends in your industry that you’re excited about or think that our readers should be paying attention to?

Nicolas: Okay, can I be geek for a moment? Cool, thanks! We are very, very excited about the evolution of the web.

Closed frameworks from big hardware companies will lose their monopolizing hold. Today, if you want to develop an app, you can… assuming you’re able to create one on devices and different OS. It is dramatically lowering production and the experience. Everything could be done with a better integration of webapps. 4G is here now, spreading rapidly, and it’s faster than wifi. It means that mobile phones will have a faster internet connection than your laptop. Why do we still need to develop apps for various OS versions of one particular device when we can create web apps that are fast, clean and compatible with all device’s versions of OS? Things are changing and will change in the next few years.

It will certainly elimitate some middle men, but imagine the amount of money saved that could be better invested in the concept and the experience, instead of the technical stuff users never heard of and don’t care about.

BusinessInterviews.com: How are you preparing for the launch of the final version of your service in November?

Nicolas: Flying. Really. I’m on an airplane headed to San Francisco right now. We’ll launch Pageyourself and the f-Site from there. We are very excited to release the public version. It’s the culmination of months of hard work, collected feedback, and community ideas.