I've watched too many people spend $8,000 on a website that took six weeks to build and was outdated before it launched.
The worst part? These weren't bad websites. They were fine. Professional-looking, responsive, checked all the boxes. But they were also the kind of site you could spin up in an afternoon if you knew what you were doing. Five pages, some product photos, a contact form. Standard stuff.
The problem wasn't the quality. It was that the same specialized knowledge required to build a custom web application was being applied to what was essentially a brochure. And because that knowledge is expensive and scarce, people either paid thousands of dollars or settled for something that looked like every other drag-and-drop template on the internet.
There had to be a better way.
The thing about web design
Here's what took me years to realize: most web design isn't creative problem-solving. It's pattern matching.
I don't mean that as an insult to designers—the best ones are incredible at what they do. But watch how they work. They're not inventing new paradigms for every project. They're applying a mental library of patterns: hero sections, feature grids, testimonial carousels, pricing tables. They know what works, what converts, what feels modern. They've internalized the rules of hierarchy, spacing, color theory, typography.
The creative part is choosing which patterns fit and tailoring them to the brand. The implementation? That's just execution.
Which made me think: what if we could separate those two things? What if we could codify the execution—the part that requires technical skill but not creative judgment—and make it automatic?
Not automatic like a template where you're stuck with predetermined layouts. Automatic like understanding your actual content and making design decisions that a professional would make.
The first prototype was terrible
We scraped a website, extracted the content, and fed it into a system that tried to reorganize it into modern components. The result looked like a PowerPoint presentation had a baby with a GeoCities page from 1997.
But there was something there. The system had correctly identified the navigation, pulled out the main value proposition, and recognized that one section was testimonials. The design was awful, but the understanding was there.
That's when I realized the hard part wasn't generating pretty layouts—it was teaching a system to understand what content actually means. To know that "About Us" is different from "Why Choose Us" even though both are text blocks. To recognize that three paragraphs with headings should become a feature section, not a wall of text.
We spent months just on content comprehension. Building heuristics, testing against hundreds of real websites, handling edge cases. A surprising number of websites have two navigation menus that conflict with each other. Many have content that only makes sense with context from another page. Some have entire sections that are just SEO spam.
Real-world websites are messy. Our system had to be smart enough to find the signal in the noise.
When it clicked
The moment I knew we had something was when I tested it on my cousin's small business website—a local photography studio. Her current site was built in 2013 and looked like it. She'd been quoted $4,500 for a redesign.
I ran it through our system. Two minutes later, she had a modern, gorgeous site with smooth scrolling galleries, a proper services breakdown, and a contact form that actually worked on mobile. She cried.
Not because it was perfect—there were definitely things she wanted to tweak. But because for the first time, she could actually see her work presented the way it deserved. And she could afford it.
That's when the scope of this thing hit me. We weren't just building a faster website builder. We were changing who gets access to professional design.
What we're actually solving
The internet is supposed to be the great equalizer, but having a professional web presence still requires either money or specialized skills that most people don't have. That's not a technical problem anymore—it's an access problem.
Small businesses shouldn't have to choose between a generic template and blowing their entire marketing budget on a website. Startups shouldn't have to wait three weeks to test new messaging because they're stuck in a design queue. Non-profits doing important work shouldn't have websites that look like they're run by people who don't care (even though they're run by people who care more than anyone).
The technology exists to solve this. The design principles are well-established. The patterns are proven. We just had to build the system that puts it all together.
The hard parts
People think the hard part of building TEZELA was the design generation. It wasn't. The hard part was all the stuff around it.
Handling websites that load content with JavaScript. Dealing with pages that have 47 different font weights (yes, we've seen this). Making sure the generated code isn't just functional but actually maintainable. Keeping build times under three minutes when processing thousands of elements. Making the system fast enough that it doesn't feel like magic wearing off.
And then there's the subjective stuff. One person's "clean and modern" is another person's "too much whitespace." We can't make everyone happy, but we can make defaults that most people don't feel the need to change.
That's been the real test: when someone generates a site and their first reaction is "oh, this is actually good" instead of "okay, now I need to fix X, Y, and Z."
What we got wrong
Initially, we thought people would want maximum control. Granular settings for every spacing value, color customization for every component state, options for every possible variation.
Turns out, that's not what most people want. They want it to just work. The ones who do want control—designers, agencies, developers—they want different things. They want to hook into the system at a deeper level, not fiddle with margin-top values in a UI.
We also underestimated how much speed matters. The difference between a two-minute build and a five-minute build sounds trivial, but it completely changes the user experience. At two minutes, you stay in the flow. At five minutes, you tab away and forget what you were doing.
Every performance optimization we've shipped has measurably improved how people use the product. That taught us something: in a tool like this, speed is a feature, not just a nice-to-have.
Why this matters
There's a version of this story where TEZELA is just a productivity tool. Save some time, save some money, move on with your life.
But I think it's bigger than that. The internet is increasingly controlled by platforms that make it easy to publish but hard to own your presence. A Facebook page isn't yours. An Instagram profile isn't yours. They can change the rules, the algorithm, the entire experience, and you have no say.
A website is yours. It's the one place on the internet you truly control. But only if you can afford to have one that doesn't suck.
We're making that possible for more people. And yeah, maybe that sounds grandiose for a tool that reformats websites. But I've seen what happens when someone who's been stuck with a terrible web presence for years suddenly has something they're proud of. It changes how they think about their business. How they talk about themselves.
Access to good design isn't just aesthetic. It's economic. It's about who gets to participate in the internet economy on equal footing.
That's why we built this. Not to disrupt web design or eliminate designers or whatever the pitch-deck version would say. We built it because the current system creates artificial scarcity around something that doesn't need to be scarce anymore.
And we're just getting started.