I recently had an interesting chat with Chris Carpenter about his latest
project, Widgely.

Widgely is an online document generator that allows users to build ‘templates’ that can be shared, downloaded or embedded in websites easily and quickly using the drag and drop GUI. It is still in
its early stages and has been entirely developed and self funded by Chris.

My first thoughts when I visited the site were that the website in its current release only had a small number of ready made templates and the purpose beyond creating certificates or simple invitations was not immediately obvious. This ties in with Kim’s recent post about improving the Aussie tech start up industry and the comments about adding value, the value of this service was not immediately apparent and I think Chris will admit himself that he adopted a kind of ‘build it and see’ type approach.  However he has now switched his focus to developing some commercial offerings using the technology behind Widgely to create more targeted services that can be monetized, he hopes to announce these soon, I can say that they will offer value and there is significant potential for Widgely as a ‘platform’.

The site has not been officially launched yet but even from the very small user base Chris has achieved so far he is getting some decent conversion rates and quite a few repeat users, which at least hints at a market. He has spent the last month making the code base more modular and portable for use in other projects, so hopefully we can expect to see some document based web applications ‘Powered by Widgely’ at some point in the future.