Meet Cardsetter
This Montana startup is making its mark on the website platform market.
Cardsetter gives its customers the ease of use of a website builder, with the power of a robust content management system.
While popular platforms like Squarespace and Wix meet the basic needs for small business websites, Cardsetter meets the more advanced needs for websites that have a lot of content to organize. This is exactly what digital publishers, professional bloggers, content creators, and content marketers need from their website platform.
"Before Cardsetter, our customers' primary option was a custom developed website most likely on Wordpress, which comes with a large initial expense and its own set of limitations." states Joshua Toenyes, Co-Founder and CEO.
Cardsetter makes it easy to create, manage, and monetize a website with no custom coding required. Cardsetter customers enjoy front-end editing, drag & drop simplicity, and the flexibility to place any piece of content anywhere on their website. They can instantly make changes "on the fly" and are no longer limited by a restrictive template (or a website developer's work queue).
Cardsetter's approach to mobile is very purposeful as well, offering a more "app-like" experience for the audience. Audiences enjoy the intuitive vertical and horizontal scrolling that they are accustomed to from platforms like Facebook, Apple News, and large publisher websites like USA Today and Buzzfeed. Cardsetter customers benefit by keeping their audience on the website longer as they scroll and consume more content.
Cardsetter also has built-in "sponsored content" features making it easy for its customers to monetize.
What's with the name?
Cardsetter is "card-based." Content is represented by "cards," square blocks that can include an image, title, and excerpt for the content they link to.
Admins can simply click a "+" virtually anywhere on their page to "set" a card and then link it to any content on their site. They can drag and drop to organize cards any way they like, anywhere on their website, and re-organize them whenever they want.
"setting" a card on a Cardsetter website
Cardsetter pulls content out of the traditional siloed approach employed by all other CMS systems, completely modularizing it. Admin's enjoy the greater flexibility of being able to serve what's most relevant to their audience at any time and give their readers more context by grouping related content. All without a complicated admin backend.
"We know that Cardsetter can meet the needs of almost any website," says Jessica Baldwin, Co-Founder and COO. "But, we know Cardsetter is 'the perfect solution' for the prolific content creators. For them, Cardsetter's features make a big difference in the efficiency of running their business, and it opens up new revenue opportunities."
Early Successes
On the Cardsetter beta, Billings365.com (a website for events and things to do in Billings), saw a 70% increase in time spent on its homepage, and ad click through rates tripled.
Another customer, The Big Sky Country State Fair in Bozeman, MT, used Cardsetter's modular approach to build an app-like experience for fairgoers showcasing the daily highlights and schedule of events. They saw a dramatic decrease in the number of paper guides they handed out because event attendees chose to use the website on their mobile devices instead.
The Team
Cardsetter was founded by Joshua Toenyes and Jessica Baldwin. The duo have worked together on web-based projects for over five years.
The idea for Cardsetter was born while they were collaborating on a new direction for Billings365.com, owned and operated by Jessica at the time, with Joshua as the technical expertise behind the website.
Joshua is the software engineer behind Cardsetter, an eight year Navy Veteran, and a University of California, San Diego Computer Science grad. Josh has been developing complex web software for over ten years.
Jessica owned and operated Billings365.com for nine years, which is now leased to another entity for operations. She spent three years as a Partner in a web development agency and has over fourteen years of experience in digital media and marketing. Jessica graduated from Montana State University.
The team participated in the Early Stage MT Hyper-Accelerator and Statewide Pitch Competition in 2018, and pitched at the Bunker Labs Muster Across America Tour.
