#33 - Pioneering The No-Code Movement

We call it a visual software development platform. It's a way for people to build things that typically coders build, just in a completely visual environment. For us to be truly successful, to be able to build a tool that builds other products and services, you can't do that overnight. The next six months were really, really tough.

What we thought was going to bring in income, we didn't have anything coming in at this point, and when you have family, and like rans, and car payments, and all this stuff, and like kids need to go to school, then just stuff started falling apart. You know, couldn't get trademarked, medical founders got a lot more motivated, they job got a lot more interesting. I think we had raised like 300k, and we were really struggling and went to Paul Graham and said, this is really hard on us, like I was waking up every morning with panic attacks, like my wife was like, this is not a type. Yeah, why have you wanted this?

Like is this what startups are about, right? They've got 75,000 paying users, they just raised a monster round of investment, 72 million, series A. Those other website builders are kind of like high movie, and then what's most like, quite on the pro. It just feels like the gold brush, or like the pioneer era of the space where, we're at the very, very beginning of it, sort of like the web in 1999.

No technology in history has ever spread so fast. Products are going up on product time, and like hitting number one, I don't even know that it's built with no go tools. It allows you to be just like eating food, not too long ago in history, I would have had to go out there and hunt and forage. Today it's abstracted away where I don't even have to think.

I push a button on my phone and the meal appears when you remove those barriers. Magical things happen. Even something that feels slower to other companies or founders, getting to where we are today, seven years from now. For me it's just feels like a natural progression to a much larger company because we want to be around 50 years from now.

We want to be a foundation company. Five million is nine and well. Ten million, twenty million. Twenty million.

Twenty million. You have nothing to lose. Add another zero to that price buddy. Add two more zeros.

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Vlad, you are in the Twitch office. It's basically Christmas Eve, no one's here, except for us. We are recording this podcast. I'm excited to have you on because we've been talking about no code tools.

And generally I like anybody with a good startup story, and I think you have one. For those of you who don't know, some philosopher of company called Webflow and Webflow is a company that is doing phenomenally well right now. If you're in Kind of Silicon Valley, I would say you guys have that hype train right now. Do you feel that?

Definitely the last year has been a lot more hype trainee. Yeah, but it wasn't always like that. We'll never know that. So they have the hype train right now because they've got 75,000 paying users.

They just raised a monster round of investment, 72 million series A, which is 10 times more than a typical series A. I think so. They're doing phenomenally well and we're going to find out a couple things. I'm interested in chatting with you because I want to know what's the backstory?

I've heard a little bits and pieces that tell me this is not like your typical. Yeah, I worked at Big Company. I quit. I started company.

It succeeded. It's not that. So give me the two minute version of the Webflow history and I will dive in deeper after that. Two minutes.

The LERI started Webflow four different times starting in early 2005 back when I was still in college. I ended up being my senior project and I started to try to start solo a couple times, you know, incorporate it, try to build this thing based on .NET, you know, we're looking at a Windows machine right now. Then the company that I sort of based all the technology on went out of business. Always good.

Yeah, exactly. And kind of gave up and I got married, started working into it, sort of needed a real job, met a couple buddies at Intuit. We were, you know, all fresh out of college, working on pretty boring things there and kind of got together and tried to give it another go. So I had a couple co-founders try to start up.

This was like the Web 2.0 days, you know, the heyday of like start up starting to happen. Like the Google Maps area where you can actually build something in the browser. What's he was just starting up. That was really exciting.

Started pitching investors got the whole like entity going. Then just stuff started like falling apart. You know, couldn't get trademark. One of the co-founders got like less motivated.

They job got a lot more interesting. My wife and I started talking about kids. So all these things added up and it was just like fizzled out. And then over the next seven years, just kept working into it and moved to Sacramento.

And then a series of a couple like really, really, you know, out of the blue events got me to think about Webflow again. And was it the same idea each of those times or was it just the same name in your? Same name. Generally the same idea, but it sort of started on the back end and moved more and more towards the front end.

So the first idea was really about how you automate back end development and make it visual. And then over the years, developed into more what you see. And so if somebody's never seen Webflow, what's the simple way you describe it? Like how should one friend tell another friend about this?

Seven years ago, we used to describe it as like a website builder. You know, sort of like Wix we believe. You need a website and you don't know how to code. Exactly.

But it ended up that wasn't a good description. So now that kinds of things people build with Webflow or just entire business, product services, etc. So we call it a visual software development platform. So it's a way for people to build things that typically coders build just in a completely visual environment.

And it's kind of a new thing. Maybe the closest we had before was Dreamweaver or things like that where you had a little bit of that visual flair and then you had sort of a code editor on the side. We're just trying to make that but completely visual. So it ends up people build a lot of websites with it, but we're moving a lot closer to any kind of software.

So what can it do that Wix, a Weebly, a Squarespace, doesn't do, right? Because those are good if you want to make it out of the box thing where it's like, here's my portfolio, here's my storefronts with just like a contact me button. Where does Webflow go deeper? So Webflow is essentially an abstraction layer over HTML, say that's a JavaScript.

So people start from scratch. Wix and Weebly are literally picking a template and sort of moving some content images around. But then if you look at like, just pick a random set of a thousand startups every year. Like you go through their websites, they don't look like any of the templates, right?

Like if you were sort of like going to Sketch or Figma or whatever, creating their own brand and then going to implement that in code, Webflow is the first program that can actually take those designs and enable a designer to implement any one of those, you know, like custom super, super custom layouts. The way I think about it sometimes is those other website builders are kind of like iMovie and then Webflow is sort of like Final Cut Pro or After Effects. You know, like super pros are using it. But it still means that if you're not a professional web designer, you can still figure it out as a startup founder, as a creator, entrepreneur or whatever.

It's going to take a little longer than a Wix or Weebly, but what you're going to get is an actual product. So like Webflow, if you go through the last couple years of product hunt launches, above anything else, like if a visual software development tool is being used, it's probably Webflow. Interesting. So it's either code or it's Webflow.

You usually won't see like a Squarespace set being like number one on product. Right, right, right. Exactly. Okay.

That's great. And I've used it a bunch myself just, you know, like if I'm like, I got an idea and I have four hours tonight to work on this, I kind of know I'll probably not going to keep going with it. I want to make it come alive quickly and not hit a dead end where I'm like, oh, this can't do that. I like Webflow because it doesn't have those same dead ends.

So you had these full starts, right? You try to start it by yourself. You try to start it with a couple friends, but life happens and one of them fades away. You start talking about having kids and that's not a great thing to do at the same time as just starting to start up.

And so when did you ultimately get the timing right? Okay. I'll rewind back a little bit to the third time. So this is that into it, right?

So we incorporated, we submitted a trademark for Webflow because we had the domain. I thought, you know, especially in those days when, you know, Twitter didn't have any vowels. It's a good name. Yeah.

It's really proud of it. There's another company called Webflow back in 1999. Right. And I guess they let the domain go to like collections or something.

So when you were just looking, you saw Webflow back in 2010, it was for sale for like 10 grand. And I was a college student. I mean, all I had was credit card, you know, kind of limits to think of those are my assets. So I ended up negotiating for a while, like sort of throwing these, actually created some fake accounts to send it back to exactly low-beds and then ended up picking up for something like foreground, which was really proud of.

Like at that time, that was like, you know, the vast majority of my credit card did this domain. And I got it was going to work it off. That's a pretty ballsy move to, you know, for like, at a college or your in college at the time. I was still in college.

In college at the time, it's like, who buys a $4,000 domain when they're in college? I mean, I knew, like, I was so, and you'll see, I was so attached to the name that, like, in the third attempt, when we got a denial for the trademark, because there's another company in Florida that was using it, they said, you know, you can use it all day, but you can't use it for anything for websites. Because they were trying to create, it was like Learn.com, they were trying to create some website, e-education thing or whatever. And then we had to like pivot and use a different name.

So we went through this whole like process of trying to pick a different name and we ended up on calling it marked up, like HTML markup, but without a e, because you couldn't get the domain or whatever. And I hated that so much that was part of the reason why it fizzled out, just didn't use the name. It didn't feel right. Right, exactly.

So fast forward, like, six years, and I was using Webflow as I just had LLC doing a bunch of websites for like, other exciting come, etc., while working into it. And part of it was working with my brother, who was a designer, and he was working at SkateShop and still kind of going to school in San Diego. And then one day, this was late to 2011. In my mailbox, this was already moved like three or four times since the into a days.

And in my mailbox was a pretty much a difficult for Webflow. Apparently, something like that. I don't know it. Exactly.

This was like five or six years later after our initial submission, after we already got a denial saying like, hey, this is not going anywhere. So I saw that as a sign of like, okay, something has to be explored here. Yeah, that literally seems like a sign for God. Exactly.

Okay, in your mailbox, here's a trademark, go forth and conquer. Exactly. And I was already resigned to the fact this was never going to happen. You know, this might be an agency.

And at that time, I already thought that Webflow was winning and like, right. It does seem like when was this like, sort of last attempt? What year was this now? This is 2012.

2012. It did seem like the space was like a solved problem. And did you at that time feel like, no, I have an insight that why it's not, or you were just like, I'm just going to do it anyways and just see what happens. It was kind of neither of those things.

I had thought that the space had come and gone. Right? Like all these other companies were starting to become huge. They all got funding.

And you know, I was already sort of, quote unquote, settled down. We were planted by house in Sacramento. I thought that was going to work that into it for like another seven years. And then I saw this video early-ish in 2012 called Inventing Unprincipled by this guy, Brett Victor.

And it was all about this concept of direct manipulation. But more broadly, it was like that he asked this question to all creators. Like, why do you do the work that you do? And it made me question everything.

Like literally that I saw that video. I read one of his papers called Magic Inc. that same night. It took me like two hours.

The next morning I put him, I noticed, I didn't do it. Wait, wait, so what's in this video? What is this video? And it's about, he kind of like draws this analogy between a lot of other different tools around.

How do we get, create a lot more human software? How do we take something that is, let's say you're creating games, right? Or you're making animation, right? If one way to think about animation is like these timeline tools where you have an object and you kind of give it key frames or whatever.

Another way to think about animation is you give a kid on an iPad, the ability to click on, you know, like a leaf or something from a tree and trace with your finger how that animation happens. And you literally get the same effect that looks a lot more natural. And just by virtue of creating another interface that is way more intuitive for humans to understand. And he draws this analogy, like he shows all these examples for creating games, for doing sort of like electrical diagramming for electrical engineers, etc.

And like all these things just, just- So he's calling that direct manipulation like the interface? Exactly. Not like direct manipulating you and applying the people. So the whole concept of direct manipulation is like when I do sculpting, right, in clay, I don't like think of the change I want to make and then go to some other place and like make that change and sort of look back and say, is that what I meant?

And that's exactly what we're doing coding. And that's when all these things sort of like hit of I'm a coder, I'm like writing all this HTML and CSS as I'm hitting save, I'm going to the other browser, I'm sort of like refreshing, even if something auto refreshes for me, I get to check is that what I actually meant, right? And direct manipulation is all about like just do the thing in the medium, like change the actual thing that you're trying to manipulate, almost like 3D animation software, like video editing software, etc. And like that's the moment that I knew that something had to be created in the space, no other tool.

And who is this guy who did this video? He's dead, is he alive? No, he's alive. He's a rich out.

I'm like, hey, this video made me quit my job and start webbing. And there's actually a bunch of other companies that started because of that video. No way. It's incredible.

What else do you know? I know Figmo was inspired by this. I know a ton of people on Twitter have said like once I saw that video, it changed trajectory of my life. It's really incredible because even if you don't resonate with this concept of direct manipulation, half the video is about this question of like why do you do the work that you do?

What is the principle behind your work? Yeah, because the purpose is like to make a paycheck. It's not as exciting as like I want to make this big dent in the universe. And for me, that was the video that made me question like, am I doing what I ultimately want to do with my life?

And it just so happened that his principle around creating direct manipulation tools was something that really resonated with me. So I got sort of a double whammy from that video in terms of collaboration. Alright, it's 2020, new year, it's gonna be a big year. And you know we had to come in with some new awesome partners.

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You watch this video. You read the guys paper. You're like, I'm gonna do this. You said you put in your notice pretty much the next day.

What would you tell your wife? What was her reaction? This was a well, of course I told my wife after I got the trademark certificate. I think it was this four months before we already like started the all these conversations around what would it take like would we move somewhere else because you kind of had to move to the area at that point to go to like I see and things that I already started talking about what would it take to apply.

And she knew it was always sort of like after that became kind of a nagging thought that if I don't do something like that something entrepreneurial, like it's gonna be something that's gonna be great exactly. So it's she was definitely on board, especially after I saw this video and like came to her with like all this just this bundle of energy. Right. So like, alright, we gotta do this.

But those problems, you know, how do kids have insurance doesn't go away? How did you address those? How did you make sure you? So very, very naively.

And I think that's one of the reasons my wife is super excited was like, look, we have three months of savings. That's an infinite runway. That's what it seemed like. You know, we're gonna do this.

We're gonna spend a month making a Kickstarter video and make whatever 300k to fund the next like year and a half or whatever. And then we're gonna build this product in like two months and then everybody's gonna pay for it. And we're gonna, you know, I honestly imagine that was just gonna be myself and my brother like running this company and, you know, building product for ourselves and kind of using it to make websites and empower other people to make websites for other clients or whatever. So it was like the sort of rose color glasses of, you know, we definitely got this, right?

Right. That's not rose color glasses. That's like rose eyedrops that you put directly in your eye. That is so crazy.

Right. But you believe that and I totally believe that. I think I use that as like rationale to get, you know, family to believe and to pick up everything and move, you know, definitely didn't turn out as well as the night and close. But what happens?

So you do the move. You put in your nose. So we move in April. Then I was working into it sort of like interim.

I started, I shifted my hours to start at like six, 30 in the morning and I left at two, two, 30 and I would work on Webflow from like two, forty five to like seven. Right. And then you what was up or or they were like, they get in our early now. Yeah.

I just sort of like negotiated with my, with my team as sort of a small team. Right. And that team was already kind of winding down. I don't remember ever having like feeling kind of shady about that because I was putting my hours or just like, you know, or see exactly.

And some of the team was remote. So it was okay. But I was still doing it by myself. And I ended up spending like months and months on just really stupid crap, like polishing the icons, right?

For the interface, not really building anything. Right. And that's when I realized like, I'm not going to be able to do this by myself. And that's when I reached out to my brother who was like the best designer I knew.

And convinced him to move to my place into like the condo we're renting in early September of 2012. That's when we incorporated. And that's when we just like heads down, started working on this Kickstarter. It essentially took all the vast majority of the money that we had to incorporate.

I think that was like 10 grand and putting another 15 grand into this video. Nice. Exactly. And then two months later, what we want to do is like apply Kickstarter, have like that big success and apply to YC and then use the Kickstarter success as like the YC kind of.

Why do you want to go to YC? Sound like you were pretty even from early on. You were like, all right. Then we applied YC.

That was like a benchmark. It's just, yeah, it was just something, you know, I think I was kind of sold by the cashier, the brand or seeing like other companies get into YC and just explode and go into the stratosphere. Like I sort of saw that as a rite of passage. Right.

And it actually hit me really hard when the first time we applied and we didn't get in. Right. I was sort of like, all right, this is never gonna happen. So how many times have you applied in your life to YC at this point?

Our total. We had applied three different times. So one in 2007 early, that's the time that didn't work out. Didn't get an interview then in 2012, this latest attempt.

And then six months later in 2013. Okay. And this last one is a great story. You were telling me this before we started recording.

So tell the story of your latest, why I see attempt. What? Actually, let me rewind just a little bit like with a Kickstarter thing. So we put all this money into Kickstarter and had this recorded most of the video, actually all the video and it was all, Hey Kickstarter.

We need your help Kickstarter, etc. And then we receive a notification kickstarter that we don't support SaaS services. Right. Yeah.

They only like create projects that are like not a. Exactly. So it came to say, etc. And the whole thing just goes out.

We couldn't we couldn't use it. We didn't have. So you have this really nice $15,000. Is this up on YouTube?

It's not it's like internal to web flow. Right. It's just putting up after this. People should go on YouTube and look for this.

Well, anyway, like the next six months were like really, really tough. What we thought was going to like bring in income. We didn't have anything coming in at this point. And when you have family and like rent and you know, car payments and all this stuff and like kids need to go to school.

And the next six months were just like, no income going to debt doing all the credit card, you know, like right to check yourself that you then have to, it's like a balanced transfer type of thing. I was pretty enough to have enough credit, but it was still like really tough to go through that. And then we got to the point where at the end of that year, my daughter needed to have surgery and it was like, you know, we didn't have good health insurance, which is like catastrophic health insurance thinking, you know, nothing's gonna happen. It's like these high deductibles or whatever.

What happened was we found out that she needed to have surgery like around Christmas time in 2012 and all the tests to figure out what she actually needed to have done was like around 10 grand, right? Which was our deductible. And like that was we had to sell a card to pay for that. And the thing that we found out was like it rolls over to January when she actually does surgery.

You start all over again. So no, exactly. So then we were at a point. We're like, okay, we're completely out of money.

We're talking about it. We're talking about getting our jobs back. Like, Sergio, you want to move back to San Diego? I want to move back to Sacramento.

And we gave each other six weeks of like, what can we do to, it was like the bare minimum on the remaining credit that we have to be able to show something to the world. And that's when we put together like this wasn't even an app. It was sort of like a demo. And you can still see it on Playground.Webflow.com.

And we put it up on Hacker News. And that just exploded. Which is like really, really surprising because here are all these developers and what we're presenting as a way to. Like it'll generate code for you.

And that finally, like we applied to YC again with that, has a proof point that hey, there's might be something here. Because at that point we had like 25,000 people on our wait list. Mostly from Hacker News. And these days would probably be more from a product time.

And finally got kind of got an interview request or interview slot. And we went into this interview completely nervous. We had no idea what we were doing. We did all this interview prep.

And for those of you that don't know, the YC interview is 10 minutes. Rapid Fire. They're going to make a decision after 10 minutes of whether you're in or you're out. And I could do 10 minutes of like small talk.

And so there was no small talk in there. So what's that going to be like? It was really intense. I mean, walk into this room and it's public eye who's the creator of Gmail.

And a bunch of other people. We had no idea where they are. Do they even do intros or they just go? No, they just go.

It's like boom, boom, boom. And it felt like an interrogation. Why would this work when so many others have tried and haven't done it? At the end of it, we just walked out and we felt maybe there's a 25% chance that they'll ever talk to us again.

Because we felt like we stumbled. We kind of agreed on some categorization. Like if they ask a question about this, like you answer. If they ask a question about design, like another co-founder answers.

And I think we like bungled quite a bit of that. Where at the end, it just felt like we didn't get our entire idea across. So we're like super nervous. We go to this beer place, try to get a beer.

And there's this gap between our interview, which is around noon and 6pm. The format is they call you if you're in or they send an email if you're out. And so we have like four hours to kill and we have beers and we're still like super nervous. So we decided to go watch a movie.

So we head over to Shoreline, The Century Theater and get tickets for Oblivion, which is like this Tom Cruise movie where he clones himself or something like that. So watching this movie and I'm looking at my phone like a hawk and finally a phone call comes through. It's a 5-0 number so I'm sure like okay this is it. So I sneak out of the movie theater and sure enough it's TV.

The Gmail guy says guys are in, do you accept these terms? Like we're excited to work with you etc. It doesn't say my name, it doesn't say web flow. But we're like over the moon.

Like Brian's searching my co-founders jump out of the theater. They're like we're jumping up and down. We call our families, girlfriends, wives, etc. I started to start up dinner.

Right. Maybe we did it. Exactly. This is like holy crap.

This is the biggest milestone for this company early on etc. And then all of our families are arranging to meet at the restaurant and downtown Mountain View. So we just like decide to go after we arrange everything, go back and watch the movie. And for whatever reason I'm still checking my phone and then a buzz is and I have an email from YC that says unfortunately we decided not to fund you.

Because the product is too complex for beginners and not powerful enough for pros. And we're like holy crap. So I sort of like signal to Brian Surgis step outside and you know this is like the biggest roller coaster. Right.

30 minutes ago we were in to this like prestigious startup accelerator that's harder to get into than Harvard. And all of a sudden we're like here's a perfect reason why if I was at YC why I wouldn't accept that. Right. So for sure we thought that the phone call was mistake because you know there's no identifying stuff in there.

And for the next two hours we're just like in complete hell and limbo. Because we can reach anyone. It was you know this huge roller coaster. And finally we got you know we started driving to the office.

We just thought you know if we can't get a hold on. You're gonna go meet a person. Let's just go try to meet a person who's already after six o'clock. Maybe somebody's gonna be there.

And on our drive there one of the partners calls us and says really sorry. Emos and say you guys are in. Honestly like that was the biggest sort of like high point low point back to high point. And you know there is this kind of history.

And did you ever talk to him and be like hey what was the deal? Apparently apparently they have like a board where after they make a call you raise the person. And then something like that didn't happen with us. Somebody had assumed that they needed a center rejection email.

They changed that process. And when does the company actually start to take off? Is it from the Hacker News thing or how did the company actually get off? Like this is just you getting to do the company.

We haven't talked about how the company actually started to succeed. Yeah I think it was another couple years. So we go through I see you know you sort of have this idea that you can't do anything else. You can't work out right not the case at all.

So we go through I see and you know going to demo day. You know we struggle. What are the numbers like at demo day because you have to stand up on stage and say we're killing it. But I think we said something like we had 25,000 users not nearly all of them were active.

We had this like stat that we were ramen profitable which was barely true. Like we were making maybe T3 grand or something like that. But you know three founders one of that like I had kids and family. That was ramen profitable but we don't eat lunch or dinner.

If we live in like you know backwards rush hour or something. But I think it was mostly sort of like the story that we used but at the time like it was a terrible time for us to raise building a you know web specific product because in 2012. Mobile. In 2013 mobile was every exactly.

So all these investors told us like what are you doing. Right. I think I even DM'd you this many a long time ago two years ago being like hey can I use this to make an app. Yeah and in my head what I was really thinking was why don't they just do this to make apps.

Why isn't that the case. It's a hard thing to essentially we're all in on the web platform right. CSS JavaScript etc. Where that was the problem that we wanted to solve with like responsive web design to be able to build things that are not just websites were like in the browser right.

And most of the time like all the apps that you use even though they might have a mobile app. So let's say Airbnb let's say Twitter or whatever. The vast majority of folks who are experiencing it are using like the web version right. Plus we that's all the skills that we had we knew how to abstract away.

Sure. So we knew nothing about mobile right now. Should there be a mobile flow should there be a web flow from out there. There are a ton of them that try but I think in a few are getting close.

I think at the end of the day that's going to be a web flow and mostly because we sort of like get to cheat a little bit in that the web platform is catching up and now there's something called progressive web apps which is essentially essentially the same exact technology as what flow like we already can compile to produce a web apps right but then they appear like full on apps in the on your home screen. You just don't have to go to the app store and they might not be as like complex as something like a snapchat but for the vast majority of apps. It's it's good enough. You can't do push notifications right.

I'm not quite on Android you can and and there's a lot of pressure for iOS to add that. So I think that that's what I mean by like we kind of get to wait right until more and more. And there's enough of a huge market on the website use case that when we get like time will bring us the sort of app. Right.

Okay. So we're going back to your app. You're not crushing it. You get a demo day add demo day or investors flocking to you because if you haven't been to demo day it's like a meat market where you got these startups you stand up on stage to get one minute now or something like that on stage two minutes two minutes on stage to say your piece and then afterwards the investors are supposed to find you and like investors wear one color badge and then the startups wear another color badge and it's like the horrible speed dating experience.

Yeah. It was a lot less clear back. Because there were no badges. You know, you had the system where investors could say, Hey, I'm interested.

Right. And we thought, you know, we're going to get hundreds or something like that. But you're checking your phone. Yeah, I was like trickling in and after that we had weeks and weeks actually months of meetings with other partners and it was like really slow going.

And finally, it was sort of like investors are kind of like they were compacts where like it's a social type of dynamic. We had heard the mentality. Yeah. Once they know others are or the windows closing.

So we had like almost I think we had raised like 300 K and we're like really struggling and went to Paul Graham and said this is really hard on us. Like I was waking up every morning with panic attacks like thinking, okay, another day of like going into these, you know, boardrooms and. Really? What is that like?

You wake up like my wife was like, this is not healthy. Yeah. Why do you want to this? Like is this what startups are about?

Right? It was even worse than like the times when you know one of our daughters would go into surgery and we're running out of money or whatever. Like it felt a lot worse. I was getting like cold source almost every week.

It was like super super stressful. So went to Paul Graham and he said, look, there's three of you. You have 300 grand. You can actually work on this on this idea.

You're sure you can't hire anybody but just go back to doing what you do best and just building the product. And with that confidence, we just told all of the investors we're talking to. Like, hey, we're not writing down. Yeah.

And you know, we're just going to go back to building the product because at that point, like our customers weren't getting any attention. You know, it was just a really stressful time. And when you say you're not raising any more, like a bunch of other stuff came in. So I ended up raising like 1.4.

That is the fundraising. Yeah. Which is we don't need money anymore. Right.

Well, just take some. Take some. So that worked out. We had like these 30 plus thousand people on our wait list and then we thought, of course, we're going to get, you know, convert a bunch of them.

And then we launched the product and it was some, you know, sub 2% or sub one other thing that we converted. So it was because the product just wasn't powerful enough. You can only build one page and didn't have like the vast majority of things that we have now. So even though people found some value out of it, it wasn't so much that they were willing to pay and stick with it.

That was a pretty long journey of, you know, at least a year of growing pretty slowly. It looks slowly adding revenue and coming to the realization that we're not going to be able to raise again. So we have to get to break even somehow. Hiring slower or building products that will add more to revenue.

So we started building our CMS and thankfully that was the right call of like just going slower and getting to break even or what sometimes called default live. If you never raise again, you're at least not going to die. And once we got to that, it was sort of like this free moment of, you know, we're just going to keep focusing on building the product. And that's what we did for the next like.

So what did you guys, like did you have a number on the wall every week that was like revenue or users? Like what was your big, I guess, what was your, how did you and the team stay focused? What did you guys focus on? What did you guys celebrate?

I think we were a lot more idealistic and more product driven and a little bit naive in the sense of the world. If we build this next feature, more users will come. So we're a lot more like that. Let's get this next thing out.

Let's get interactions and animations out. Let's get the CMS out. And I think over time that proved to be successful, but we did not do a great job of like orienting everyone around a similar goal. The goal was make the product better in that case.

Okay. Normally when I buy startups and they're like, this next feature, that's what unlocks growth. I'm like, oh, don't do that. That always, I've done that and that doesn't work.

But in your case, it actually kind of worked. I think over the long term it worked. But we were lucky in that the market is so massive and we had this sort of tight window of opportunity where nobody else was working on website building products more or less because they thought that more than they were. Right.

And responsive web design was pretty brand new that all the old players haven't gotten into it yet. Like Adobe hadn't gotten into a response web design. So it's sort of like this perfect overlap of enough market demand that it was sort of pulling us into product market fit and, you know, our sort of product sense of what's built something like really amazing that designers are going to be proud to work on. And it worked out for us.

But yeah, usually I don't. Usually when you say that statement about like, you know, we just need to work on this feature. That'll solve our growth problems. You're actually circling the drain at that point.

Exactly. And we did think about growth in the sense of like, okay, everything that we're doing naturally is not working out. So we tried like this, you know, affiliate program and like a referral thing. None of them really worked for like our user base or maybe we just didn't get them right because people are trying to game them and everything.

Over time, it was mostly the product that led to growth. And so what does that mean? Does that mean? Do you see most of your traffic coming from work mouth SEO?

Right now, more than 60% is word of mouth. We're getting to people like searching for web flow on Google and stuff. Over the last year or so, we started doing a lot more sort of like paid acquisition and trying to grow faster and things like that. But the vast majority still comes from people talking about it.

That's great. And so when did things start to really heat up and things started to accelerate faster? I remember something that was put around like, you expect growth to be really stable. And then but the actual curve looks like super choppy.

For us, it was always kind of the kind of product we're building, I guess. It's always kind of capped by like growth is capped by what it can't do because people sort of like naturally early on, they would graduate past it all the time. Now it happens a lot less. But it was enough that we sort of, you know, grew a certain percentage per month for like years.

And it wasn't, you know, we thought when we built CMS, we thought when we built e-commerce, we thought when we built, you know, these big product additions, it's going to be like a huge inflection point. But over time, it's just been like cumulative in the same rate over over time. It's actually pretty hard to maintain the same rate as the numbers grow. But we've been able to do that.

And it's just been kind of slow and steady when it's erased. We're not slow, but like not like hyper fast. What's steady? Right.

And here in Silicon Valley, not hyper fast feels like molasses. It feels slow just because you'll see things popping up. So if you didn't catch the soul story, you basically in 2000, what, four or five, you're like, I had this idea. And then you fall started a few times and then like kind of like, let's call it the real start was, let's say 2012 this time.

And so now this is like seven, eight years in that you're into this business. And honestly, as I'm hearing, this is kind of amazing you stuck with this. Like, I don't know if I have that stick to it, like you had with this business. Like I would have quit 10 to 12 times along the way.

And not because I'm a quitter, I don't think. Just because I'd be like, look, time is just going by. Why were you not that way? I don't know the answer to that.

I think I'm just naturally not impatient. I'm just more oriented around stability and a decent change in pace. Okay. Even something that feels slower to other companies or founders, you know, getting to where we are today, seven years from now.

For me, it's just like feels like a natural progression to a much larger company because we want to be around like 50 years from now. We want to be a foundation company. And how do you do that in a way that feels like it's still webflow, like the culture, the mission, the principles, the values. And that just seems a lot easier to preserve when you have like a more measured sense of pace.

And even, you know, like right now we're winding down for the year, right? The company sort of shuts down for a while. There's a certain mentality among some founders, like you've got to be like grinding all the time, etc. We're more around how do we get people to like really dig this mission and the purpose of like doing this kind of work and be here five years from now.

Like we have such a big focus on like balance and culture and putting people first that our team members stick around for a long time. Like we've been around for seven years. We've hired probably 175 total people over those seven years. We have 155 now.

We've had like 10 or 12 leave, like seven of those starting companies. Three of them got into IC. One of those like sold their company and came back to work on our product team. So it's in over the last four years, what one person per year has left.

And I think that is because we like focus more on the long term. And I think it's required for the kind of product that we're building because for us it'd be truly successful to be able to build a tool that builds other products and services. You can't do that overnight. You can't do that by building like verticalized solutions.

You have to get all those core foundations right so that it's almost like building a game engine that is like will last decades. Right. You have to get those core parameters right. You have to get all the teams to work together.

It's very hard to do that by just like throwing money at problems or like spinning up new teams. You have to build relationships. You have to build like communication paths. You have to build kind of the ways that other developers internally and externally are going to expand on this.

So it just like that naturally needs time that needs like time to adjust needs time to kind of get right and polish. Of course we have like the sort of early on we have the tendency to get everything completely perfect before we launch. But thankfully YC like hammered that out. Yeah.

You got to like launch launch launch and get things out and you know you learn a lot from being in market. Yeah. The way I put it is anytime I run into that struggle because when you work with really talented people they have that inclination of like well we're just shipping stuff too fast and it's like not great and that makes me feel bad. I'd rather get it right and then ship it.

And my answer to them is I believe the way to get it right is to ship it and then iterate on it when it's out there. If you want to make it great. I agree with you. Let's make it great.

But the way to make it great is not to tinker with it ourselves and not show it to anybody for a long time. It's to give it to them and then figure out what's wrong with it in the real world and make it better. Sometimes it's not just what's wrong with it. My favorite story to tell about YC about the value that they added was I was a freelance web designer.

I was working with my brother. I kind of thought I knew what we needed or what other people might be willing to pay for. So when we got into YC and as we were getting ready for demo day we didn't actually want to launch with like pricing and you know to charge customers which just wanted to show a demo. And what we thought was what we needed to ship in order to charge people was our CMS right.

We were like nobody that's professional that's building for clients is going to pay for anything that doesn't have like blogging functionality. Like this is WordPress 101 right who would pay for this and why she was like if you don't ship something in the next two weeks and you don't charge for it. So we needed that kick in the pants and we ended up launching and it was enough that several like there was like this core set of users for whom it was life changing. Like they literally could now make a living because they didn't have to pay another developer because for them what they were building for clients was like the single page landing sites or whatever and they were able to build their own agencies.

And for us it was a huge surprise. But the time we actually got to building our CMS the thing that we thought we needed to launch in order to charge. We already doing like 1.5 million in AR which was you know for me a huge surprise. It was like a humbly moment to think.

Hey let users and the market and customers decide. So I'll tell you what's right. Yeah. What's wrong?

Okay. I like that. So you start to get this sort of steady growth and I like that you said you sort of it sounds like it's one of your superpowers is that you're not impatient. Which means you're patient.

Are you like this with all aspects of your life? Like do you you know wake up at the same time? Do you go to bed early? Do you just not like carbs?

Do you know do you drive the speed limit? Like what's your life? Or did you like that too? Or you have some adrenaline junkie in you?

I definitely don't have an adrenaline junk. I love like certain things like snowboarding and which is like a hit of adrenaline for a little while but mostly I'm a little more risk of risk. Especially now with kids. I go in spikes like a lot of people will say oh you know you need like all these defined rituals etc.

I sort of go in every year is a little different like I did a year without sugar. Right. I was like on this anti-carb bend and then I figured out that that was not fun. You know just and it was kind of in some situations like really pretentious.

I can't do certain things. Right. That's why it's the most. Right.

And I think generally I've settled on kind of a more stable schedule in terms of like going to sleep earlier. Like my wife sometimes laughs at me you know when I'm head into bed like that. I definitely was more of a one a.m. type of thing before when in earlier years but you know getting into work early.

I'm usually in around like six or seven and having some time to just like focus on things has really been helpful. But I think I always adjust my patterns and in rituals. There's nothing I don't like wake up every morning and work out and meditate and all that. Right.

So what can I value that routine which now takes like 16 hours. Yeah exactly. per day. So now the company's like 150 people you have like a CEO coach.

You have like an ex coach. I work with a coach for a year and a half now it's been really really awesome. Tell me about it. My coach's name is Michael and the biggest thing that I work with them on is just interpersonal skills and kind of personal artization.

So I think over the last year the biggest change for me has been focusing on a lot less learning to say no to a lot of things which overall sums up to being able to do things that might take an hour but are like a 10x sort of impact to what flow to me personally to my family versus doing 10 things that you know add up to that same amount. How do you make that shift? Is there an exercise you did or you just more aware of it honestly was treated by a reading a book called essentialism and it's essentially essential. I think the byline of the book is the discipline pursuit of doing less and to me that was pretty life changing.

I think over the last year that was the most impactful book I've read. I used to have this goal of like how do I read the most books how do I get the most knowledge or more more exactly over the last year. I've actually reread my two favorite books which is essentially my regular three different times atomic habits. I'm reading that right now and this like the book that essentially again essentially defined my leadership principles which is called leaders last by Simon Sinek.

I read that like three more times right so I've been focusing a lot more on sort of reabsorbing the things that have been the most value out to me rather than trying to get a lot more. I'm not going to be able to read that one more information. Yeah when people talk about like I read faster now or I listen on 2x speed I'm just like that's awful. Not only because it just sucks to listen to something at 2x if you're listening to this at 2x right now slow down.

I did have that like I think a couple years ago when I was really having the podcast and audio books it was you know 2x everything. I think by the time if you're if you're starting to think in your mind like I'm gonna listen to music at 2x speed too. You ruined the one fear thing with the music. So what I sort of feel about that is my opinion of course could be wrong but my opinion is that comes from this place of insecurity which is like oh my God there's so much to do.

I have so much to do. Don't have enough time. I'm gonna go in hyper speed to try to essentially catch up and it's sort of like a FOMO driven thing where I need to consume more faster so that I don't miss anything and I get to have more of it. And what you're saying has served me really well and the reason I say this is when you go slow and you read or reread or take notes or really just read something and then stop and think how would I apply this to my life.

Like am I doing this? I've gotten a lot more out of it. It's just to all the 2xers out there I encourage you to do the other way because it's really helped me. Yeah I think I've seen more and more of that like Justin Kahn has been talking a lot more about this.

The faster you go you're never fulfilled thinking of all these sort of success metrics in your mind whether it's reading books or starting companies or hitting like revenue milestones or whatever. All these things always unlock like the next thing that you're dissatisfied about. So I've been really encouraged by just getting to a level of contentment where you don't see sort of the outside world and the speed at which it goes. Of course you have to like look at signals or like do things in a way that you know fall that's practiced etc.

But like seeing kind of constantly judging yourself against what other people are doing reading, hitting like whatever goals they're hitting just ends up causing more and more kind of dissatisfaction and to me going through that transition has been really really relieving even in the way that I used to think like okay our company's not growing at the speed at which you know this like cruise right they go from zero to a billion dollars in like two years or whatever like why can't we do that or whatever. And then seeing over time that you know every company is different every approach is different every team is different like their product that have different needs then even like growth needs right. Like you would fail as Uber or Lyft if you didn't grow that fast right because the competition would outpace you or whatever. Then there are other environments where like you know being more methodical being of paying attention to customers like pouring into your team making sure they have the resources to grow even if it's slower.

It adds up to to being more beneficial in the long term right so I think every every person is different but at the end of the day if you're always sort of chasing those kind of milestones and compare yourself to others. I don't think you're ever going to find contentment right and so how do you feel about all these other no code tools is there anything that you really like. This one's cool if somebody wants to do somebody's new to the space what should they check out what's cool to you. So the most awesome thing about no code just the whole sort of philosophy in the space and the set of tools is that finally people who are makers creators builders entrepreneurs they have fewer barriers to be able to have this idea I'm going to validate in the market.

You no longer have to do the laundry list of technologies that you have to know where people you have to hire and it's bringing that closer and closer to reality. And there's so many different tools in the space like you can go from like Zapier to Paravola to like Adalo to Light Apps and they all have sort of like more niche use cases including Webflow. Webflow is primarily used like marketing teams and people are not starting to tie it with Zapier and like Integra Mat and all these like back end tools and sort of build like entire products and services like bubble that ties a lot of these things together. To me it just feels like the gold rush or like the pioneer era of the space where we're at the very very beginning of it sort of like the web in 1999 right like a bunch of people start to make websites that kind of look like toys to a lot of people.

Who are like professional in the industry you know not a lot as possible yet. So to me it's sort of like the more tools are better right now almost in the kind of like this sense of a rising tide lifts all those if we get more people to believe that you can actually you know build for the Internet build apps build software without some of these sort of barriers to open it up from like every one. I think the statistic is there's like 25 million developers on earth that know how to code so that's one out of every 333 people approximately. So if we're going from 0.33 or 0.5% of people building software and we can inspire another you know 10 times as many if not 100 times as many to be able to do that.

I think it's pretty magical like we don't know what people are going to develop we don't know what kind of ideas that are not being developed right now they're going to make it out to market and that's where the more tools are better right now I think that naturally there's going to be some consolidation. Naturally there's going to be you know some companies that are like exactly or page and home to like specific you know there were some no-go tools before that wanted to build all kinds of apps and then they sort of like most of the customers were events. So they end up being like an event like building platform or whatever but over time this is sort of like the early days of the web where let's just see where this goes that the most important thing is that people are fundamentally inspired to do this stuff and believe that it's not a limiting thing so early. On when AWS first launched and you could say you don't have to learn how to rack your own rate drives you don't have to like order your own Dell machines you don't have to like get a network switch installed a lot of the professionals in the field especially like IT or even like companies like oh this is never going to be a thing right like you're never going to be able to do like real workloads to build real products on those things and it was more of a mindset shift over time that was proven by a lot of people building lasting companies on these tools even those like dollar for dollar more expensive right but the things that unlocked were amazing like what was built on AWS if it didn't exist we have to like have a team twice as big probably right so I think right now no code and visual software development is going through a similar journey where people are starting to believe like that.

Okay this is going to be like already real things are being built products are going up on product time and like hitting number one people don't even know that it's built with no code tools people are creating companies and getting the YC without engineers on these no code tools so that's that to me is a really really exciting time to be alive because it's just a lot of a lot of like really good vibes in this in this area and like a lot of people are starting to believe that this is going to be a huge thing. Gotcha. Give me two no code tools that you can shout out that people should check out that you know this there's the name here's what it does for you. Yeah one of my favorites right now is parabola.

So I've never heard of that. So it's a it's a visual way to like do data transformation so you give it let's say a spreadsheet and that's where you can come from air table from like Webflow CMS even and then you have like this it's almost like a electrical diagram of like gates and it's like yeah. Well pipes if you ever use out pipes back in the day where you can like add something like let's say filter the data and run it through some you know some formula or whatever and you can create like here's an example that that somebody built where you could take Webflow blog posts go through this whole like ranking algorithm where it pulls information from like SEO or whatever and then creates a an order based on popularity and puts it back into Webflow like and that is completely done without code. You know you just sort of like have this diagram it's a visual way to express that stuff and another one of my favorites is this company called voice flow which is a visual way to build Alexa apps and like Siri apps right and it's the same thing like you're sort of you're empowering somebody that typically would need to figure out like the Alexa API to just drag and drop and say when somebody says this do this and somebody says this do this and I think that layer of logic can be applied to way more than just like voice sort of conditionals and over time we're going to get closer and closer to building out something like an Airbnb or a player.

So like we build product kind of itself right in a no code tool right where you're doing all the logic all the database stuff all the like visual components all the kind of state changes of voting comments. Good marketing idea for you guys exactly. Okay great and you let them on your your block of flow you let voice flow on your block. Yeah there you go.