What's up, everybody? This is Cortland from IndieHackers.com, and you're listening to
the IndieHackers podcast. On this show, I talk to the founders of profitable internet
businesses, and I try to get a sense of what it's like to be in their shoes. How did they
get to where they are today? How did they make decisions both at their companies and
in their personal lives? And what exactly makes their businesses tick? And the goal
here as always, is so that the rest of us can learn from their examples and go on to
build our own profitable internet businesses. Today, I am talking to Vlad Magdalene, the
CEO of Webflow. Vlad, welcome to the show.
Thank you. It's great to be here.
It's great to have you. So can you tell us a little bit about what Webflow is and also
how big the company is, how well it's doing? Because I think you've been able to build
something pretty remarkable.
Thanks. Yeah, Webflow is a kind of a new category. We call it a visual software development
platform. It's a way to build software. You can think of that as like websites and applications
visually without writing code. We started off as a website builder, almost like a web
design and web publishing platform, but are graduating more and more into more complicated
types of software. We're at 155 people as of this morning, which has been growing gradually
over the last seven years. It started with just my brother and I, but doubling our customer
base pretty much every year, have over close to 70,000 customers.
Crazy.
And people are building some awesome things on it, have a great team.
All over the world, actually, we're about 70% remote across 20 countries, 30 plus different
states. And having fun doing that.
I think I remember reading an article from a year and a half ago where you were already
making I think $10 million a year in revenue, projecting to more than double that. Is there
a point at which you look at yourself in the mirror and you're like, I've made it. I've
done it.
I mean, that definitely hasn't happened yet. And I absolutely don't look at revenue as
that metric. It's sort of like a nice lagging indicator.
But honestly, that's just helpful in helping us reach our full mission, which is to empower
a lot more people to build software. Right now, it's a tiny percentage of the world that's
able to build software, like people who know how to code.
So it feels like we're maybe 5% there. People are just starting to see the potential of
this. So it definitely doesn't feel like we've made it yet. Although I could say maybe seven
years ago when we were first starting out, kind of felt that certain points that we made
it just by surviving, being able to be ramen profitable and not worrying about running
out of money, that sort of felt like a milestone in making it. But right now it feels like
we still have a lot more to do.
Well, we've got a lot to talk about. I want to talk about what you sort of alluded to,
which is kind of the no code movement and the fact that right now we live in a world
where primarily the people creating things online are developers, but we're moving towards
a world where lots more people who aren't developers are going to be building interactive,
cool websites and applications.
I want to talk a little bit about fundraising because on this show I don't exactly feature
that many businesses. You've raised a ton of money and I've been kind of accused by
some of being kind of a VC basher, but now I've got you in the podcast.
Me too, by the way.
Well, you've got an interesting perspective because you hit profitability before raising
money and you raised, I think you guys have raised like $75 million or something, an insane
amount. And so it'll be cool to get your perspective on whether or not the things set on the show
about venture capitalists are true.
But first thing I want to start by talking about ideas and choosing what to work on.
Because I've noticed this pattern with lots of companies that I've spoken to that although
intuitively it kind of seems like to start a successful business, you need to invent
something that's brand new, you need to solve some sort of unsolved problem.
A lot of the most successful companies that I've talked to solve kind of a boring, straightforward
problem that's been around for web flows, enabling people to create websites and applications.
People have been doing that for ages. Our mutual friend, Lintai, she has a company called
Key Values. She helps developers find jobs at software companies. People have been doing
that before.
I just talked to John O'Nolan. He's helping bloggers publish content online. People have
been doing that before. But I think there's something to solving one of these perennial
problems that people really find a need to solve and then bringing kind of a more creative
solution than what exists already in the market.
So why don't we start at the beginning? How did you come up with the idea for web flow
and why weren't you dissuaded by the fact that people were already building websites?
Yeah, that's a good question. By the way, it's a small little aside. Lintai, you mentioned,
she built her business, Key Values, on web flow.
So it sort of helped her bootstrap her company, which always makes me happy and seeing success
cases like that.
But the original idea was a lot of people had the same idea around how do we make making
websites easier. Just like a lot of people thought search was a solved problem in 1990.
In the 90s. And then Google sort of came along and did it slightly better.
I think we're in the same boat where we just saw this. Because I was a web developer, I
was working with a lot of designers, taking like Photoshop files, turning them into like
these CMSs. It just kept like repeating over and over. And at some point I was doing this
so much that it just became more and more obvious that it has to, there has to be a
better way.
But I actually won't claim credit that it was like some magical insight because that
I had, it was a specific video that I saw that I think every maker and every creator
should see called Inventing on Principle by Brett Victor.
Seeing that talk, it's like a maybe 50 minute talk around creating games and doing animation
and sort of like this broader concept of direct manipulation. But more importantly, the principle
behind why you do the work you do, like what drives you.
And seeing that video and being sort of a designer and a 3D animator and a developer
all at once, it just sparked like that idea of like holy crap. The kinds of tools that
we can have like in animation land, the kind of tools we already have for like game design
and level design, the kind of tools we have in like digital publishing, all those things
can be like married together to like front end and back end development and just make
it a much more human type of interface. And that's when it was like, boom, this has to
be a product and a thing.
But I didn't even think that there was like a market, huge market opportunity. It was
more like how do I solve this problem for myself and for my brother who I partnered
with to build websites for clients. So sort of like how do I make our life easier? Not
how do we make like billions of dollars or whatever, or like create this world changing
product or anything. It was much more meager ambitions at that point.
So what was your plan if you were to build this tool and make your life easier? Would
you just continue doing agency work?
Yeah, it was just us two. We were working mostly with businesses in Sacramento, like
mostly dentists, sometimes orthodontists like started with my dad's boss who was a dentist
and you know, kind of went out from there. And we just thought, you know, I could make
more money for my family. I had kids at the time already. I could just make a better living,
put a little bit more money away for college or whatever, and just be more efficient with
creating these websites. So it was just only thinking of it as that, like how do we save
ourselves a little bit of time?
At what point did you start thinking that this could be something that you could turn
into a fully fledged business that other people would want to use and wouldn't just be for
you and your brother?
I think that was more gradual, just seeing a lot of the success cases around that time.
This was late 2011, early 2012, where, you know, more and more businesses like Weebly,
like, you know, Squarespace, like WordPress, etc., started becoming pretty prominent and
started to see that as like, hey, maybe there's like a product opportunity here, not just
like a tool that we create for ourselves. And at some point, somebody encouraged us
to apply to YC and that's to Y Combinator. And the questions that they asked there led
us to think more around sort of like the opportunity because they ask, you know, what are you inventing?
What are you creating that doesn't exist? What problem does it solve? And then later
on in the applications, like how are you going to make money? And that's some of the earliest
times where we're like, oh, you have to think about how this is going to be productized
and what kind of value it brings to people into businesses. And that led us to more think,
you know, more strategically around like, is there a business here, etc.
But even then, during that process, the first time we applied, we thought it was going to
be us sort of, you know, we didn't know around about how the need to scale, you know, add
more people as you build a complex product, we just thought that we could build everything
ourselves, a little bit naive in that sense. But you know, it's sort of like gradually
started becoming more clear that, you know, we were going to have to turn this into a
more into a bigger company in order to reach, even deliver the initial product that we wanted.
So I want to dwell on this point for a little bit where you looked out in the ecosystem,
you saw, there was Weebly, there was Wix, there's Squarespace. And these are all basically
website building tools. So if you don't know how to code, you can use one of those to create
a website. I think the vast majority of people, if they look out and see a bunch of other
companies doing a great job at something, they think, oh, I'm too late. You know, if
only we had done this a little bit earlier, we're too late, these companies are huge.
There's no reason for our thing to exist. Why didn't you think that?
I actually did think that. And believe it or not, I started Webflow three different
times before 2012, starting all the way back in 2005. And at different times, I saw these,
you know, products come out and I got discouraged. I was like, okay, so Weebly got into, you
know, these kind of these accelerators and they raised money from Sequoia and all this
stuff and sort of like game over for me. I think the key insight in 2012, when I saw
this video from Brett Victor, was one very specific new technology that just came around
into browsers called Responsive Design that none of these tools had. And that's the part
that I was doing a lot like, you know, my brother would do the Photoshop design of a
new website. And I would translate into code with like HTML and CSS, but mostly in CSS,
there's something called breakpoints that none of these other template based website
builders even had. And Adobe didn't really have a product that let you do sort of cross
breakpoint stuff, where you would design one thing for desktop and kind of go down to tablet
go down to mobile, because all that stuff was relatively new. So that was the, you know,
those are little hedge into the into the market to say like, Hey, nothing exists like this
to do actual responsive design, where you have one design that automatically kind of
flows down to the next version, and you can make some like design tweaks, etc. All other
services like forced you to either like have one design for all environments, and you just
sort of kind of have to zoom out, you know, or write custom code, and we wanted to create
something that specifically solved that problem. So we were kind of lucky in that sense, and
that those companies were like big enough at that point that they couldn't move quickly
to add something like that. And nobody else had sort of everyone else was kind of discouraged
in that, you know, website builders are kind of a solved problem. And they added a sort
of thing that we naively still believe that it was a huge opportunity. But a lot of people
in 2012, especially investors, especially other startup founders, were thinking about
mobile, like anybody we talked to about web at the time, we're like, What are you doing?
Like this, this whole, you know, medium is dying, everyone's, you know, working on apps,
and that's the next big opportunity. So it was a combination of kind of like having that
small little feature set that we could be unique in. And most of the people not really
paying attention to the space and thinking that it is a solved problem. And for us, honestly,
just, it seemed like a really fun thing to work on. So yeah, it's crazy how some of the
some of these bigger problems that seem solved will never truly be solved, because the world
keeps changing. It's like, okay, well, now there's responsive design, now there's mobile,
need better website building tools, it's not something that ever can be solved. And I think
it's one of the reasons why there's always an entry point if you're solving one of these
previously solved problems, one of these boring, straightforward problems. Another thing that
comes to mind is just competition. Because even though you might have an edge on the
features, how do you find customers? How do you compete where you have all these other
companies basically buying all the ad space, and they have all the word of mouth, and they
have all the attention? How did you find your very first users for Webflow?
For us, it was a combination of, so we, I think this was a saving thing for us, we would
be dead right now if this didn't happen. We created a small little prototype, like Sergey
and I, my brother, we first wanted, so we started the company in September 2012. And
we had like three months of runway. We essentially talked to my wife, and we took all of our
savings, even borrowed some against credit cards to say, okay, we're going to really
live with that income for three months. And then in the meantime, we're making a Kickstarter
video, and that's going to get us a bunch of money, like we're targeting $300K or something.
And then Sergey now would be able to live on that runway for a year or two, and then build
the product, get to revenue, et cetera.
And your wife was okay with that plan?
With the three months. Then when three months rolled around, and we're nowhere close, and
Kickstarter shut us down because they don't support SaaS products, and we were already
like, we had invested like $20K into making this video. You know, that was our bad for
not reading the terms of service, which by the way, read the terms of service before
you bank your company's future on, you know, a platform or something like that. And, you
know, ran out of money, then had to start borrowing or whatever. And three months later,
my daughter needed to have surgery. So we're like selling our car, and we're planning already
to move back to Sacramento and get my old job back. And we said, okay, we have only
one more month. And my brother also wanted to move back to San Diego because, you know,
he was out of money, et cetera. So we said, we're just going to put together a rough prototype.
And it's not even going to be a working product, it's just an idea for what we want to build.
We put together this like five month, not five month, five week plan of like the bare
bones of what we need to ship. And we shipped that and we put it up on Product Hunt. It
was like a read-only thing. You can still see it. It's playground.webflow.com. And that
took off like gangbusters. It just went, you know, it went viral. It was the number one
thing on, not Product Hunt, sorry, Hacker News. Product Hunt didn't exist yet. So on
Hacker News, which is like full of developers. And here we're like showing this design tool
that was actually an abstraction over HTML and CSS, which I think is why it resonated
so much because we had this sort of side-by-side mode where you can make a change with like
visual UI tools. It would show exactly what code is changing in the CSS. And I think that
really resonated with a lot of developers thinking like, oh, this is kind of like dev
tools, but a little more sophisticated. And that got really popular. And that gave us
a bunch of people on a waiting list. I think it was close to 25,000 people over just a
week. And then there was sort of, you know, people sharing it and saying a lot of good
things about it, a lot of bad things about it too, a lot of like dispersion things.
Attacker News, of course.
Yeah, especially like thought leaders in like CSS space, like you can never, you know, you
can never replace CSS, that kind of thing. But that created a pretty large list of people
that when we ended up launching an actual working product a year later, that was how
long it took us to actually build it out. Then, you know, we had a list to try to convert.
And you know, we had all these ambitions around, okay, you know, 30,000 people, even if we
convert, you know, 5% or whatever, we're going to have a really good business. But the product
was so limited at the time, I think we converted like 100 people. And it was really discouraging.
And you know, then that started going up like slow, very slowly. And that's actually honestly
one of the reasons why we decided to take an investment at that point, because it was
just survival mode. If we didn't do that, like we literally didn't have any other options
in finance, like being able to invest in creating the product, because the product couldn't
sell itself yet.
Yeah, it seems like you were floating from lifeline to lifeline.
At that time, yes.
Yeah. How did it feel to see your prototype project blow up on Hacker News and get all
these subscribers after you've been taking out credit cards and really not succeeding
to build what you tried for five or six months?
You know, when the decision was, we're already looking for homes back in Sacramento. And
you know, my wife was really discouraged. My kids, they were three in one at the time.
We already made plans to move out, thinking that there's no way that this is going to
be, you know, like we just wanted to show the world. And what happened on Hacker News
was way beyond our wildest expectations. That was, I don't know, it was like the biggest
roller coaster of being discouraged to seeing, holy cow, like this is really, really resonating.
And for once, like Hacker News, if you go back through that thread, like people were
saying like really positive things. I don't know what was on people's minds then, but
it was like an uncharacteristic day for Hacker News to be like really supportive for what
we're building, especially with something that potentially has like this era of replacing
programmers potentially, even though that's not what, you know, no code does. We were
very lucky that it really took off that day.
How did you support yourself for the next year when you're building this prototype and
you're actually trying to capitalize on this thing that had taken off on Hacker News?
I can show you my credit card statements. It was a lot of those, thankfully I had the
privilege of having good credit so I can keep borrowing. But you know, I had a lot of credit
cards that had those like, you know, 2% you sign yourself a check type of things. And
it was that for a while. And then we got into IC, there was a small investment there. So
we were able to start paying ourselves minimum wage. And then only about six months later
when we were able to raise a seed round did we start to like have any sort of salaries
where you could even like break even on a personal level and pay for like rent and stuff.
So that was, you know, I think the promise of like, hey, it's working. Like people are
signing up. People are excited about this. People are talking about this on our forum
or on Twitter. That gave enough of like blind optimism that this was going to work that
I could kind of keep everybody excited that something, you know, this thing is going to
come through.
We've got almost the exact story and path that I tell founders not to go down.
Oh, yeah, I would absolutely not advise anyone to do this. It's like a paradoxical thing.
You know, we wouldn't be here if I hadn't done that. But I would not recommend that
to a friend, to be honest, like the roller coaster and the financial decisions we had
to make were not prudent ones.
No, but I think on the flip side, there's something about being under that kind of pressure
of knowing you only have a month left of knowing that you're running out of money that I think
sometimes forces a certain level of creativity or a certain level of action. You decided
to build that prototype. And maybe if you had had two years of runway, you never would
have done that. You would have built something much bigger, never really proved that concept.
It was definitely all or nothing. Like it was, and I definitely don't recommend this
now. Like it was a season that we had to go through a survival mode. Right now, I would
never recommend, you know, especially a growing company to work those kinds of hours and do
that kind of, and thankfully it was like super enjoyable because we got into flow state,
right? Like we were building like this beautiful thing that we really wanted the world to see
and to experience. And it was, you know, one of the best years of my life in terms of like
creativity and, but also one of the worst years of my life in terms of like stability
and uncertainty and risk and etc. So, but you know, thankfully, I think I was privileged
enough that I knew that if everything fell through, sure, I would be, you know, still
in debt or whatever, but at least I can go get a job back at my previous company because
my boss was sort of like hinting, my old boss was kind of hinting like, Hey, it'd be nice
to have you back kind of thing. Not, not nearly anyone has that. Not nearly everyone has that
kind of privilege.
So when you joined YC, I think they gave you $80,000, something to fund your company, which
is enough for you and your brother to basically pay yourselves a salary for a year, a year
and a half if you're living super frugally. Yeah. You had a family at the time, so probably
not. Yeah. At that point, those three, so we had
another co-founder join Bryant. He joined a few months after we started before we got
into YC and it was definitely not like YC was like, you have to pay yourselves a minimum
wage. So whatever that was, like 12, 15 hour at that point, that was not at all sustainable.
So until we were able to raise our seed round, maybe six months later, it was sort of like
that investment was more for like, if we have to pay for AWS or if we have to like hire
a developer, maybe, you know, we weren't thinking of that as like, okay, how do we divvy up
80 grand into, you know, three founders pockets or whatever, it was more. We were still operating
in that like really lean, everybody individually figures out how to cover their personal expenses,
kind of waiting for more income to come in through revenue and things like that.
How did you decide that the path forward would be to raise more and more money? And this
is something I want to talk to you about because you just have such a different perspective
than others I've had on the podcast. I think for most people, the caution around raising
money is the cost to your potential freedom, you might lock yourself in a path where essentially
you're answering to investors, your company, even if it would be successful at a smaller
size now has to go way further and do way more in order to succeed. Were you weighing
those questions when you decided to raise your seed round? And how did you decide to
make that decision rather than bootstrapping?
Absolutely. So for us, we didn't have a choice. There was no bootstrapping option. You know,
we were maybe 20% of the way through building the product, right? We just needed more time.
The only other option for all of us was to go back to work and sort of moonlight again
in building the product. But I think that would have taken just the market opportunity
at the time, somebody else would have. There was already a company called Easel that had
launched a preview and they were already in YC that were thinking, you know, if they really
operate really well, they ended up being sold to GitHub and it became like Adam, the editor.
Same team was working on it. But it sort of felt like, you know, we either have to raise
a seed round to be able to sustain, just sustain operators, like literally pay rent, not even
for the company, for ourselves individually. Otherwise, we just have to shut the company
down. So it didn't feel like a conscious choice at that point. It was like, do you want to
keep surviving or do you not? Like, do we want to keep building? And that seemed like
the only avenue. And thankfully, like the seed environment at that time was like, you
know, you don't have to give up any control. People kind of taking a flyer on you. There's
no, you know, investors don't meddle in operations or board seats that investors are getting.
Absolutely. Exactly. And then thankfully, this is where usually it gets tough for startups
is where they raise that and then they don't get to profitability. And all of their options
go out the window except to raise more. And that's when like you get more dilution, more
control that starts to seep out away from founders and from the company into people
that might not be aligned to your mission. And you're sort of doing that out of desperation
rather than like strategically. So for us, what we did, thankfully, we had amazing early
seed investors because nobody wanted to invest in web tools at the time, except people who
really believed in you as a person and wanted to support you as a person. So it was like
philosophically aligned, you know, people who just wanted to support like the scrappy
and passionate team. They didn't have like, you know, outside expectations for this becoming
like a rocket ship or whatever. In fact, one of our investors early on, this guy named
Ron from Rainfall Ventures, we would do like breakfast and walks around San Francisco and
he'd be like, why don't you be more like the Patagonia founder who takes off six months
a year to get inspired, which is not something you expect to hear from investors. He's thinking
like super long term and, you know, talking about culture and how do you build, you know,
teams that are kind and not things you expect from investors. And then we got to, thankfully,
got to profitability or to break even. And at that point, the sky's the limit, right?
Because you're in control of your own destiny. You don't have to, you're what I call, what
PG calls Paul Graham, who's the founder of Y Combinator, Default Alive, which means that
if you don't bring in outside capital, you're still going to survive. You might grow slow
or etc., but you're like, you're in control of your own destiny. The other more common
option is your default debt, right? If that next like Series A or Series B or Series C
doesn't come through, you have to go out and raise again and, you know, have more people
to be accountable to, etc. So we were operating like that for five years. And the calculation
that we made recently, like around the beginning of this year with raising this very large
Series A was thinking through like the strategic opportunity of what we wanted to do and honestly
came down to finding another person that was so philosophically aligned with what we want
to build long-term and just wants to help us do that much faster. And we wanted to do
that much faster. We knew that we wanted to go from well beyond websites to web applications
because we saw what kinds of things people were building on Webflow. People were literally
tens of thousands of people making a living, right? So we had this fire in our bellies
of like, look, our product is helping people make a living. People are begging us for more
functionality because they are putting food on the table. They're buying houses. They're
like creating jobs because our product is enabling them to do that. It feels suboptimal
for us to just take our time and just treat our comfort as we're just going to keep our
team the same size it is and keep growing very slowly. We just had this drive to like,
how do we get this into a lot more hands? How do we get not one out of 400 people to
build software? How do we get like 40 out of 400 people, if not 200 out of 400 people
building software? So it was like finding somebody and we didn't even go out looking,
right? It was hundreds of conversations and breakfasts and relationships that sort of
develop with potential investors over the years because people hear things like we're
making a lot in revenue and profitable, et cetera, and that sort of attracts investor
conversations. And I'll tell you this, the vast majority of them were exactly what you
hear about investors, right? How do we make more money? How do we turn this business into
something that is going enterprise and makes these massive deals, et cetera? Thinking through
the classical model of what I call just build shareholder value. And it wasn't until we
met Arun from Excel that was like, forget about all that. That stuff is interesting
in that a company can do that right now. It's like double down on what's already working.
But look at this, seeing the opportunity of really shifting the landscape of software
development and how do we get it into as many hands as possible, even if it means growing
revenue slower. Even if it means having to forego some of the classical VC type tactics
of growth at all costs. And that's what it became for us. Finding a partner that really
cares about us as people. We're friends, we used to hang out with families and kids. The
way I think about it is we knew we wanted to climb this mountain. We've only done so
much in climbing mountains before. We kind of know about it conceptually. We know we
want to climb it. And here's somebody that's like a sherpa that's done it a hundred times
before and is able to give us gear and resources to do that faster and better and more safely.
And for us, it was that feeling of a true partnership. And we were lucky to be in a
position where we didn't have to give up any control. It's a true partnership. It's not
somebody that we report to or a new boss or whatever. It's like adding a new co-founder.
It's adding somebody who really believes in the mission and has something to bring to
the table. They're literally in our slack, interviewing people, solving problems, diving
into specific challenges on a team, dreaming big about what we can do together. It just
feels like a collaboration rather than somebody to fear or somebody to... And the cool thing
about Excel is that they don't have these short-term time horizons because the funds
that they work with that are downstream are like the California Pension Fund, the Canadian
Pension Fund. They have a hundred year time horizons. They're looking for the global maxima,
just like what we're trying to optimize for. We're trying to make this new way for people
to create software. The faster we get to that, the more of a dent we can make in the universe.
And that's really what it came down to because we weren't able to move that fast with the
resources that we had. We weren't growing revenue fast enough to be able to say, okay,
we're going to do an event like No Code Conf and really kick off the industry and inspire
a lot more people. We just didn't have that money to invest. It was sort of like a question
between, okay, do we wait two years until we're in that position or make more of a spark
now and try to do a lot more now? And so far that calculation has been an amazing return.
And we still stay true to our values. We still stay true to the way that the company operates.
We have these things called core behaviors that in our mission and our vision that truly
drives the company. It's not things like a revenue number. It's not things like how do
we get into every company or sell to every company in the world or whatever. It's how
do we make our mission happen? How do we empower more people to create software and build companies,
create services, make a living, et cetera. And that avenue helped us do that faster.
So it sounds like there's really three big things that have made your experience with
fundraising really positive. The first one is just working with the right investors who
are actually aligned for what you want to do and are just sort of, they'll invest in
any company so long as it increases shareholder value.
And those investors are very few and far between. So I understand when people have a negative
view of investors because I have a negative view of the vast majority of investors.
And so the second point was that you got to this default alive state where you were making
enough money to be breakeven, which meant that you actually had the power and the time
to mine these good investors. You weren't rushed into having to accept any deal you
could take.
Exactly.
I think the third thing that's pretty interesting is kind of your values as a person. You are
someone who, and you said it several times so far in this conversation that the revenue
number is not what excites you. It's more so the opportunity to change the way that
people are creating things online. And I think that's not a common trait. I think for the
vast majority of people, if you say, hey, would you rather have $20 million? Would you
rather change the way that people build websites? They'll be like $20 million.
Where does that come from inside of you and if you always prioritize things that way?
I haven't thought a ton about that, but I think a lot of it has to do with just my life
experience. I grew up in Russia like super poor. We were on this sort of our own farm
with no electricity. We had a well and an outhouse and that kind of thing. And we lived
in a country where my family's religion was persecuted again. So my parents didn't have
to be isolated under the radar, trying to make ends meet. My grandparents and their
grandparents were also persecuted, went through multiple wars. So having that chance to come
to America, honestly by the goodness of people, there was a law that allowed refugees to enter
the country, especially at a time when there was anti-Russian sentiment. There was enough
people in Congress and with the leadership was able to have a totally different view
on immigration and amnesty than what's currently happening, unfortunately. And seeing that
somebody was able to give my family the chance at a better life, I already have a much better
life than I would have been having back there. So it almost seems like I want to help as
many people as possible provide that. And money doesn't seem like a, sure it might be
an avenue to do that, but helping other people make a living seems a lot more powerful, especially
if we can do that through our product. And it always, I think when I've had experiences
that felt very morally wrong to me at other companies, it just made me want to create
a company where other people don't have to make that trade-off of, well, we're doing
everything in the service of capitalism or shareholder value or whatever. That just doesn't
feel inspiring. It just doesn't feel like, sure it could be an outcome or a reward, but
what people really want is a strong sense of purpose, like why are you doing the work
that you're doing? That's the inventing and principle video that I mentioned that really
inspired me towards that. It's not the what that you do, but the why. And people want
a lot more autonomy. People want a lot more ownership. People want to master crafts that
they practice to give meaning and purpose to their life. And all those things feel so
much better. It just feels better to operate in an environment that's values driven. Some
of our core behaviors are things like practice, extraordinary kindness, be radically candid,
dream big, lead by serving others. Our entire leadership model is not direct, I know everything,
and here's like, go do this, do my vision, and sort of like serve high, really awesome
people and serve them in meeting their objectives and bringing their new ideas to our product
and to our team and to processes, et cetera. So much so that we baked it into the mission
of the company. A lot of times, companies will have missions where it's like make collaborate
or whatever Google's is. Organize the world. Yeah, exactly. And we have one like that that
we defined very early on, which is to empower people to build software without code. That's
like the big long-term vision, et cetera. But we created one that's side by side and
equally as important, if not more so, which is to create the kind of company where each
individual team member can live an impactful and fulfilling life, whatever that means to
them. And that's like a much higher thing to shoot for. It's much harder than like here's
a product that you want to build. And that creates sort of like this glue and this foundation
of wanting to also staying accountable to doing the right thing. People have different
definitions of what the right thing is a lot of times, but most times you just know when
something is like you're doing it because you just want to make more money versus because
you want to do the right thing by people. And to me, that's just the kind of company
I want to work in. And whether I'm the CEO or not, that's the thing that I see sustaining
the company over decades rather than, you know, chasing a revenue number or like a market
share number or whatever. That's just, I don't know, for whatever reason, that's not inspiring
to me.
Yeah, it's pretty interesting. And I think a lot of first-time founders don't think
about this when they're building their first company, but you're not just creating something
for customers and you're not just creating something for yourself, but you're probably
going to create something that has employees and it's going to be its own community. It's
almost like its own country and you're the head of state and you get to determine what
kind of country it's going to be. Is it going to be a brutal dictatorship? Is it going to
be something where your employees can grow and flourish? And so putting a lot of thought
into that is crucial. But also the other side of the equation, you know, how do you sustain
all these people's livelihoods? How do you generate enough revenue to actually make your
company work and grow? And, you know, that basically means making your customers happy
and building something that works. What goes into building a company like Webflow that
somebody from the outside looking in who's never built any tool like this might not appreciate?
How do you grow and build a successful product?
Honestly, it's sort of like chicken and egg, right? You could say that you need to serve
customers really well for them to give us revenue so that we can, you know, treat employees
better, et cetera. But you could also argue that you're not going to build a good product
if you're not taking great care of your team. So like which comes first, right?
I tend to believe that it's actually like the team comes first. The team that we have,
you know, we can tackle other problems and we could probably tackle them equally well.
We happen to be like really excited about this vision and mission. I think what wasn't
obvious to me from the very beginning is that I wasn't thinking about team and structure
and like the values and core behaviors of the company as like a system, right? Or even
a thing to be like really thoughtful around at all times. I was more thinking about like
architecture and features and like code base and are we writing enough tests or whatever
that stuff kind of figures itself out. But it's much, much, much, much harder to build
an organism of people that are rowing in the same direction and have a common mission and,
you know, like treating each other really well and collaborating well have a common
sense of purpose. Much harder than creating, you know, a set of servers that are following,
you know, even as hard as software development is. So I would encourage founders and people
who are building companies to start on that much earlier. Even if you're running a very
small independent company, even a company of one, the way that you treat your vendors
or people that you're subcontractors that you're collaborating with, all that stuff
has like compounding effects by treating relationships as people first rather than like outcomes
first or like revenue first or, you know, what can this do for me in a financial sense.
I think over time, maybe I'm too much of an optimist, but I think that reaps much bigger
rewards over time, both like emotionally and psychologically, but also, you know, in a
monetary sense. Over time, I think it just pays dividends to treat people as people.
What point did you have that transitioning? Because you said you weren't necessarily thinking
that way right up front. Webflow is now, I believe you said 155 people. Yeah. At what
point did you, did you switch over and think, you know, this is the real challenge?
Yeah. So it wasn't, it wasn't a, you know, snap of the fingers type of transition, but
I'd say it took place around, like when I realized that I really have to shift my mindset
from like thinking about the code as the product to the company as the main thing that I'm
kind of designing was probably around 40 people or so when it started emerging that, you know,
it was much easier for me as a developer and as a designer to focus on code problems. Like
that's where I could add value.
And that's your natural skill set. Exactly. But seeing things like start to crack, like
two people not getting along or it's hard to give somebody feedback or you see somebody
struggling, but you're, you're, you're afraid to give them a, you know, a tougher expectations
or like more clear expectations, or you saw somebody say something that is, you know,
potentially harmful for somebody else. And you're just afraid to lean into that. You'd
rather go into your code base where you can put on headphones and like solve a problem
and like have other people celebrate that. It took seeing more and more of those things
manifesting and people, thankfully being kind enough to like flag those to me and be brave
enough to come to me with like radical feedback of like, Hey, this is what's actually happening.
Like people are going to leave if this isn't fixed or this is going to start falling apart.
Or you know, we have somebody that's like steamrolling over other people just because
they've been there longer, et cetera. And that's when I really realized that it, I have
to step away from the thing that I really associated my self worth with was like this,
this code base, like the thing that I created from scratch and, and, you know, understood
better than anybody else at the company and started to like disassociate from that. And
I always thought that that was going to be a super painful thing. And then, you know,
I would always try to come back to writing code in one way or another. But surprisingly,
like three years later, like I haven't written a line of code in like the last two years
in the Webflow code base. And I've actually gotten a lot more personal satisfaction and
fulfillment from seeing how the team has developed, like the amount of autonomy the team has and
what they were able to build. So it was a surprising thing that I was really fearful
of. But like looking back, I'm really thankful that I was able to go through that transition.
Is there something you can do to make that switch more palatable, to make it more enjoyable?
Because I know a lot of founders who are technical, who are developers or designers, and they
really love working on their product. And they have kind of the same fear. You know,
I don't know if I'm going to like transitioning to more of a leadership managerial role and
having other people do the thing that I love to do.
Yeah, you don't by the way, you don't have to, I think it would be a shame to completely
step out of the thing that you love doing. I'm still deeply involved in sort of the product
vision and direction. And a lot of like the high level decisions around that. That's what
I found was that like, that was the most satisfying thing for me, not necessarily, you know, like,
you push this pull request, right, and then like our customers have a new feature. But
more the like, this is my vision for what the product is, and how it will solve these
big problems for our customers, etc. So that for me, like getting rid of that would be
really painful, I think, and I think it would be a disservice to the company. So I think
like creators, especially developers, I would just explore, like leadership becomes its
own challenge and reward. So and it feels like you're developing yourself as like a
code base. Because as you get stronger and like having tougher conversations, you get
stronger and like motivating people and inspiring people, that starts to have its own like endorphin
type of kind of rewards, right. So you'd be surprised how much satisfaction there are
in those even though emotionally it is, you know, you do carry a lot more. It is a more
kind of tough thing that you can't just turn off like the way the way that you can turn
off like thinking about a feature or whatever, I would say like explore, like start adding,
especially as you grow, even if you're working independently, it doesn't really matter if
you're kind of 150 people or 15 people, you're going to have to focus on people leadership,
you're going to have to focus on like motivating your team, inspiring your team, you're going
to have to focus on how do you get a group of people to dream in the same direction and
execute in the same direction. So that's inevitable. It's the question of like, not if but when.
So it's better to start like leaning into that earlier. And you'd be surprised how
much satisfaction you can probably develop there. But it's still totally reasonable
to hold on to like areas that give you energy and that you're really like passionate about
and I would never let go of that stuff.
It's such a good point that as you get better at doing this, you're going to enjoy it more
because that's true for so many other things. Like I've taught a few people how to code,
I taught Lynn how to code, I taught my brother how to code and it's so frustrating for them
in the early days when they just can't get it right. They don't know when they're just
learning but once they start figuring out how to do it, it's suddenly a fun thing to
do and that this thing that they were struggling with that they were frustrated by they suddenly
enjoyed doing. I think it's hard when you're managing people because the stakes are a lot
higher if you don't have a code.
But then the rewards are a lot higher. Let's say you're managing somebody for a year and
they're really struggling or they want to level up as a leader or a manager or whatever.
And then, okay, sure, it takes a year later but then they post some blog posts or some
tweet around like, here's all the progress that I made as a leader, how excited I am
and the team that I built or the product that I shipped. And you're like, ding, ding, ding.
Such a huge reward for the investment that you made into that person and to yourself
in that same journey. You start to see, sure, the stakes are higher but the reward is also
higher.
And I would say that the stakes are more forgiving because people, when you develop a leadership
type of relationship with more people, we're all people. We're all going to make mistakes.
We're going to have conversations that are, we're going to hurt, say hurtful things and
then realize what impact that has and apologize and et cetera. And you get to deepen your
relationships there which is satisfying in its own way. We all crave connection and meaning
et cetera.
I think I found more, even though the lows are lower, the highs are higher too when you
switch to a more people-driven kind of impact mode, especially as the company scales.
Let's talk about the effect that Webflow is having on people outside the company because
your mission is to get more people creating things and then just empower more people to
do what developers are already doing today.
I think I read quite a lot about the best way to grow a company and things that are
the most impactful. So you have people like Peter Thiel wrote zero to one. He was like,
what you need is a monopoly. You need to figure out some niche that you can target that nobody
else is targeting and that's the only way to build something big and impactful.
Totally disagree.
Okay. There's a line of thinking 10 or so years ago that what you need is just the best
product. What you need is to build a product that's at least 10 times better than your
competitors and that's the way to stand out.
What do you think?
The pie is so big. This is why I'm so excited about the potential of Webflow is that so
many problems that can be solved with software especially could be super hyper-targeted at
a small population of people that only you care about.
Let's say you wanted to create, you're in a community immigrated into Sacramento that
has a large community of Russian refugees. There's like 200,000 people there. Let's say
I wanted to create some sort of mini social network for a meet-up-like kind of thing that's
very specific to Russian culture and the way that we do events. That's not a scalable multi-billion
dollar company or whatever, but it's so meaningful to me to be able to build community there
empowered by software that why not?
There's this huge white space right now between people that might have ideas that are like
that that might not be billion dollar companies. What essentially is the benchmark for venture
capital type of investment companies where they're like, oh, how is this going to become
a billion dollar company?
In order to go the venture route, you're usually building things that have to have a lot more
customers, they need a lot more developers, need a lot more designers, product managers,
et cetera. The stakes are much higher, but that white space of being able to solve, build
smaller products and services that serve a more niche type of customer or solve problems
that you know exist but might not be massive opportunities that are going to be global
or across million plus user bases, et cetera.
There's a huge, huge opportunity there. It's almost like the way I think about it is when
magazines used to... When you used to have... You would do them on paper and then you went
to a typeset or to translate that to postscript or whatever, and then you had this big printer
thing, and only certain cities were able to afford a newspaper or whatever. Then digital
publishing made that barrier to entry a lot lower, and a lot more people were willing
to do that in much more niche situations because the investment required was much lower. Same
thing with YouTube, you need to have a movie studio before to make any sort of entertainment.
Now you just need a camera. You can say the same thing about podcasting. This is like
significantly democratized access to that medium, and that's what the huge potential
behind Webflow is. Other no-code tools is that it gives people a clear pathway to having
access to the power of the internet with fewer roadblocks. The big theory is that a lot of
these ideas already exist, and once they understand that they have access to... They have the
right building blocks to be able to build for that, magical things will happen. They're
already starting to happen. In the same way that if developers are listening, that Rails
did the same thing, but in kind of a smaller way for programming in general. When Rails
came out, a lot of developers, early stage developers, junior developers, even designers,
were able to use that as an abstraction layer of things that they no longer needed to understand.
They didn't have to understand SQL. They didn't have to understand how to build out these
UIs. They would just sort of scaffold out an object. They would sort of create UIs and
maybe tweak some CSS or whatever. We got Airbnb and GitHub and all these other companies based
on that. It was like a step function in empowering people to do more, even though it's still
required code. That's sort of our big theory, and it's already being proven that by making
the barrier to entry a lot lower, even though you can't build the most complicated things
with no-code tools, it just opens up the playing field for many more makers and creators that
have this idea that they want to monetize. They now have, they don't have to rely on
like, okay, how does this become so profitable or so revenue generating that I can hire two
developers and a designer to do that? That one person can actually develop that business
idea or that product or service directly if they put in the time to learn these tools
and learn how to hook them up together. Of course, the tools are pretty immature right
now, so you have to put in quite a lot of effort, but they're getting better and better,
and drastically so. I think that will open up such a huge opportunity for people once
they have an idea to be able to prove whether it's a viable business much sooner with much
higher margins, because you don't need to put in as much in terms of labor and time
and outsourcing to be able to even bring that to market, to even test whether it works or
not. For the same way that Shopify made it so much easier for people to test out a product.
You no longer have to hire a development team to say, build out this whole e-commerce experience.
All you really need to innovate on right now is the product and to a certain degree, not
even like fulfillment anymore, because they're starting to automate that more and more. You
have to focus more on the market opportunity and finding something that you think people
need and marketing it, et cetera. It's all about bringing down the barrier to entry and
all about making it that journey from idea to launching a lot shorter. I think by removing
code from that equation, it just means that 100 times many people can even give it a shot.
It's exciting for developers too. I just put together a Shopify store for Andy Hackers
earlier this week. It took like two hours and it's beautifully scanned. It looks just
like the India Hackers website and that frees me up to write more code in other places.
That's the deceiving thing about even the title or the name of this movement. Unfortunately,
I didn't have an input into naming it no code, but even just hearing it, the branding, you
can think of it like, okay, we're trying to get rid of coders or there's no code. But
the truth is, this is all an abstraction layer over code that is only going to increase the
need for coders. Because as you start to build more things with software, inevitably, you're
going to have use cases and things like ways to scale and expand like your initial thing
that you create with more custom things. It's sort of like a rising tide lifts all boats
type of philosophy. The same way that 50 years ago, people were fearful when spreadsheets
started becoming a reality. Because the way that you did financial modeling and doing
just a graph of a chart of financial performance, you'd have to use like COBOL, Pascal and Fortran
and programmers were doing this stuff generating reports, et cetera.
And then spreadsheets came out and first they were kind of a toy. And now over a billion
people use spreadsheets to get access to computing power. And developers are doing more complex
development work. And no code tools are kind of the same where you're going to have a lot
more things started and a lot more need for developers. For which, by the way, we already
have a massive shortage in the world. There's like a million developer shortage today. And
that's expanding. That skill is not going anywhere. And it's only going to be more and
more valued over time.
That's such a great way to make that point. Excel's here. We don't have fewer developers.
In fact, we have more developers than we've ever had. And with the advent of no code tools,
I'm sure the same thing will happen.
Sort of the underlying current that we're talking about here is that Webflow is kind
of at the middle of this no code movement. You allow people to build apps and websites
without code. And you recently hosted the no code conference in San Francisco, which
I unfortunately missed. I don't know how I missed it.
But next year I'll be there. What are some of the things you saw happening there that
got you excited that others who didn't attend maybe missed out on?
The most exciting thing for me was just hearing how people felt, honestly. Because no code
has been – or these approaches of automating or automation through computing power, whether
it's Excel, whether it's Zapier, whether it's even 10 years ago, if this and that
or whatever. All of these things sort of had – people felt some of the productivity gains
from that. But at no code conference, the first time I heard a lot of conversations
of like, oh, I've been doing a lot of these – I knew I wanted to create. I knew I wanted
to build for the internet and for software. And finally, I can see that there are other
people that are just like me. I can't quite get myself to understand how all this code
stuff works, but I want to create. I want to build these things.
And now I see 300 other people that are in my same position. You have people from marketing
teams who are frustrated with having to wait a month for engineering to turn around their
marketing experiment or whatever. And then being able to discover, holy crap, I can do
this entire thing myself, hit publish, and it goes live. It's the real thing.
You have people who are building entire products like IDOU. They have a whole design thinking
course where a designer completely created the entire front-end experience of that without
waiting for a front-end developer who knows like React or Vue or whatever. And that made
the entire product happen. So you start to see the community that's forming, the spark
that formed of like, okay, this is an identity now. This is like a thing. I can see other
people are calling themselves visual developers. I can see other people are saying, I'm part
of the no-code community or whatever, which I think is super powerful. The fact that for
me that was like a 10x more powerful thing, then here's some skill that I learned or some
trick with some tool X or whatever.
I belong to this community.
Exactly. We didn't even make the event about Webflow. I talked from Webflow and we'd said
it's sponsored by Webflow or whatever or presented by Webflow. But we had people from a bunch
of other companies, even companies that we considered to be competitive, it was more
around like, how do we kickstart this industry? How do we work together to empower a lot more
people? Because the opportunity here is so massive. Even if you have a thousand competitors,
it's like Greenfield. It's almost like the gold rush where there's 50 mountains with
a ton of gold and you're really cutting yourself short from laying claim to all the mountains
or whatever, because it's just going to be harder for you.
We have right now the kinds of relationships we formed from that conference, more companies
that we're working with and partnering with and creating integrations with or whatever
that, to me, that's the most exciting thing. Just the spark of this movement that really
got legitimized there.
This is one of the cool things, I think, going back to what we were talking about earlier,
bringing a creative solution to a boring sort of commonplace problem. And I don't want to
call Webflow boring or what you're doing boring at all, but I think it's something that's
been around, but it gives you that longevity where there's millions of people who actually
care about quitting these experiences, and if you stick around long enough, different
things happen. The industry changes and you can be there to sort of ride those waves and
capture them.
For example, John Onolan with Ghost, who's helping with journalism and publishing, the
amount of crises and journalism that have happened since he started Ghost. And he's
been there for every single one of them to say, hey, move to Ghost, this is an independent
publishing platform, et cetera. Or with Webflow, where you started Webflow years ago and no
code wasn't a thing.
Nobody had that term, there was no no code community, but because you've been pushing
this direction and solving this quote unquote boring problem, you're there when these big
trends hit. I think one of the challenges that a lot of founders in your position might
have is that you're building a tool that has a lot of leverage that allows people to create
pretty much anything, but sometimes with that lack of specificity comes difficulties in marketing.
How do you describe what Webflow is? How do you describe what you can do with it when
you have so many different people?
Yeah, it's like, how do you market Excel?
It's like I can manage my chores or there's entire billion dollar companies that run their
entire model on Excel.
Yeah, so what do you say?
That's where you have to find specific verticals. What we say is we define personas. We have
web design freelancers. They have a bunch of jobs to be done. They want to make a living.
They don't know how to code. They have clients that expect a certain level of custom work
from them and they need to move fast. They need to deliver a project. They move on to
the next client to make a living, etc.
We develop that as a persona. We have different messaging for them. It's more around how do
you manage your clients? How do you lower your costs for developing these things? How
do you make sure that your customer moves to hosting and you can add a markup there.
We call it managed billing where they can say, I'm going to charge you $200 even though
Webflow costs $20. That solves their needs.
Then you might have a marketing team where what they really care about is speed. They
don't have clients. They have the company where they work. HelloSign uses Webflow for
marketing. A bunch of other YC startups use Webflow for marketing. What they care about
is speed, iteration, and not having to file a ticket with engineering to make a CSS change.
For them, it's a totally different value add. Then we have e-commerce which is people selling
products and digital goods. In the future, it's going to be creating entire SaaS products.
That's a hard thing. You have to pick four or five and really focus on them. Even that's
hard because each one of those you need an expert in. It's like an exercise in company
building because you can't just ask one person on your team. You own research and development
and all the marketing and feature preference work for large companies and small companies
and freelancers or whatever. It's a really overwhelming thing to split focus on.
We have to pick and choose and prioritize which of those are the easiest sell and hope
that word of mouth and things like that spread more broadly. While other people find other
ways to apply Webflow to their use case, we have many examples where people build entire
products with Webflow, but we don't yet have that as a selling point on our website. Like,
hey, build something that you're going to put up on product hunt, even though we've
had over 50 companies that are launching products and we're in the first position. Nobody even
knows it was built in Webflow. It was something that they just developed and got out there.
It's not big enough that we can go and say a bunch of our effort is dedicated to that.
But the cool thing about some of these personas, freelancers and designers that work at companies
on marketing teams, is that by virtue of using the product, they now have a sense of what
else it can do. It's almost like if somebody asks you to edit a family video on iMovie
or After Effects or whatever, you get more ideas like, oh, now that I understand this
tool chain, I can do so much more. I can go develop my portfolio or I can go develop this
video for a friend that wants to start a business or whatever, or I can develop some toy product
where I can track, I don't know, we had one that was on top of product hunt that just
tracks a bunch of spreadsheets of data, like public data, that people can use to slice
and dice and feed into design tools, et cetera. Not monetizable, but it's a cool product for
the world. Yeah, a cool product. Or recently something
launched on product hunt around color palettes, where I'm starting a product, I want to go
and get inspired by a bunch of really nice looking color palettes. It's not a super monetizable
thing, but this thing got over 100,000 views and a lot of people use it now. It's getting
some integrations into design tools. That's something that wouldn't have existed if a
product like Webflow didn't exist. I kind of forgot what the original question was.
I like where you're going with this because it's exciting that you're able to build something
and you can work on your company, when you're creating in your team, but that that's empowering
so many other people to build things that you've never conceived of, wouldn't have time
to think of, and you can know that you're at least somewhat indirectly responsible for
those things coming into the world. That's really satisfying. We have this, we
call it a showcase, if you go to webflow.com forward slash discover and seeing what people
have built. It just blows my mind. We've had a 3D X-Wing something experience that just
looks like it should be built in Maya or something like that, but it always built divs and stuff.
We've had people rebuild the AirPods landing page completely visually, where Apple probably
had a team of 10 developers working on this thing. A lot of other creative experiences
were like, holy cow, when you put these tools into other people's hands, this is nothing
like what we imagined before and then stretch it beyond its limitations.
Almost like you can think of it as building a game engine. A lot of these companies build
game engines like Unreal, et cetera, but it's other teams that figure out what kind of games
to build. You have a wide range of things that end up being developed there or 3D animation
software or even YouTube. You create the platform and the foundation, but what people do with
it is so unique and so multifaceted. You have entire brands doing things on YouTube and
you have individuals, kids reviewing, unboxing things, and then you have all sorts of society
defining entertainment, et cetera.
MakerPad was built on Webflow. MakerPad is itself a platform that's inspiring other people
to build things, so it's like many levels down of inspiring platforms. I think a lot
about founder or company fit. How do you start a company that you as a founder actually will
enjoy running? If you're someone who really wants to have an impact on what others do,
and if that's super important to you, I think building some sort of tool that others can
create with or some sort of platform others can build on, it's kind of the perfect company
choice because you get to see exactly what you're talking about.
Exactly. I think what's most important for me as a founder, and I think it's very important
to a lot of other founders, is to be able to build a company that you're proud of that
you can say, I didn't have to compromise my personal values in order to make decisions
around some aspect of the business or whatever. If you can do that, if you can create something
that gives value to others and makes their life easier and you feel good about the way
that you did it, that's magical. That's the kind of company I want to keep building so
that I feel proud of this and not to fast forward to my deathbed or whatever, but to
be really proud of not the money that I made, which I'm sure will manifest over time, but
the impact that I've been able to have on other people's lives, including especially
my teams, but especially our customers in the world at large.
That keeps me super excited. I'm actually more excited now than I even was seven years
ago or six years ago or five years ago or whatever, because the potential is like multiplying
because you get to see more of these stories out in the world of what people actually create,
how they make a living, how they impact other people, because we've had people create products
that impact millions of lives, that it's sort of like this hub and spoke thing, right? In
Butterfly Effect, if they weren't able to create that, that wouldn't have happened.
If we didn't create Webflow, they wouldn't have happened. It's sort of like this multi-stage
effect that makes you feel proud of what you can build as a team.
I feel pity for historians of the future who are going to have to look back on the 20 teens
and try to make sense of all the different things that are changing and all the different
apps and websites that are completely upending how basically society works.
But if you think about it, it's kind of like historians looking back at the time of the
printing press right now and the Renaissance, where very few people had the ability to write
or even read, right? We didn't have the ability to put thought on paper and distribute it
to the world, right? That was a relatively new invention with the printing press and
how much more creativity, how many more ideas, what kind of change has happened in the world
now that we were able to share ideas, write things down, actually share them with other
people. I think what we're going through now with the internet revolution is a similar
type of magnitude as when people kind of got this new medium of being able to write.
So this show is listened to by a great many aspiring founders, people who want to start
businesses, people who want to start businesses that are not just cool and helpful, but that
also generate revenue and can sustain themselves and who ideally want to keep to the values
that you just laid out, where you don't really have to sacrifice your personal morals and
values in order to make your company a success. What have you learned that you think would
be helpful for these other founders to know?
If I was to sum it up, always trust your gut. All these things that we discussed, whether
it's venture capital or whatever, all those things are a tool, right? Just the same way
that if you're running a business and you need to go take out a loan in order to be
able to make an investment that you know is going to pay back or whatever, at the end
of it, they're just tools. But the most important thing that I think I feel the most proud of
is that when it came to making hard decisions, I leaned more on my, I would say, morality
rather than business sense. And that's the thing I regret the least because I've made
some decisions that are bad for the business or would cost us a lot more money, but we're
better for people and kinder to people and kinder to our customers.
So of course, there's like trade-offs and fairness when you don't want to give your
product away, right? And you want to charge for the value that you offer, et cetera. But
at the end of the day, that's the thing that I feel most proud of. And I think that that's
the thing that got us into the situation of being in control of our own destiny, building
a product that we all really care about, and really investing in the relationships and
the people and the team that helps build this product, which ultimately is the thing that
needs to sustain the longest.
We have a team where, I mean, it's 155 people over the last four years, at most one person
has left per year. And I think that speaks to how much we care about providing avenues
for people to grow, to have impact, to work on the things that they really want to work
on and be honest and transparent about their experience there so that we can better improve,
right? So I would, above all, focus on people. Don't focus on, you know, a lot of founders
have like this mindset of like being, and I had it at certain points, of like losing
control at all costs, not even to investors, but losing control even to your team, right?
Like not having that final sort of dictatorial say of like, this is exactly what we're going
to do. And a lot of times you hear it manifested of like, I don't want a boss, right? And believe
it or not, even if you don't have VCs, even if you build a profitable business, if you
are creating a team and a product that's driven by people, you're going to have like, if your
team is 100 people, you're going to have 99 bosses if you really are serving your team,
because now you're accountable to 99 people, you know, you being the hundredth, because
you're responsible for 99 people's like paychecks and livelihood and families. And that is a
that is not something that is like, you're in control at all times. And that that team
is now delivering the vast majority of the value that the company is getting revenue
from, right? So you can't even claim that, you know, I started the business or whatever
this all because of like, my ideas, that starts to like fade away, you can't claim a moral
high ground there. So I would say like, prioritize team, prioritize people, prioritize relationships.
Because ultimately, that leads to like, it just feels better. And I honestly believe
it leads to stronger businesses over time, that treat their customers better. And customers
respect a lot more because they see it from the outside or how people talk about the company,
how people talk as customers or gets around exactly exactly. And and that's like, it takes
a long time to build trust. And you know, it's pretty quick, it's pretty easy to destroy
it. But it's also like, if you if you really are thoughtful around how you treat people,
like you also get a lot more grace from people when you make a mistake.
Trust your gut and prioritize relationships. Vlad Magdalene, it's been such a pleasure
having you. Thank you for coming on the show. Can you let listeners know where they can
go to learn more about what you're up to? And about Webflow?
Yeah, just webflow.com. Do we have a bunch of stuff there? I know, like, I'm sure there's
a lot more news on our on our website, but check out the product, feel free to reach
out to me and Vlad at webflow.com. Or find me on Twitter or on the webflow discovery section.
Thanks again, Vlad. Thank you.
Listeners, if you enjoyed this episode, you should reach out to Vlad on Twitter and let
him know you can find him at call me Vlad. Also, if you want my thoughts and takeaways
from each episode of the podcast, you can find the indie hackers podcast newsletter
at www.indiehackers.com slash podcast. Thanks so much for listening, and I will see you
next time.