Building Webflow, and the No-Code Movement (with Vlad Magdalin, Co-Founder and CEO)
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Welcome, LPs. Today we are doing an episode I have been excited about for a long time with Vlad Magdalene, the co-founder and CEO of Webflow. Did I say that right? Yep. All right, good. If you go for my full name, it's Vladimir Konstantinovich Magdalene. Well, next time you're on the show, I'll have the whole thing prepped. It's very intimidating. Yeah.

Well, Webflow is a company I am personally very passionate about since I grew up as a web developer, always fighting between building websites from scratch in PHP and hand coding HTML and CSS. PHP. Facebook days. The Lampstack, baby. Oh, boy. There were WYSIWYG editors out there. You're dating yourself, Ben.

I know. Like Dreamweaver, but they always required you to do all the hosting yourself. I don't know the state of the product today. This is like 12-year-old data, but generated garbage code and Webflow has been an amazing answer to provide the ease of use of a graphical user interface while still being an enormously powerful tool. And we personally use the site for Acquired. We use it for PSL and basically all of our portfolio companies use it as well.

So, Vlad. It's so powerful that even, you know, I can now update the website and add. Which is, you know, the last time I wrote a line of code, I think I was probably maybe 20 years old. Yeah, Vlad, I have the designer creds. So one year ago. David has an editor login. Thank you, Vlad. That says a lot. Yeah.

So listeners, who is Vlad? Well, Webflow, you know, while most of you may know this company only from the last year or two, it is a at least decade old company that I believe, Vlad, you started as a side project in 2005? Yep. It was actually something that started when I was still in college, when I was working at an agency part time as an intern. And

And then turned into my senior project, then turned into a couple failed attempts at starting it as a business. Then I joined Intuit, sort of worked there for a while, then had another failed attempt at turning into a business during sort of the Web 2.0 heyday. And then finally started it, hopefully for the last time, in 2012.

Wow. All attempts to start the same business. Same business, same name, different co-founders every time. Two of those attempts just by myself, sort of looking for a co-founder. The third attempt actually was with two Intuit buddies, one of which, so that attempt didn't work out and can go into sort of like the history behind that, but sort of fizzled out. And over time, one of those co-founders ended up

Starting his own company, got into YC, got acquired by Stripe, and then came back as a senior product manager here. So now he's one of our product leaders. The circle of life. Exactly. So I sort of worked on it in many different iterations with multiple people, and finally something worked.

Wow. Wow. That's so cool. Well, we'll get into all of that. So it's the 2012 version. That was the start of the company. That's the best vintage so far. We know it today. Exactly. Wow. And I think it only raised maybe a few million dollars between then and now when you did the... Yeah. So we started in 2012, started that with my brother, and then one of my buddies from Intuit joined a few months later. Brian ended up being the third co-founder. And then we...

about a year later, we got into YC and then did a seed round, which at the time seemed huge. It was $1.4 million, even though other companies were closing their seed rounds much faster or they were bigger. And then we ended up doing a small, well, small relative to today extension of another 1.5 about a year later. And then...

got to profitability and sort of didn't worry about funding for a long time. And that was what, 2015 you got to profitability? Late 2015, yeah. Awesome.

Listeners, you should know the company then for the last four years has raised no money, as Vlad said. And then this year raised a $72 million Series A from Excel that is coinciding today with sort of this no-code movement. So I think we'll get in a little bit of that later on. But Vlad, I want to go back sort of to the very beginning. You alluded to how you started Webflow. Can we talk all the way back like your college project? What was your initial conception of what it could be? And my understanding, it was...

called Webflow in every one of these iterations, but what was different about the ethos and what you thought the product needed to be in the world? Yeah, so originally when the first idea came across, it was not designed to be like a visual landing page builder. It was sort of in the days where Ruby on Rails was first becoming a thing where...

There was kind of like this idea that, hey, you don't have to like program everything. You can sort of like write some configuration and, you know, it'll scaffold out some, you know, the database for you or whatever. The key insight came. So I was like following all these tutorials and trying to find out how people are building apps. I think the thing that that is important here is that I was going to art school right before that. I wanted to study 3D animation, wanted to work at Pixar. That was sort of the dream job.

that got too expensive so I went back to study computer science kind of

finally listened to my dad. I was like, hey, that might be a better career path. Was your dad or your family engineers? Sort of. So we all grew up in Russia and my dad was sort of like, Russia was 10 plus years behind on technology. So it wasn't, I wouldn't call it computer engineering. It was more like get old computers and try to repair them and try to find schematics. And my dad did do some programming, but he was mostly sort of like IT kind of set up networks, install,

software games and yeah it wasn't it wasn't like mainframes but it was uh kind of computer administration and he was sort of the guy to go to to get software uh which you know

at the time was not always on the up and up. I'll probably throw my dad under the bus here, but it's been a while. Statue of limitations or whatever. And we all know what we did with Photoshop back in the day. Some of our more classic episodes, we should talk a lot about software distribution. Back in the day, there was no internet distribution. Well, there was, but it was not on the up and up. And that'd be really fun. Maybe when we cover Microsoft to talk about

distribution, legal and otherwise in that area. Yeah, I think a lot of people's careers are built on that. Like, you know, I first got into graphic design using CorelDRAW, which I remember downloading from somewhere and then Photoshop, etc. I remember Microsoft had the strategy of like, you know, whatever, you know, as long as people get used to it, which is sort of the strategy in Russia and China, like they built their entire business on it and then you monetize.

But, you know, that's a whole probably different episode. Well, it probably in a lot of ways leads into, you know, Webflow, right? Yeah. Like, you know, in your premium model and all that. Right. Yeah. Well, anyway, jumping back to the original sort of insight was I was working at this agency and my whole job was it was a creative department and they were doing, you know, we're building these CMSs for large companies like Apple, HP, Tennis Channel, Quicksilver, etc.,

So there's this amazing creative department. They were doing like the websites, like designing what they were going to look like. And my entire job as an intern, I was being paid minimum wage plus a dollar, which I was really proud of. My entire job was to take their designs and put it into this custom CMS that the company had. The entire workflow was look at the layout, right? Build it in HTML and CSS and then write out the SQL to like update, read, like,

fetch data, update it, delete it, et cetera. So it's pretty repetitive, right? Like,

Every different data object was sort of like the same thing with slightly different variables or whatever. And then, you know, it was sort of like, okay with that. That was sort of the state of the world. And then one day, I wasn't supposed to see this, but on the desk of the creative director was an invoice for the tennis channel. And each line item was for like each data object, like player, program, or whatever. Things that took me like three or four days to implement per, I mean, plus the design cost. I'm not sure how many days that took to design. Yeah.

That was like the truly innovative work, you know, like create the brand, work with the customer to sort of like tell a visual story or whatever. And each line item for like that I was probably being paid three to $400 a week to do was over $100,000. Because that was the value that it provided. And immediately I was like,

Shoot, like this needs to be automated where that design team should at least have... And the original insight was not like a design tool that sort of generates this stuff, but almost like a visual logic builder for Ruby on Rails to generate... I see. Like the things you would write out that would scaffold things, one layer above that, like a visual sort of drag and drop thing, like a form builder that would then scaffold out...

the scaffold sort of configuration. So what time frame was this? Like early 2000s? This was 2000, end of 2004, 2005-ish. That's crazy. I mean, you think about like, so we're already like getting into the Web 2.0 era. Yep. And old school companies are still...

still paying $100,000. Oh, yeah. I mean, they're doing that today. I wouldn't be surprised if they're doing that today with like Sitecore and all these massive like Drupal installations. It's just like, because it's super valuable. It's totally, like I worked at the Wall Street Journal briefly and, you know, our CMS and the amount of money that we paid and consulting fees and so on. It was just like, it was insanity. Yep. You could probably build a better product on Webflow now. Yeah, absolutely. Flaz, like certainly.

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So this code generation was kind of the initial. That was the initial thing more for like the backend side of things. Like how do, how do I generate the, you know, the, the database, your own job. How do you, yeah. How do you automate like the forms that take in data? How do you automate? But it was still like, in order to like pull that into a, you know, a template, I was still imagining you have to write HTML and CSS and sort of like, you know,

marry it to data the same way that you would with React and GraphQL today or whatever. So that insight didn't come. And I sort of wrote my senior project on that concept of like, how do you automate the creation of sort of backend flows without needing a developer? And I think I was still of the opinion because I spent so much time and so much effort learning HTML and CSS that I didn't believe that it was possible to automate at that point.

Isn't it funny how that's like a trend where if something, once you acquire what you consider to be unique knowledge, you're like, oh, this isn't something that software can do. Like now I hold the magical keys to accomplish this thing. Exactly. Yeah. So the third attempt, 2007 going on 2008, when I tried to start it with a couple Intuit buddies,

This was already when, you know, Web 2.0 was like in full swing. Y Combinator was a thing. They had a couple batches already. Convertible notes were starting to become kind of like a common way to get started quickly. We got incorporated. We did the whole thing around, you know, splitting the company into equity or whatever. Started building like pitch decks, started talking to investors. Were you in Y Combinator at this point? No, no, no, no, no. This was like, you know, we were planning to apply. We had created the...

C Corp or whatever, then Weebly became kind of like a big thing. We're like, oh, crap. You know, they're kind of... We knew that they weren't doing like every... They were doing very cookie cutter sort of template stuff. You couldn't do a lot of like back-end-y, like custom data things. So we still thought there was an opportunity there. How did that compare to Squarespace at the time? It was very similar. I think Weebly was just more...

I think they were lower priced and they were going for the, like strikingly later became another version of that, that is even lower price that you could like build landing pages even faster, but it was still very much the, you know, targeted directly at small businesses. You'd like pick a template, move some stuff around and press publish. And I think they had an e-commerce component, but I, I don't remember. But anyway, I just remember feeling intimidated by them because it was sort of like, oh, well they're, they got into YC and you know, it's sort of game over for us. They're, um,

Well, this is what we keep going with the story, but I want to come back at some point and talk about,

You see this sometimes in a category where it can feel like it's overcrowded. I mean, there's, you know, we could reel off a ton of quasi competitors to you guys. And yet, you know, there's room for differentiation and for multiple really big companies to be built. That is the case looking backwards. When we were in it, we're like, oh, crap, you know, we're way behind. Right. And I don't know if it's worth sort of pursuing that.

You also don't know what the market segments are going to evolve into. So when you're pitching yourself as, we're honestly just emotionally trying to decide where do we fit into this puzzle. Like you don't know where the big pieces are going to be. You don't know what pieces sound good but are actually going to be non-existent. Right. And that's something I'll get to a little bit later. But you even have those thoughts when you have some semblance of product market fit. You know, when things are working and then you're kind of like, well, they're not working well enough so we must have something off or whatever. Yeah.

That third attempt actually failed for just stupid reasons because we had incorporated and then we filed for a trademark and then filing for the trademark because we had the domain. And I thought like getting the domain was the hardest part in the Web 2.0 era, right? Like when everybody was dropping letters just to get, you know, something to work. Right.

We were like, okay, we got all of our bases covered, so we filed for a trademark. And then because we filed for a trademark, I guess somebody who already owned a trademark for Webflow for like a different category or whatever, they saw that on their trademark.

trademark, you know, notification service or whatever. And they sent us a, you know, cease and desist, like, hey, we already have like an early filing. It was like this company in Florida. And I guess they were developing a product in sort of some, not a website creation space, but like an e-learning space that had something to do with websites. So that started a whole sort of like, we basically ran out of money trying to

like fight that. Oh no. And so had you raised money? We had not raised money. This was like, we got, we got like 15 grand from, you know, lawyers to sort of like, Hey, we'll cover, we'll take like a small cut of equity and we'll cover your incorporation or whatever. You don't have to worry about it until you raise. And then just some personal money that starting from scratch was mostly on credit cards. So you're not, you didn't raise money. You're not generating revenue and you're already embroiled in a legal battle. Exactly. Uh, it

I wouldn't call it a legal battle. It's more like, you know, like there was a volley lobbed at us and we're like, it was more of a battle with our lawyers and then them telling us it's not worth it. Like, you're just going to pay us tens of thousands of dollars just to send emails back and forth. And these are like, you know, high-powered Silicon Valley lawyers that are like,

at the time was like $500 an hour or something like that. So we got totally discouraged. We were like, sort of went back to the drawing board, started looking for new names, created a bunch of logos for like this new version called Marked Up, like, you know, H-O-M-A-R-K-E-U-P. Except it was M-A-R-K-D-U-P because, you know, you couldn't get the domain name.

Marked up. Yeah, exactly. I feel like now that would mean like a venture firm that does gross stage rounds. Marked up. Yeah, exactly. There you go. The idea of running a company called Marked Up and us spending like four months on trying to rebrand and like one of the co-founders sort of dropped out and we all started, you know, this was our first job at Intuit. So we kind of had to like

The idea first came when we were in the very, very early few months when there wasn't a lot of like pressure work. But then, you know, work picked up and it sort of fizzled out, especially since like I personally was really discouraged by not being able to use the name.

And the job got interesting at Intuit. What were you doing there? Initially, I was working on payroll, which is not great. But then about a year in, I switched to their innovation lab, which was amazing. I got to work on this product that essentially I invented in what they call 10% time or white space time. It was called Brainstorm. It was around sharing ideas internally. It was almost like an internal Facebook for sharing ideas, centered around...

business ideas where you can like develop them, get like execs to sort of sponsor them and they would have like idea jams and... And did anything ever ship out of that? A ton of things. Oh, cool. Like, it was like the first version of...

of TurboTax on mobile. I remember coalescing as like a small team through Idea Jams. We had thousands of ideas and then a bunch of them actually made it to become products. We ended up productizing and selling it to a bunch of other companies. It became like a multi-million kind

kind of AR type business and a pretty small team. That's cool. This is a total aside. We got to cover into it someday because that's a, talk about narrative violation. I'm laughing because the New York Times article, first time acquired made the New York Times. We were, Ben was quoted as, um,

Talking about narrative violence. But I feel like people think about Intuit as this like super stodgy, old school, not innovative, not fun company. But I think that's actually not the case at all. It's not the case at all. I think it's a great company. Like they put a lot of thought into empowering people to bring the best ideas forward. And like...

the founder, Scott Cook, is like always around roaming the halls. Like, uh, especially I remember in our cohort when we joined straight out of college, like I think he was spending more time with us than like other parts of the business. And, and that was just, maybe that says something about other parts of the business. I don't know. Uh, but it was really, I think it was a, well, didn't, um, Bill Campbell, the coach, right. Was, uh, into it. Yup. And, uh, he actually, John Donahoe with eBay came from into it too. So I think so. Right. Yeah. Yeah.

So Campbell's actually the, so this business, we were going to spin it out into a separate thing because it had nothing to do with Intuit's sort of like core thing. And this is the product for companies to empower individual ideas to sort of rise to the top. Yeah, because like Intuit's whole sort of shtick is like small business software, right? Like taxes and accounting. And we had this sort of tiny, by their standards, SaaS product for companies.

idea exchange or whatever. So they were going to spin it out. But at the end of the day, Bill Campbell said it's probably not a good idea to set the standard of like Intuit, you know, subsidizing startups that had nothing to do with the core business, which I think is the right call. But anyway, during that time,

When, you know, it was pretty clear that Intuit was not going to keep prioritizing the SpringStorm thing, I started working with my brother, who was the best designer I knew, my younger brother. He was working at the skate shop in San Diego, and we started building a bunch of websites together just for side income. I had kids at this point trying to make ends meet, planning to buy a house, so was trying to get all the income I could get. I started with, like, my dad's boss, who was a dentist, built his website. Dentists know other dentists, sort of recommended to,

to other dentists, ended up building a bunch of dentist websites. - It's that viral dentist strategy. - Yeah, we almost started expanding to orthodontists. Actually, dentists, if you're listening, and people run agencies, dentists are the best because they are not super price sensitive. They do a lot of business through their websites and usually use super old builds that somebody else created for them for tens of thousands of dollars. They're not getting value out of. So if you're building websites, dentists are really good.

We were just like jamming on creating all these websites and, you know, he would design them in Photoshop and they were, you know, every, every project was different, like sort of talk to the client, see what they need, what kind of story they want to tell or whatever. Dentists have stories to tell apparently. And I would. Captive audience. Yeah. Exactly. It's early in the morning. There's a filling pun. Yeah. There's a bunch of puns in there.

I was building all of them in WordPress. So I would like translate them to HTML and CSS or whatever. And that's when finally the final idea of like, okay, what I'm doing is not just repetitive on like creating, you know, these custom post types or databases or whatever. But almost every single build that I'm doing is kind of the same thing. The same sort of workflow for creating layouts, the same kind of workflow for creating pages. And I was getting honestly really tired of it.

because it was like really tedious for Sergi. It was really exciting because every new design is a new project. You know, you kind of do it once, you get it over with where I was dealing with, you know, WordPress installs and theme upgrades and security patches and hosting and all this crap that you kind of mentioned in the beginning. And it was so tedious that I just wanted out.

And then when this Intuit thing was sort of winding down, out of the blue, I kid you not, end of 2011, to my house, I've moved like three times from sort of like the early Intuit days when we were living in the Bay Area. It was now in Sacramento. Arrives, this five years later, an envelope, like a hard line envelope that has a trademark certificate in it.

for Webflow. Whoa. No way. From our, I guess from the original application and then something about the other company in Florida, like their thing lapsed and they didn't renew and we were on some list. I still don't know how it happened. Wow. But it was like, all right,

I was talking to my wife. Yeah, exactly. And we were already in the process of like buying a house, uh, trying to buy a house in Sacramento. And I was like, okay, this is a sign. Like something, something is happening here. Uh, the total side, but I was listening to, um, a podcast with Scott Adams, the Dilbert guy. Yeah. And the same thing happened to him. He, he was like a business dude. Yeah. And, uh, he wanted to be a cartoonist. So he talked to like a famous cartoonist and got some advice. And it was like, okay, good. And then he's Toby. Yeah.

writes some cartoons sends them out to everybody gets rejected and uh he's like okay i gave it like a good try i'm gonna go back to the business world a year later the dude he went to for advice sent him a letter in the mail and was like i just want to make sure you haven't given up yet and he got that and was like okay that's let's let's do this for the universe telling you yeah yeah

But I still wasn't like super convinced. You know, I was kind of trying to plan, okay, you know, what's the angle here, et cetera. And responsive design started becoming a thing at that point. It was just all the, you know, you kind of have one code base across breakpoints and the same code base sort of responds as you resize your browser and sort of works on mobile, et cetera. It still didn't click like there was a huge opportunity there.

Until one day, this was early 2012, somebody randomly shared a video on Facebook. This is when people used to use Facebook. I don't know if you guys are... Sick burn. It's all about TikTok these days. Exactly. TikTok all day. I saw this video called Inventing on Principle from this guy, Brett Victor.

And it was all about direct manipulation, like how the impact of how direct manipulation like that sort of category of software has disrupted so many parts of what we know as technology today, including like simple things like word processing. It used to be that you have to like switch between modes. Only programmers would be able to use it.

To now we have like 3D animation software and he painted this whole picture of like being able to build games and define electric flows if you're trying to create like a circuit board or whatever where applying a visual language to something that's technically really traditionally more complicated where you have to do a lot of things in your brain and translate in your brain.

Saw that video like immediately the next day, put in my notice and said, I'm starting Webflow. Like this is just like the combination of those things is just way too many signs and made the decision right there without another co-founder or whatever. And then pretty soon after talked to Sergio, I was like, hey, I need a designer. Can you help me out on like a contract basis? And he's like, yeah.

I don't know. I can't do that right now. And then eventually, like a month later, convince him to join full time. That's awesome. I had not made this direct manipulation connection. Do you know what Brett Victor did before releasing that video and before doing a lot of the research stuff that he's doing now?

No, I think he was working at Apple, right? He was. And he, I believe, worked on the original iPhone team. And one of the core tenets of the iPhone and the thing, I think a lot of people call it multi-touch, but when you really dig in, one of the core tenets of that team was that...

things on the phone when you're interacting with them don't use a metaphor for interacting like you don't have a button to close a window you close the window directly and you don't computers to this point had very much been about using metaphors all the way to the mouse as a metaphor for the pointer on screen and the iPhone was like no no you are we need the latency to be so low we need the pixels to be so close to the screen everything should feel like you're literally interacting with the objects it's where you get this incredible skeuomorphic design and it

it makes so much sense that that would kickstart this era of why are we using all these translation layers and metaphors to build websites we should be directly interacting with. Exactly. And that, and that was, you know, that was the final spark. Uh, and that's exactly what Flipy came. I was like, how do you,

turn what developers are doing within a text editor and sort of like mentally mapping, okay, this is what I mean. Is this actually what I want, right? Which is a totally different paradigm than how other creative disciplines work, right? You don't sculpt by pushing in and then going to check if that's what you meant. You sort of like have this direct connection to the thing that you're-

So this notion isn't brand new of we should have... And the direct manipulation is a great insight and the timing is interesting, but WYSIWYG web editors had existed before. And it's kind of like the...

write once, run anywhere, it'll finally be good this time. Like it's still not good this time. So why is it that Webflow is sort of, has really found product market fit and created this nice product with a web-based WYSIWYG editor when it's failed so many times before? So two things.

One, I think if we tried the same exact thing in 2007, it would have failed. And I'll tell you why. The reason direct manipulation works in Webflow is that we can actually-- not emulate. We have the real thing inside of the browser itself. So Webflow is built in a browser.

You can sort of think of Webflow as dev tools or Web Inspector with a lot more visual tools on top. Right. A lot of other WYSIWYG tools, what they try to do is like, hey, we're going to take a graphic design tool like Photoshop or Illustrator or Sketch or whatever. And we're going to try to randomly guess or best guess what the generator code should be.

It's the approach that doesn't respect the core principles, the core foundations of what the web is. And the web is like, you know, you have these DOM nodes and they're essentially boxes on top of boxes, inside of boxes, et cetera. And everything is a box, right? You want to make a circle, you have to make a box with rounded corners, right? That's a circle. Or you have like a, you know, an SVG or something like that. I think Webflow is the very first application that said, okay, here are the core primitives, right?

You know, you have styles, you have classes, you have like CSS abstractions. And what we're going to do is create a pretty shallow abstraction that still forces you to understand those core principles, not necessarily the core syntax. So for example, when you're doing layout in Webflow, it's Flexbox or CSS Grid. You just don't know it. The visual tools are

built on top of it are a representation of those same constraints and limitations. They're not like draw anything and then we'll try to guess what the code is. It's literally like adjust the margin and the padding. Exactly. You're almost like one-to-one making code changes. You're just doing it through a different language. It's almost like if you're

using software to create music, you have to understand the core principles of music. You might not, you know, have a piano in front of you, right? But you don't get to cheat by saying, I'm going to create like a masterpiece by not understanding like good rhythm and et cetera. So that's the same thing with Webflow. Like you, it does have a more, you know,

you know, advanced learning curve because you have to understand the box model because you have to understand you don't just draw a box and then go like drag it anywhere. You have to think, OK, when the screen resizes, I have to think of this box as being 50 percent of the width of the current viewport, not 500 pixels. Right. And then when I resize, I change it to 495 pixels or whatever.

I sort of had to think in a more like relative, the way that a front end developer would think, but we're erasing like 95% of the complexity and like knowing how to glue all these things together, et cetera. And the other thing that made it possible was that

that when we first started building it in 2012 was the first time that browsers were getting good enough. There was like Chrome 1.0 days. Safari and WebKit were kind of like on the same, they were using the same engine. Firefox and Internet Explorer were sort of like the old guard in terms of like, hey, this is like a way to view documents or whatever. But Google's really pushing Chrome as like an application platform. Like Google Maps, that's sort of the standard of like what's possible as an interactive type of thing in the browser.

That was impossible in 2007, 2008, et cetera. So in order to create that full abstraction of like I'm previewing exactly what's going to ship, you have to actually show that in the browser in an iframe or something. And browsers just didn't support that until like 2011, 2012, 2013 to be really like that's when browsers were kind of kicked into gear of like, holy crap, this is the next wave of application. It's an application platform. Exactly. Yeah. Exactly.

That's a rewinding a little bit. I remember buying shares of Google when they launched Chromebook and Chrome OS for this very thesis. I was like, oh yeah, okay. Google is going to use its weight to push the browser forward as an application platform. I then sold them way too early.

All right. So, Vlad, catch us up to today. Obviously, lots changed between 2012 and 2019. What has Webflow evolved into? How do you best describe it today? Tell us a little bit about the company. Sure. We first started as a landing page builder. We're kind of thinking, how do you empower Sergi to build dentist websites, right? And dentist websites only go so far. Yeah. So, did the two of you co-founded as brothers? Yes. That's the TLDR here? Yep.

That's awesome. And then, and then Brian joined shortly after. He was just like, we had worked together at Intuit and then he went to co-found another company called Vungle. Oh yeah. Yeah. And,

And, like, joined as soon as he could because there was a, you know, a lot that depended on him. And then he joined. And then a few months later, we got into YC and then kind of hit the ground running after that. When you applied to YC, how did you describe the company? I mean, at this point, we're... Landing page builder. Yeah. We're in 2012. Yeah. Weebly's been around for a long time. Squarespace is around. Yeah.

We did describe it as something like a professional website builder and very heavy emphasis on the professional as in like, hey, pick a random set of YC startups. And our tool is the only one that can actually recreate their layouts because we have the full power of CSS.

We didn't have a CMS at that point. We didn't even have the ability to create multiple pages or whatever, but that was our shtick of there's a lot more power here. There's a whole story around how we applied to YC the first time in 2012, got rejected because we didn't have any traction, even though it was kind of the same product. And then in early 2013, we applied again, went to our interview, and the

I don't know if you know the general sequence, but they give you a phone call if you're in and they send you an email if you're out on the same night of your interview. So we got the phone call, you know, we're sort of passing time trying to watch a movie, you know, super nervous, grabbed a few beers and got this phone call from PB Publicate. And he's like, you're in, you know, we like jumping over the moon, call our families, set up dinner to start celebrating or whatever. Went back to finish the movie because it wasn't over. It was oblivion, by the way. Yeah.

And I'm sort of like still nervously checking my phone for whatever reason. And then email comes in.

uh, saying, I regret to inform you that, um, we loved your presentation, but we think your product is too like difficult to figure out for novice users and not powerful enough for developers or professional users, which is like exactly the reason we would give for, for rejecting us. Um, so we thought, okay, obviously the phone call was a mistake. They never said Webflow, never said anything by name. It's Paul Bukite who is responsible for exactly what you're talking about. Google Maps and web applications. Exactly. Uh,

It turns out the email was a mistake. Uh, but we had a whole hour of like trying to reach somebody over there. Uh, and it was probably the, the biggest rollercoaster of emotions of my entire life. Cause at this point you, you have your first kid already. I had both kids. You have three and a one year old. You've left your job there. Yeah. And they're driving to a restaurant to go celebrate. Oh my God. Um,

Yeah, left my job. This was already nine months in. We're like functionally broke at that point, almost bankrupt. My daughter has just had surgery for like a hernia that popped up out of nowhere. We had like catastrophic health insurance. So like at that point, a lot was riding on us.

On this phone call? Yeah, exactly. Wow. After that, we sort of launched the simple landing page builder and then started adding all the things that progressively got us closer to where we are today. We added animations and interactions. Then we added a CMS, which ended up being a pretty big inflection.

For what's possible with Webflow, because it's not just a, you know, like CMS for pages and blog posts. It's like literally you can build anything. This is collections. Collections, exactly. Yeah. So it's almost like a visual database. So you can create all sorts of relationships, et cetera. Every acquired podcast episode is a collection item. Nice. Awesome. Yeah, it's very flexible. You should buy it.

It's like when Bezos gets interviewed on stage still, he's like, consider buying your loved ones a gift from amazon.com. They're like, really? That's where half their sales come from. Why do you think I'm on this podcast? I'm joking. It's not Ben's smiling face. Yeah, then we built our e-commerce platform, which is essentially CMS plus the ability to charge for things.

Do you guys work with Shopify on that? We did not. So for both the CMS, like originally the idea was like, do we work with WordPress? But you get 10x the benefit of not having to export to some other thing and having like that translation layer that just essentially means the difference between somebody being able to practice this stuff and not.

So our visual CMS became a way for people to not even have to worry about that whole handoff piece. And the same thing with our visual commerce engine. It's essentially Shopify. And all the things that you would need to rely on Liquid for, which is Shopify's templating language that developers have to use, we put that power into designers' hands. So it's, I mean, obviously we're not

like competitive with Shopify on like a feature by feature basis because they've had like, you know, 15 year kind of lead on us if that's, if I'm doing my math right. But for, you know, small like DTC type of brands and soon we're releasing like digital subscriptions and things that are, you know, don't require shipping, et cetera. It's,

just a slam dunk because a small design shop or an individual freelancer can build all that stuff that a dev agency that's working on the Shopify platform can build at 10x less time and less effort, et cetera. I was going to save this question for later, and I know I'm cutting you off right before you bring us to today, but I think this is the appropriate time to ask.

there are like sort of frenemies and adjacencies and pseudo competitors all over the place. So how do you think about segmentation? Like what's the ideal customer profile where you're like a Webflow is totally for you, but if you're this, you have these needs in this direction, it's not for you.

We have sort of a broad segmentation. So we know that Webflow is not for you if you're like a tiny SMB, sort of building your own landing page or something like that. That's Squarespace, Weebly, Wix. And we're not for the enterprise where you're like Adobe Experience Manager or Sitecore or whatever. We're like in this big fat middle where it's startups,

all the way up to like multi-hundred person sort of companies, marketing teams, et cetera, where, you know, you need a unique web presence, right? You're not going to get away with a template. You usually have like some sort of engineering talent, like working on marketing stuff and moving more and more into not just like beyond just marketing, like all kinds of applications. And I can talk more about that later. That's sort of our...

Very wide but sweet spot of like we're not going to pretend that we're an alternative to Squarespace or Wix even on a use of use level because we're as powerful as like a WordPress with all the kind of customization thereof but without code. But it's kind of our journey too. We started on Squarespace and then we moved to you guys once we got to a point where like this became kind of a real business for us and we need something more powerful. Yeah.

Yeah. And the idea is that we'll continue improving at a pace where you never need to eject. The same way that Shopify, for example, if you're running a Shopify store, it's basically... Tesla runs on Shopify. Exactly. It's one of those things where that is your platform where you just worry about your business, worry about your products,

they'll take care of the infrastructure. We want to be the same thing for not just e-commerce, but anything web presence related. And that's why right now we're focusing really heavily on expanding beyond websites into web applications. So over the next year... So you could build like a productivity tool in Webflow? Yeah.

That is probably a couple years out, but the first big steps are user authentication and visual logic. That gets you a lot closer to being able to build more Ruby on Rails-ish. Like a SaaS dashboard type thing. Exactly. Or even simpler things like a product hunt.

or like a basic Airbnb or like a, uh, small social network or whatever. Uh, Oh yeah. Like for like DLP show, right? Like you, we could have a special website or like, yeah, you can manage, like you could create your own CRM. You could, uh,

manage all of your, you know, people can have sort of login accounts. They can have access to specific. The idea is that you'll be able to segment sort of based on transactions that you've completed or whatever plan you're on that you specify, like you have access to specific parts of the site, etc.,

It's kind of interesting. There's this world of like lifestyle businesses that generate low single digit millions of revenue a year, which are kind of these fun things to own because once you build it, they kind of just spit off cash and they atrophy over time. So you're not, you know, the code's going to get old and crusty. But right now you have to be a developer to have that privilege to like have a little side business on the side where you've built a web app and you've targeted all the dentists you can. And like this vertical niche thing is where you're kind of lowering the barrier to that.

Absolutely. And it's not just lowering the barrier. It's also a lot of how we think about this is not like replacement for what people are doing right now. It's the ability for a

a hundred, if not a thousand times more people to be able to access that power. And talking about like crusty code, a lot of times why that happens is because you have to control the entire stack, right? Like right now there's, I can list, you know, just out of the dentist websites I've built, how many things have like outdated jQuery and like WordPress versions or whatever. However, when you look at like platforms like Shopify and especially Webflow,

what you're doing is you're declaring the behavior and the look and feel, right? And you're abstracting away at that. Exactly. Behind the scenes, like stuff is changing all the time. Yeah, you guys are upgrading. Exactly. Like you're the developer. Exactly. So stuff is changing. Like we've literally changed from jQuery to Knockout to React behind the scenes, like the way that sites are powered. CDNs have changed all the time. Like,

versions of Node and all these other technologies have changed behind the scenes, not a single one of our customers ever noticed. We've solved many security issues through libraries that other people use or whatever. We solve them centrally, and then nobody ever hears about it. You don't have to ever do a template upgrade or a theme upgrade or whatever. You're just worried about what this looks like, what it functions like.

That's it. Yeah, that's cool. The other thing that I wanted to ask you about is this. Let's drift into the no code movement stuff. So I wouldn't describe Webflow as no code. I would describe it as code optional. And when you do want to write code, you can write

almost whatever you want. I mean, you can't like go create a whole new like view controller or something or, but like if I want to put a whole bunch of JavaScript into a single page or an entire collection of pages or whatever, like I can. And so how has that thinking evolved for you?

where Webflow five years ago, three years ago, no code was not a thing. And now it's sort of a movement and something that, frankly, you get to be a nice champion of. When something comes along like that, that's not exactly what you're doing, but it's very close. How do you adopt it?

And you're right, like Webflow is very, very much like a code optional type of tool. The aspiration is that it becomes a lot closer to no code over time. Because a lot of the things that people have to pull in code for in Webflow today is just the limitation of the platform. It just means the building blocks are not available, right? Like if I want to do something as simple as, you know, add like a Mapbox integration that pulls, maybe you do like podcasts and then for whatever reason you have latitude and longitude sort of like locations where you did these podcasts, you want to show them on a map.

The ability to say like, okay, here's our last 20 things like pointed on a map. That's a pretty simple building block of like,

I want to drag in a Mapbox thing and map it to some of my collections. We just don't have that, right? So you have to pull in code, look up the API or whatever. So right now we're kind of in this territory where for a lot of websites, everything's available, right? But as you get more and more sort of niche, there's a huge long tail of things that have to be implemented in code.

And the idea with no code is that you find those, like the first person that has to, let's say, build a Mapbox integration, right? They could, and this is something that we're working on now, they create sort of a plugin that's more of a no code API where they do the work of like looking at Webflow's sort of internal APIs and saying like,

hey, now here's a Mapbox building block. The only thing you really need to do is paste in your API key, if you are a Mapbox customer or whatever. Then you drag it in. And then your interface is totally visual, where you're saying, OK, I want to bind this thing here, or I want to change the color of these pins, or whatever. One developer has to do that work, not

End developers, tens of thousands of developers that ever want that on their site. Very much how the WordPress plug-in ecosystem. Exactly. And Shopify, too. Exactly. I mean, this is the Shopify developer platform. It's very much like standing on the shoulders of giants, like not redoing the same, like the same way that the developer community works with like NPM or whatever. You're not rewriting your own like search algorithm. You're just like going and searching on GitHub and getting the best library or whatever, pulling it in.

And this really shifts from Webflow, the tool company, to Webflow, the platform company. Absolutely. Yep. And we're already seeing a lot of that sort of just by the nature of how people are building and how the community is growing. Like there's a lot of side...

marketplaces of people like selling components and templates and entire businesses built around the Webflow ecosystem. We just haven't like formalized it yet with our upcoming plugin marketplace. That's, that's going to be like the, you know, the official way to,

you know, extend Webflow in a first party way by third parties where you don't have to kind of like, hey, take this code and paste it into like a custom embed block or whatever. So ideally over time, those exceptions where you have to get down into code are less and less and they get into sort of like 1% territory, not 20% territory. And that's when we could say that, okay, we've reached our aspiration. But that's the idea with no code as a movement is that

when you say the differentiator between no code and low code is that low code makes this sort of implicit admission that in order to really finish a project, I'm going to need a developer or I'm going to need to know how to like take it across that like last mile. Yeah. Or at least to make it really powerful. Exactly. And no code, the aspiration is that you, for the vast majority of cases, you will not need that.

And when you do, there's an approach to having one or a few developers create sort of like the no-code version that abstracts away the low-code version and then put that into the hands of millions more people. Will I be able to make money as a plugin developer? Absolutely.

Maybe that's the side hustle to start working on. I mean, a ton of people are already making money selling Webflow templates. And Webflow templates, the thing that makes them different from WordPress templates is that they're built visually. But what makes them different from like Squarespace and Wix and all those templates is that all of ours are actually built inside the tool itself.

So it's almost like all of them start from scratch, right? And there's just a point in time where designers are like, okay, this is good enough for me to like monetize. And the sky's the limit from there. Like anybody who can use Webflow becomes like a Webflow expert can now monetize their templates. And soon it's going to be application templates, right? That are way more expensive. Like let's say I spin up a podcast template that has like ratings and use it exactly like...

Or like, you know, I want to build a marketplace. Like I'm launching MVP for a marketplace. Like here's an Airbnb template, right? You could be like someone could build Ning on your platform. Like it could recreate this social network. Well, like we talked about in, you know, with Rover, when Rover started, you know, the directive from Greg and me to Phil was like, go to Airbnb.com,

Redo that. And we had to get... Phil, who dropped out of college, was a CS major to do that. And it took him months. Instead, we could go to Webflow and be like... That's the idea. Boom. And the idea there is right now, the people who are able to create those things with code, they literally represent 0.3% of the population. Yeah. That's such a tiny fraction that...

you know, so much potential is left off the table. Like we just don't know. It's almost like if spreadsheets were available to that, that few people, sure. Like no code tools aren't going to cover a hundred percent of like the software development space, but the space that they do cover is going to cover the majority of like these simpler cred based apps, which were the foundations of like Airbnb and Twitter, et cetera. And all these foundational businesses that have like transformed how, how we live in like, yeah.

how the internet works. To the extent that this works and becomes incredibly pervasive, if you think about it from a macroeconomic perspective, what it really does is it forces companies to work or not work based on not their ability to execute building an application, but more their ability to

understand their customers and distribute to them. Absolutely. And that's honestly the hard part, right? Like understanding the... As your own story illustrates. Yeah, like the way that you create a solution. Take something simple, right? Like you want to create sort of a way to manage...

a podcast show, right? Where you might have, you might set up these like visual flows around like, hey, when I upload something, it goes to like an approval process and whatever. You have to understand your own pain around this. You have to understand like what,

what works, what doesn't. Knowing how to translate that into HTML, CSS, Ruby on Rails, Node Express, whatever, PHP. Again, that's all it is. It's a translation sort of like mechanism. If you're able to declare that in a way that doesn't require all that complexity...

it just removes more kind of barriers between you, your idea and getting it out there. Yeah, totally. All right. I want to shift to this era of productivity that we're in. So like we're in this crazy era with both productivity and creativity software. So we had Rahul from Superhuman on the show. Recently, we've seen the rise of Notion, Airtable, Sketch, Figma. You guys, why is this happening now? A lot of it goes to...

just the fact that the web platform is now so mature and there's no longer limitation of what you can build in the browser. Sure, the browser is like single threaded. You can have like only a certain amount of, you know, memory or whatever. But the advances we've made over the last like six years, especially just means that you don't have like this, this barrier of like somebody else install something or whatever in order to say like, oh, here's like web class type of software, which is like simple forms or whatever. And here's like software, software type of software, like, you know, Photoshop or whatever. Now you have like

Webflow and Figma, like these pushing the limits of what you can do, not just in a browser, but in software period. Right. Plus the combination of like the distribution mechanisms of the, of the internet, like everyone is now relying on, uh, sort of like a de facto truth that connected software, like Google sheets and, you know, Google docs or whatever is, you know, the most, uh,

effective way to like, even, even our lawyers, right. Are tired of sending red lines back and forth. Whereas even two years ago, it was like, uh, kind of, that's the way that lawyers work. Right. So I think it's, it's been a lot of like cultural change, a lot of, uh, technological change. That's sort of like, okay, now people don't conceptualize these barriers as like reasons not to do something. And, and people are more in the like optimistic dreaming mode of like what's possible. Well, I mentioned it's also, you know, back to

your dad and like it's, it's distribution too, right? Like because the web has this powerful software now, you don't have to like in the past, if you're like, Oh, I want to do this. All right, I'm gonna go to comp USA and I'm going to buy Photoshop and I'm going to install it on my machine. Like screw all that. Yeah. Plus, so there's just like the ease, but then there's also the business model. Like all of this software that we're talking about, it's all freemium software. Like there's no risk. You just like, you know,

tell 1Password to generate a password for you and then you're in and you're using the thing and you haven't paid anything, right? And you get this incredibly powerful tool that's democratized all of this. Yeah, it kind of feeds on itself because that allows people to sort of...

for free with fewer barriers, create new products or ID new products, then actually build them, et cetera. It's kind of like the way I think about Webflow sometimes is sort of what AWS did for hardware. Like you used to have to know how to buy your own machines and rack your own servers and replace your own hard drives and configure RAID and all this stuff.

And now, even though AWS is pretty complex, it just hit a huge category of problems away from developers where you don't have to worry about that stuff anymore. You're like, I need computing power. Boom. You just pay for it and it's pretty cheap and you don't have to worry about what, you know, power going out or whatever. And I think we need the same. And that's the journey we're on, that we need the same thing for the software side of things of like, how do you abstract away as many of these complexities as possible? Yeah.

So that people who are experts at this stuff really are sweating it, like things like performance and accessibility, et cetera, especially like hosting and things that touch hardware and infrastructure and scaling and whatever. You're never going to have people come, even me as a software engineer that's been doing this for like 20 years, I don't know this stuff like even to 1% of what like...

infrastructure engineers understand, right? So that problem really only needs to be solved by a few people, and then that can be scaled and made available to millions, if not billions. So you say you as a software engineer, are you still writing code?

Absolutely not. I'm a visual developer now. I use Webflow. But also that's mostly because I want to get out of my team's hair. Yeah. When did that stop? I want to transition a little bit into founder journey here. That was actually one of the hardest transitions that I made because I was the original engineer on Webflow. I built all of the front end myself and then Brian joined and built the back end and kind of like the dashboard piece.

And then the next five years, I was really heavily involved in coding. And that was like more and more emerged as a problem because A, either I was the only person aware of sort of how things worked. And therefore, I was the only one who worked on like some pretty critical things. Or I was like distracted for weeks writing code when I should have been doing something way more...

way more needed by the team, like hiring more people or really thinking about company building and culture building and setting up ways for all of us to collaborate, et cetera, and all the things that you kind of have to graduate to once you stop coding. And for me, that was a...

I think I was really emotionally attached to writing code. I found a lot of satisfaction from that. And I never imagined that I would have a fulfilling life with the absence of that. But surprise, surprise, I haven't been doing it for like...

two and a half years. And I think because it was a slower transition, it was easier for me to see how I can get satisfaction and fulfillment from higher leverage things like being able to, you know, hire five engineers that were then able to do way more than I could do in the same amount of time and seeing the impact of like how fulfilled they feel like working on that team. So I got satisfaction of seeing like

that kind of impact multiplied. Yeah, it's the, that dopamine hit that you get when your code works. You can, you can get in a slower, more spread out way, but a much higher leverage way from empowering others. Yeah. One thing, one thing I'll say though is there's something to kind of getting into flow state and getting, you

you know, a machine to work or the thing to work. Totally. But it's also way more predictable and a lot easier, honestly, than like building teams. People, people are not as predictable. Uh, you know, they're, they're not state machines. Yeah. Their compilers change all the time. Um, and you know, memory is not, uh, yeah, exactly. Uh,

But, you know, it's a lot more satisfying when you get it right. Well, so this is a good kind of transition maybe to bring it all back to all this together. You know, you guys as a company have not taken, despite, you know, we're here on, you know, 11th Street in Soma and, you know, San Francisco and the heart of Silicon Valley, you did Y Combinator, you know, but you haven't taken the traditional path either. Like, so you did YC finally on the third attempt to start the company. You raised the seed round, right, and then a small extension. And then years go by and...

you guys are just running and building. Like how, how,

How did that journey go? Did you intentionally decide, you know, well, how did you how did you get to profitability? Was that an intentional decision and then a decision not to raise more capital until just now? Yeah. How did you think about all that? It was kind of a combination of intentionality and accident. So after we raised, we kind of we knew we had to build a lot of things. We knew we had to build a CMS. We knew this was after the three million. Exactly. So this is early 2014.

We just weren't growing fast enough to be able to sort of justify a full A round. And I think we realized that pretty early when we still had a lot of cash in the bank. Was that you guys realizing that or your investors? No, us realizing it because like so much of Webflow is reliant on

being able to meet a certain functionality bar for people to be able to base their entire business on you. Right. So the first, first few years up until 2015, mid 2015, there was so many, like it was a very high churn type of situation where, and a lot relied on our export tool where you would like use it for projects and then take it somewhere else. Right. We realized that like it was a tool product essentially. And our main competitor at that point, like on a,

I don't know, category levels, Adobe, right? And the way that people thought about us was like, Oh, it's just another Adobe. But we didn't have like the entire other suite of products, right? So you, you didn't have anything like holding you there if your project was over and you're only building one project. Uh,

because we didn't have the creative suite or whatever. So we realized then like our option, and I think around the time Paul Graham had his essay around like default alive, default dead. Yeah, that's so good. And we really wanted to do whatever was possible to get to default alive. We thought that that would give us a lot more optionality and it was mostly like a survival thing. Like,

hey, we're pretty sure we're not going to be able to raise more money. Let's just get to, you know, hire a little slower, try to get growth as high as possible so that we kind of are in control of our own destiny. And once you reach that, you stop thinking about fundraising, right? Because you're able to operate on a monthly basis. You're like more or less break even, cash balance goes up. And we were operating in that mentality for like the next two, three years.

But then we realized, which is what led us to this fundraising. Oh, rewind back a little bit. Almost all conversations with investors at that point, even when people find out like you're profitable or close to it, a lot of the conversations were not inspiring at all. It was sort of like,

Okay, how do we get more businesses using this, right? Even conversations around like, oh, well, Google would be interested in an acquisition kind of thing. Like almost thinking about sort of like local optimization of revenue and how do we go into enterprise? Like, oh, these enterprise deals that you've signed before, they could be like a quarter million dollars or whatever. Let's focus everything on that. Well, like, why would we care about 2,500 customers paying us, you know, this small amount of money? We can have one customer that pays us a quarter million dollars or whatever.

And that was a very sort of like a philosophically, we had this kind of opposition to it, thinking that if we do get pulled in that direction by investors, then it's very hard to go back and create a democratizing product for adoption that empowers a lot more people. Well, you're going to have to...

you know, it's the classic problem. If you go that path where you're going to have to create custom features for each client, that's paying you a million dollars. Exactly. Next thing you know, you're like, you've gone from this incredible platform opportunity to an outsourced dev shop. Exactly. And it wasn't until, uh, when we started talking, because we've been talking to Excel for like three years and it wasn't until we met Arun, that was like, uh,

full, what would I call it? Like a mind meld opportunity of like the future opportunity. Like, Hey, this website thing is interesting. Like we're, you know, we're, we're just a tiny fraction of like the WordPress, WordPress is market share. Like WordPress is like 40%. We're like 0.1. Right. Uh, in terms of a business there, you know, they're like $300 million or whatever. We're above 20, but like I had a much smaller fraction of that entire, uh,

like space that wasn't even part of the conversation. Like that's interesting. And there's a huge opportunity there, but think about this opportunity of like creating software, like the amount of like new companies that can be created and amount of new services that can be created. The amount of like, uh, new ideas that can sort of become a reality that are already like percolating in people's heads. Uh, and, and people are just not building them because they don't have the right tools. That is just a vastly, uh,

more powerful opportunity that we don't even know how to quantify, like how to even like work up the TAM for that. Well, it's really the difference, you know, and Arun at Excel has been a good buddy of mine for many years. We were classmates at GSB together and, you know, I just kind of seen his thought process through this, you know,

You know, Excel, like most investors until recently when this has become in vogue would look at a company like you guys and what they're thinking when they're telling you about enterprise, blah, blah, blah. They're thinking like, oh, great, this is gonna be an acquisition. Like, how are we gonna flip this for a couple hundred million? And I think Arun and Excel were one of the first folks to see like, no, no, no, you can build really big standalone companies like Atlassian, like Qualtrics, you know, like Squarespace where they're investors, you know, and not sell them. Yep.

That's the goal here. Like we haven't even discussed an IPO or an exit strategy. Like there's no exit strategy. We're building Webflow. We probably built 5% of the things that we want to build. It's going to take another couple of decades to get to that full vision, if not longer. So still having fun. And there's no reason to change course, I don't think.

Love it. Well, final question that we always like to ask is, is there anything that we didn't ask you about or that you would like to say to an audience of primarily founders and aspiring founders? I wish that...

Somebody had given me this advice sooner is don't focus on perfection, just ship sooner. Like ship, deliver value as quickly as you have it. We have been learning that lesson over and over and I think we still have to learn it where there's like this tendency to think, okay, everything has to be perfect or nobody is willing to pay for it. I am consistently surprised by releasing something that is, you know, much less powerful than you think and then

tons of people finding value from it right in its infancy. And then of course you iterate on it. So I wish we had that mentality sooner. I think we would have gotten to where we are faster. And I think a lot of founders could be a little too, I don't know if precious is the right word, around like what their idea is of like what's actually marketable. You'd be surprised that it's probably something much earlier.

Awesome. Thank you so much, Vlad. Yeah, Vlad, thank you. This has been awesome. Thank you guys. That was great. LPs, we will talk to you next time. Talk to you next time.