
Website Builder Webflow (YC S13) Went from Near Bankruptcy to $72M Series A - jaoued
https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2019/08/07/webflow-went-from-near-bankruptcy-to-72-million-series-a/
======
callmevlad
Hey HN! I'm Vlad, CEO and one of the co-founders of Webflow.

It was over 6 years ago now, a just several months a rejection email from YC
and a few weeks from being essentially bankrupt (my daughter had an unexpected
surgery while we had only catastrophic health insurance), we posted a Show HN
about Webflow
([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5407499](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5407499)).
It was our last "hail mary" to show something tangible to the world before
promising our partners to go back to our old jobs to actually get some income
again.

Luckily, the Show HN took off like wildfire and we stuck to the #1 spot nearly
all day. Tens of thousands of people signed up for our beta. This really
helped us reapply to YC with tons more traction (and boundless confidence this
time), and we were lucky enough to get in to the next batch.

We're now a team of over 120 people across 20 countries, serving billions of
requests for tens of thousands of paying customers. I'm very confident that we
wouldn't have been able to achieve this had the HN post not taken off here,
and we're so thankful for the positive reception. Luckily, we didn't get those
funny "I can build this in a day with some bash scripts!" kinds of comments :)

Even though it's been many years since then, we're still on the same mission
to empower millions more people to build powerful websites (and increasingly,
more powerful software!) without code. We believe that in the end,
democratizing software creation will multiply the potential of the internet,
likely by at least an order of magnitude.

A HUGE and humble thank you to the community here, and for your support way
back when!

~~~
shrumm
Vlad, thanks for building Webflow! My team and I love it. Building a company
these days requires a website that looks and works great - but as a founder
I'd rather spend my time working on the product and talking to customers.
Webflow is perfect for it. Our designer Blanka knew nothing about web design,
she used to do photoshop / illutrator mockups and rely on me or another person
on the team to make it into a website. We switched to Webflow, and I spent an
hour on a Skype call with her showing her the basics. Now she does everything
herself. This is the website -> [https://datacue.co](https://datacue.co) \-
was all done by someone who knew 0 about web dev.

The best thing about webflow for me is how it makes advanced features like CSS
animations accessible to people. If you resize the website width till you see
the mobile version, a hamburger menu pops up. Click on it and you'll see a
little animation. I can't tell you how proud Blanka was that she did it
herself, was really great to see.

Sorry this sounds like such an advert for you guys - but I'm a very happy
customer.

~~~
callmevlad
Thank you so much for the kind words, and so happy to see that you've found
Webflow to be so useful! Go Blanka!

~~~
joelx
I own a large web design agency, do you have options for partnership? We are
always interested in new tools and better ways of doing things for our
clients.

------
jonshariat
I think the main differentiator for webflow is the user experience of their
tool. Its very well done, intuitive, easy to use but doesn't oversimplify. If
designing app front ends was this easy it would be awesome.

In my mind the hook into their hosting service is keeping them from their
potential. If they had a stand alone tool I could use or a corp lvl tool, it
could be big.

That being said, maybe there is more money in it for them to do it this way.
But as a designer I see so much missed opportunity to unit design and code for
front end work. (And eventually basic app functionalities)

~~~
samuell
Yeah, my main complaint about Webflow is the lack of a standalone tool. Last
time I was designing for a client, I was travelling in east Africa, and simply
couldn't afford to pay refill cards for the data needed to use Webflow online.

The closest competitor I've found that is standalone is Pnegrow. It is pretty
cool, but still not nearly as intuitive and fast to learn as we flow, sadly.

~~~
samuell
Sorry for the typos (mobile keyboard, arrgh).

For completeness, the link to the Pinegrow editor:

[https://pinegrow.com](https://pinegrow.com)

Also, I seem to have forgot to point out that one requirement I was looking
for was Linux support (Pinegrow runs fine on Xubuntu).

------
JMTQp8lwXL
Congrats to these folks. But I have a serious, genuine question: How many of
these click-and-drag, WYSIWYG website creators are we going to see?

I get there's a need for the long-tail of web traffic (small businesses, etc)
to create an internet presence. But is it all that profitable, which I imagine
is plenty of competition to undercut your prices? I don't know how a Wix, etc.
can stand out or have a competitive advantage in this space. There are so many
of them it seems.

~~~
shubhamjain
Webflow is different. It doesn't limit to set of templates and their styling,
which most other site builders do. It's a GUI layer above raw CSS and HTML,
which gives you the ability to build virtually anything. It's an order of
magnitude more powerful than its competitors. Webflow's own website[1] is a
great example of what you can make with it.

Considering how many marketing departments I have seen struggling to pull
someone from the dev team to fix a tiny, tiny change, this is a massive
opportunity.

[1]: [https://webflow.com/](https://webflow.com/)

~~~
JMTQp8lwXL
So when there isn't a template to do what you need, you have to know CSS and
HTML, and must code yourself. The premise is "no-code". The uniqueness of this
editor is it's ability to play nicely with anything you write yourself.

~~~
davidivadavid
Nope. You don't have to code anything. That's the whole point. If you don't
have a template, you start from a blank page and you build it using the GUI.

~~~
JMTQp8lwXL
My original discussion point (top-level comment) was that feature alone
doesn't sound like much of a differentiator from other WYSIWYG web builders
out there.

~~~
callmevlad
That is, in fact, our main differentiator – and the main reason people choose
Webflow. Check out this very diverse set of sites [1] that can be built with
Webflow, this ability to visually develop any kind of custom layout/experience
really does go a long way to distance us from any competitors.

[1]
[https://webflow.com/discover/popular](https://webflow.com/discover/popular)

~~~
JMTQp8lwXL
These sites are quite varied, I do agree. One small thing I noticed. Some
sites could have improved tab navigation, for example
[https://www.memberstack.io/](https://www.memberstack.io/). The site, without
any interaction, is buttery smooth 60fps. When I start tabbing through the
"What others are saying..." carousel, though, it destroys the animation frame
rate (Chrome, Mac OS, 32 GB RAM).

------
iamsb
Great story! Couple of minor suggestions.

> Before you dig in, note that while sites built in Webflow work in all modern
> browsers, we don’t actively support use of the Designer in Mozilla Firefox.
> Given all that has been said about BigTech, it will be awesome if firefox
> becomes a priority so that we dont need to use Chrome.

One feature suggestion - being able to import CSS and HTML and then work with
them. Often I will buy wordpress themes and want to customize them a little
bit. Or when I want to move an existing site to maintain it using webflow.
This will also open up revenue channel, being able to buy themes from other
marketplaces and use them in webflow.

------
zlatan_todoric
I would say well deserved! I am not anymore into web design nor did I ever
liked it much (I went low-level and to hardware design) but when I needed to
do it I used webflow and it was delight. Easy, intuitive and really great
tutorials were there.

Thanks Webflow team!

------
Blake_Emigro
As a non-coding technologist I was also a skeptic about how this was
differentiated from other non-coding options, but it seems I need to get on
the Webflow train. I will now add it with Figma to the toolbox for my venture
builder empowering immigrant entrepreneurs - seems to have a good story to
match that too. Cheers Webflow team!

------
segmondy
Congrats, but it's weird how $72M is series A. Facebook's Series C was $15M,
Snap $50M series C. Weird.

~~~
ohadpr
It's because they were able to build a decently large business purely with
their seed founding + ongoing revenues (It's called an A round because they've
only ever raised a seed)

------
adamparsons
As someone who makes a living with react, I'd still turn to webflow if I had
to throw together a quick design or help a friend out. Just feels way quicker
and wysiwyg than doing it all by hand. Cheers for building such a nice
product, and you know, surviving.

------
7cupsoftea
Congrats Vlad, Bryant, and Sergie! Very happy for you guys. Well-deserved!

~~~
callmevlad
Thank you, Glen!

------
gmays
Very cool. For people familiar with WordPress, specifically what's the value
proposition/reasons why it's better relative to a common CMS like WordPress?

------
artur_makly
wonderful inspiring story about never giving up, showing how much luck &
timing play in making or breaking a great idea, and that the American dream is
still alive and kicking — as Ukrainian Refugee myself who migrated around the
same time, has grew up poor through the wild 80s, and survived the Internet
bubble..and still chasing it..I salut you!

------
cj
Congrats Vlad + team!

~~~
callmevlad
Thanks Brandon!

------
abledon
Wow, designers must be shitting their pants. You could fire a whole department
and use this stuff easily!

~~~
penagwin
If you only need a static website then it's a great solution.

But it is NOT hard to start running into barriers. In my experience it's
essentially impossible to use it as a frontend design tool with say a node.js
backend. There's no templating support, very restricted export (their CMS
costs extra per site, and isn't part of the export), etc.

If your website has a login button then I'd be impressed if you designed the
whole thing in webflow.

~~~
zed88
Exact reason why we migrated a webflow site to
Next.js/GraphQL/Contentful/Hasura stack.

Webflow is an awesome design tool, but the exported code is very messy to work
with. If are a designer or plan to stay on webflow for simpler static sites,
it wouldn't matter though.

However, It does create a technical debt if you happen to scale up and your
needs grow.

------
azifali
I used to bump into Vlad and Sergey in Hackerdojo when they were hacking the
very early version of Webflow.. I used the very first version and loved it..

Amazing story of persistence and focus. Keep up the great work folks!

