
Startup Weebly takes profitable leap forward - pg
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/08/13/MN1I1KJFNV.DTL
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skennedy
I love that they are profitable, growing rapidly, and generally kicking butt.
My biggest wish for them is to start taking market share from Adobe by making
their website toolkit more flexible and advanced. When a professional designer
can get everything they want in a browser, no extra software, and changes are
real-time...for me, they win.

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drusenko
We actually just did that! [http://blog.weebly.com/2/post/2011/08/a-summer-
focused-on-de...](http://blog.weebly.com/2/post/2011/08/a-summer-focused-on-
design.html)

When we launched the Designer Platform, we completely revamped our theming
engine to be super flexible and introduced a pretty cool web-based IDE with
real-time preview of HTML and CSS changes (and pop-out functionality for dual-
monitor development).

It's a huge focus for us going forward -- we'd love to hear your feedback on
whether the new changes allow you to do everything you'd like to, or if not,
where we can improve.

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dools
Yeah I think the market for Designers is huge - that's basically all we're
focused on at Decal is the deployment model and integrating with designers'
existing workflows.

It's hard trying to make people realise that we're not "DIY" though :) I've
just come up with the phrase "DIY for Designers" which I think captures it
pretty well. Designers have, for too long, been punished by dynamic web
deployments (the "big 3" Joomla, Drupal and Wordpress) - time to disrupt!

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tocomment
I love Weebly. My only complaint is this I couldn't find any professional
looking templates for a dance studio. Everything looks like a blog template.

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rysulliv
Awesome product and awesome progress from a small dedicated team with a ton of
determination and passion! These are the kind of stories that inspire
others(myself included) to work those extra hours on their idea. Keep up the
great work Weebly team!

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trafficlight
I'm a big fan of Weebly. It's by far the easiest tool to recommend to a new
web client. I can build a simple template and then hand over the reins.

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petenixey
I didn't realise you guys had taken money from Sequoia - congrats. Could you
be the first YCC to go public? I've got high hopes.

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drusenko
We're working on it... we certainly have some stiff competition! :)

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skrebbel
Genuine interest: why is it so important to go public? What does your company
win by doing so?

I understand companies who need the one-time cash injection to stay ahead of
competition. It doesn't look like you guys need that much. So what is it,
then?

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petenixey
I can't speak for the Weeblies but in the event that you don't need the
capital for growth and you don't plan to be acquired then going public is the
only way for founders, investors and employees to see a significant release of
capital from the company. You can just take revenues from the company but in
many ways going public is lower risk (and obviously releases more capital
too).

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jcc80
Are the domain renewals still $39.95 through Weebly? Maybe if they raised the
price on that they could have already built their new office.

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drusenko
We add a lot of value on top of the domain name that we think justifies the
price (our customers seem to think so too).

If you don't, you're free to buy your own domain at GoDaddy (or anywhere else)
and point it to Weebly, completely free of charge.

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jcc80
You've surveyed the customers on the domain renewal price compared to GoDaddy
and they prefer the $39.95? Or, they are given the option to purchase/renew
from GoDaddy at checkout? Or, maybe what they don't know won't hurt them?

"If you don't, you're free to buy your own domain at GoDaddy (or anywhere
else) and point it to Weebly, completely free of charge."

Sounds good. Didn't happen - tried to move a domain off the platform after a
year. After 3-5 emails with support the domain eventually just expired. Glad
it wasn't anything critical - just a simple site I had thrown together for a
family member's business which was remade in Joomla.

I think the product is great for many people, the founders sound like nice
people. Just unsure if the experience I had trying to get the domain back is a
tactic or incompetence/honest mistakes. Of course I hope it's the latter
because that'll get fixed.

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drusenko
We definitely support transferring domain names out of Weebly. Once you
purchase it, it's your domain name. If we didn't do that when you asked, I'm
really sorry. That's our mistake and it definitely shouldn't happen. Would you
mind emailing me at david+c@weebly.com with your account username or email so
I can look into the situation and make sure that never happens again?

As far as domain name prices go, we handle a ton of things for you that are
otherwise really hard. The domain purchase experience from Weebly compared to
GoDaddy is night and day, and we've put a lot of effort into making it
extremely simple and hassle free. A lot of people are willing to pay a premium
to save them time and hassle with a domain name, but on the off-chance they'd
prefer to go directly with another registrar (GoDaddy or otherwise), they are
completely free to do so.

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jcc80
Hey - no problem. Not like I spent much time on the original site. No need to
apologize either - everyone these days loves an apology it seems! (sickening)
I thought about it before you responded and my goal isn't to get anyone in CS
in trouble or anything or make a big deal of it. Just seeing the article
reminded me.

If you really support transferring domains out that's all I was wondering. I
was told I would be sent an EPP code to switch registrars and never was. Asked
for it to be sent again, then again, did the whole, "Did you check your spam?"
exchange of emails, etc. The people I spoke w/ through email seemed genuine.
For whatever reason I was just never sent the code and eventually gave up.
Probably just honest mistakes - it happens. Anyways, continued success.

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pitdesi
I love that they are profitable and have been for a long time. I've
recommended their product to small business novices and they have been
impressed with how easy it is to use.

I'd love to see more articles about companies that are profitable and how
long/what it took to get there. We are seeing a lot of hype in the
consumer/social media space, but it seems to me that it is much harder to be
profitable in that space (but also more likely to have a massive exit). It
seems that the B2B space offers less risk and reward.

Way to go, Weebly! (disclosure: they are a customer of ours)

