My First Million - #33 - Pioneering The No-Code Movement

Episode Date: January 8, 2020

We're back with Season 3, brought you by Microsoft: The latest episode of My First Million, Shaan sits down with Vlad Magdalin (@callmevlad), Co-Founder & CEO of Webflow: a visual tool to build web apps. Vlad shares the several attempts in 6 years to get his no-code brainchild going. Persistence paid off as it quickly got to $20MM in revenue and raised a monster $72M Series A round led by Accel. He talks about the emotional rollercoaster of getting into Y-Combinator, the video that made him quit his high paying job immediately, kickstarter kicking him off their platform and the trick to get investors interested without changing anything.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

We call it a visual software development platform. It's a way for people to build things that typically coders build, just in a completely visual environment. For us to be truly successful, to be able to build a tool that builds other products and services, you can't do that overnight. The next six months were, like, really, really tough. What we thought was going to, like, bring in income, we didn't have anything coming in at this point.

And when you have a family and, like, rent and car payments and all this stuff, and like kids need to go to school. Then just stuff started like falling apart. You know, couldn't get a trademark. One of the co-founders got less motivated, day job got a lot more interesting. I think we had raised like 300K and we're like really struggling and went to Paul Graham and said, this is really hard on us. Like I was waking up every morning with panic attacks.

Like my wife was like this is not healthy. Yeah, why do you want this? Like is this what startups are about, right? They've got 75,000 paying users. just raised a monster round of investment. 72 million series A. Those other website builders are kind of like I-movie, and then web flows to like Final Cup Pro.

It just feels like the gold rush or like the pioneer era of the space where we're at the very, very beginning of it, sort of like the web in 1999. No technology in history has ever spread so fast. Products are growing up on product hunt and like hitting number one. I don't even know that it's built with no-go tools. The analogy to me is like eating food. Not too long ago in history, I would have had. to go out there and hunt and forage.

Today it's abstracted a way where I don't even have to think. I push a button on my phone and the meal appears. When you remove those barriers, magical things happen. Even something that feels slower to other companies or founders, getting to where we are today seven years from now. For me, it just feels like a natural progression to a much larger company because we want to be around 50 years from now. Right.

We want to be a foundational company. $5 million is not enough. $10 million. $15 million. $20 million. $100 million. $5 a billion in revenue. $850 million.

$1 or two people in a bedroom actually the threats to these giant multi-million dollars companies because you have creativity and you have nothing to lose. Add another zero to that price, buddy. Add two more zeros. First million. Every week, we sit down with self-made millionaires and ask them, how did you do it? I didn't start a podcast. I started my own personal business school.

And the teachers are the successful entrepreneurs behind the biggest brands and business that you find today. I wanted to know the real stories with all the details. Like, how did you get your first 100 customers? What did it feel like when shit hit the pay? I ask them, how did you spend your money now that you're rich? And what would you do if you were starting over from scratch again today? If you're like me and you want to own your own business instead of living a nine to five job,

this is the podcast for you. The hustle presents my first million. All right. Here we are. Vlad, you are in the Twitch office. It's basically Christmas Eve. No one's here except for us. And we are recording this podcast.

I'm excited to have you on because we've been talking about no code tools. And generally, I like anybody with a good startup story. And I think you have one. For those you don't know, so Valazza founder of a company called Webflow. And Webflow is a company that is doing phenomenally well right now. If you're in kind of Silicon Valley, I would say, you guys have that hype train right now. Do you feel that? Definitely the last year has been a lot more hype trainy.

Yeah, but it wasn't always like that. Not at all. So they have the hype train right now because they've got, you know, 75,000 paying users. They just raised a monster round of investment. 72 million Series A, which is, you know, 10 times more than a typical series A, I think. So they're doing phenomenally well and we're going to find out a couple things. So I'm interested in chatting with you because I want to know what's the backstory. I've heard little bits and pieces that tell me this is not like your typical.

Yeah, I worked at big company. I quit. I started a company. it succeeded. Like, it's not that. So give me the two-minute version of like of the Webflow history. And then we'll dive in deeper after that. Two minutes.

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

And kind of gave up. Then I got married, started working into it, sort of needed a real job. Right. Met a couple buddies at Intuit. We were, you know, all fresh out of college, working on pretty boring things there. And kind of got together and tried to give it another go. So I had a couple co-founders, try to start it up. This was like the Web 2.0 days, you know, the heyday of like startup starting to happen,

like the Google Maps era where you can actually build something in the browser. Right. YC was just starting up. That was really exciting. pitching investors, got the whole, like, entity going. Then just stuff started, like, falling apart. You know, couldn't get a trademark. One of the co-founders got, like, less motivated. Day job got a lot more interesting. My wife and I started talking about kids. So all these things added up, and it was just, like, fizzled out. Right. And then over the next seven years, just kept working

into it, moved to Sacramento. And then a series of a couple, like, really, really, you know, out of the blue events got me to think, think about Webflow again. And was it the same, idea each of those times or it's just the same name and you're trying to do different things? Generally the same idea, but it sort of started on the back end and moved more and more towards the front end. So the first idea was really about how do you automate backend development and make it visual. Right. And then over the years developed into more what you see.

And so if somebody's never seen Webflow, what's the simple way you describe it? Like how should one friend tell another friend about this? Seven years ago, we used to describe it as like a website builder. You know, it was sort of like Wixweebly. Right. You need a website and you don't know how to. code, use this. Exactly. But it ended up that wasn't a good description. So now the kinds of things people build with Webflowers just entire businesses, product, services, et cetera. So we call it a visual

software development platform. So it's a way for people to build things that typically coders build just in a completely visual environment. And it's kind of a new thing. Maybe the closest we had before was Dreamweaver or things like that where you had a little bit of that visual flare and then you had sort of a code editor on the side. We're trying to make that, but completely visual. So ends up people build a lot of websites with it, but we're moving a lot closer to any kind of software. So what can it do that Wix, a Weebley, a Squarespace, doesn't do, right? Because those are good if you want to make an out of the box thing where it's like, here's my portfolio. Right. Here's my storefront with just like a contact me button. Where does Webflow go deeper?

So Webflow is essentially an abstraction layer over HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. So people start from scratch. Wix and Weble, you're literally picking a template and sort of moving some content images around. But then if you look at like, just pick a random set of a thousand startups every year. Like you go through their websites, they don't look like any of the templates, right? Because people are sort of like going to sketch or Figma or whatever, creating their own brand and then going to implement that in code. Well, it's the first program that can actually take those designs and enable a designer to implement any one of those, you know, like custom, super, super custom layouts.

Right. The way I think about it sometimes is those other website builders are kind of like Imovie, and then Webflow is sort of like Final Cut Pro or After Effects, you know, like super pros are using it. But it still means that if you're not a like a professional web designer, you could still figure it out as like a startup founder, as a creator, entrepreneur, or whatever. It's going to take a little longer than a Wix or Weebly, but what you're going to get is an actual product. So like Webflow, if you go through the last couple years of product hunt launches, above

anything else, like if a visual software development tool is being used, it's probably a webflow. Interesting. So it's either code or it's web flow. Like you usually won't see like a Squarespace site being like number one on product hunt. Right, right, right. Exactly. Okay. That's great. And I've used it a bunch myself. Just, you know, like, if I'm like, I got an idea and I have four hours tonight to work on this. And I kind of know I'm probably not going to keep going with it. I want to make it come alive quickly and not hit a dead end where I'm like, oh, this can't do that. I like well, because it doesn't have those same dead ends. So you had these false starts, right?

You try to start it, but you're by yourself. You try to start it with a couple of friends, but life happens and one of them fades away. You start talking about having kids and that's not a great thing to do at the same time as you're starting to start up. And so when did you ultimately get the timing right? Okay, I'll rewind back a little bit to the third time. So this is that into it, right? So we incorporated, we submitted a trademark for Webflow because we had the domain.

I thought, you know, especially in those days when, you know, Twitter didn't have any vowels. It's a good name. Yeah, it's, I was really proud of it. There's another company called Webflow back in 1999. Right. And I guess they let the domain go to like collections or something. Somebody picked it up and it was relatively cheap. So one night you were just looking, you saw, oh my God, webflow.

No, it wasn't available. It was like, it was for sale for like 10 grand. And I was a college student. I mean, all I had was credit card. you know, kind of limits to think of those are my assets. So I ended up negotiating for a while, like sort of throwing these, I actually created some fake accounts. Right.

To send several low balls. Exactly. Low ball bids. And then ended up picking it up for something like $4,000, which I was really proud of. Like at that time, that was like, you know, the vast majority of my credit card debt was this domain. And by God, I was going to work it off. That's a pretty ballsy move to, you know, for like out of college or you're in college at

time or you're at a bus? I was still in college. You're in college at the time and to buy, like, who buys a $4,000 domain when they're in college? I mean, I knew, like, I was so, and you'll see, I was so attached to the name that, like in this third attempt, when we got a denial for the trademark, because there was another company in Florida that was using it, they said, you know, you can use it all day, but you can't use it for anything for websites because they were trying to create, it was like learn.com. They were trying to create some website e-education thing or whatever. And then we had to, like, pivot and use a different name. So we went through this whole like process of trying to pick a different name. And we ended up on calling it marked up like HTML markup, but without a E.

Right. Because you couldn't get the domain or whatever. And I hated that so much that that was part of the reason why it fizzled out. Just right. It didn't use the name. It didn't feel right. Right. Exactly. So so fast forward like six years and I was using Webflow as a just an LLC doing a bunch of websites for like side income, et cetera, while working it into it. And part of it was working with my brother, who was a designer, and he was working in a skate shop and still kind of going to school and saying, there you go. And then one day, this was late 2011. In my mailbox, this was already moved like three or four times since the Intuit days. And in my mailbox was a trademark certificate for Webflow. Apparently, out of nowhere. Exactly. This was like five or six years later

after our initial submission, after we already got a denial saying like, hey, this is, you know, it's not going anywhere. So I saw that as a sign of like, okay, something has to be explored here. that literally seems like a sign from God. Exactly. Okay. In your mailbox, here's a trademark. Go forth and conquer. Exactly.

And I was already resigned to the fact this was never going to happen. You know, this might be an agency. And at that time, I already thought that Weebly was winning and like, right. It does seem like, when was this like sort of last attempt?

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

I had thought that the space had come and gone, right? Like all these other companies were starting to become huge. They all got funding. And, you know, I was already sort of, quote unquote, settled down. We were planning to buy a house in Sacramento. I thought that it was going to work into it for like another seven years at least. And then I saw this video earlyish in 2012 called Inventing on Principle by this guy, Brett Victor.

And it was all about this constant. of direct manipulation, but more broadly, it was like he asked his question to all creators, like, why do you do the work that you do? And it made me question everything. Like, literally that I saw that video. I read one of his papers called Magic Inc. that same night. It took me like two hours. The next morning I put in my notice add into it. Wait, wait, so what's in this video? What is this video? This video is all about, he kind of like draws this analogy between a lot of other different tools around how do we get, create a lot more human software. How do we take something that is, let's say you're creating games, right, where you're making animation, right?

If one way to think about animation is like these timeline tools where you have an object and you kind of give it keyframes or whatever, another way to think about animation is you give a kid on an iPad the ability to click on, you know, like a leaf or something from a tree and trace with your finger how that animation happens. And you literally get the same effect that looks a lot more natural. And just by virtue of creating another interface, that is way more intuitive for human to understand. And he draws this analogy, like he shows all these examples for creating games, for doing sort of like electrical diagramming for, you know, electrical engineers, et cetera.

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

And that's exactly what we do in coding. And that's when all these things sort of like hit of, I'm a coder. I'm like writing all this H-T-1 CSS. I'm hitting save. I'm going to this other browser. I'm sort of like refreshing. Even if something auto-refreshes for me, I get to check, is that what I actually meant, right? And direct manipulation is all about like just do the thing in the medium, like change the-

live. It changed the actual thing that you're trying to manipulate, almost like 3D animation software, like video editing software, et cetera. and like that's the moment that I knew that something had to like be created in the space that no other tool And who is this guy who did this video? He's, uh, is he dead? Is he alive? No, he's still alive.

He's, uh, Did you reach out and be like, hey, bro, this video made me quit my job and start webbed. And there's actually a bunch of other companies that started because of that video. No way. It's incredible. What else do you know? Like, I know Figma was inspired by this. I know a ton of people on Twitter have said like once I saw that video, it changed the trajectory of my life.

Wow. It's really incredible. even if you don't resonate with this concept of direct manipulation, like half the video is about this question of like, why do you do the work that you do? What is the principle behind your work? Yeah, because if the purpose is like to make a paycheck, it's not as exciting as like, I want to make this big dent in the universe. And for me, that was the video that made me question, like, am I doing what I ultimately want to do with my life? Yeah. And it just so happened that his principle around creating direct manipulation tools was something that really, really resonated with me.

So I got sort of a double whammy from that video. in terms of inspiration. All right, it's 2020. New Year. It's going to be a big year. And you know we had to come in with some new awesome partners. So for January, we are partnering up with Microsoft and My First Million.

That's right. This episode is brought to you by Microsoft because whether you're just starting out or you're well on your way to your first million, Microsoft Teams can help your team hit the ground running with must-have features like real-time chat, editing, and video calling, all in one easy-to-use platform.

Teams is a no-brainer at a price you can afford. Yep, there is a free version of teams, as in it costs $0.0. See for yourself at AKA.m.m. slash the hustle. Again, that's AKA.coms slash the hustle to check out Teams. Brought to you by Microsoft. I love it. Microsoft, that is a trillion dollar company. Right? We're talking about my first million. They're on my first trillion. So that's goals for everybody. They got there because they build epic products. Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint. These are products that stand the test of time. And now they've come out with Teams. to help teams chat, communicate, and work together.

And I think it's awesome. All right, great. Let's get back to this episode. You watch this video, you read the guy's paper. You're like, I'm going to do this. You said you put in your notice pretty much the next day. Yep. Did you tell your wife?

What was her reaction? This was, well, of course I told my wife, after I got the trademark certificate, I think was this four months before, we already started all these conversations around. What would it take? Like, would we move somewhere else? because you kind of had to move to the Bay Area at that point to go to, like, YC and things like that were already started talking about. What would it take to apply? And she knew it was always sort of like after that became kind of a nagging thought that if I don't do something like that, something entrepreneurial, like it's going to be something that's going to regret.

Exactly. So she was definitely on board, especially after I saw this video and like came to her with like all this, just this bundle of energy. Right. Sort of like, all right, we got to do this. But those problems, you know, how do the kids have insurance? Those didn't go away. So how did you address those? How did you make sure you were able to do this?

Very, very naively. And I think this is one of the reasons my wife was super excited was like, look, we have three months of savings. That's like infinite runway. That's what it seemed like. You know, we're going to do this. We're going to spend a month making a Kickstarter video and make whatever 300K to fund the next, fund the next like year and a half or whatever.

And then we're going to build this product in like two months. and then everybody's going to pay for it. And we're going to, you know, I honestly imagine that it was just going to be myself and my brother, like running this company and, you know, building a product for ourselves and kind of using it to make websites and empower other people to make websites for other clients or whatever. So it was like the sort of rose-colored glasses of, you know, we definitely got this, right? Right. That's not rose-colored glasses.

That's like rose eyedrops that you put directly in your eye. Exactly. That is so crazy. Right. But you believed it. And it actually- Totally believed it. And I think I used that as like rationale to get, you know, my family to believe and to pick up everything and move.

You know, it definitely didn't turn out as Rosie. Not even close. But. So what happened? So you do the move. You put in your notice. We do the move. So we move in April.

Then I was still working into it sort of like interim. Right. I started. I shifted my hours to start at like 6.30 in the morning. And I left at 2.30. And I would work on Webflow from like 245 to like seven. Right. And they knew what was.

up or or they were like they they uh really they rod's getting up early nowadays i just sort of like negotiated with my with my team it's sort of a small team right uh and that team was already kind of winding down i don't remember ever having like feeling kind of shady about that because i was putting my hours it was just like different hours exactly and some of the team was remote so it sort of was okay but i was still doing it by myself and i ended up spending like months and months on

just really stupid crap like polishing the icons right for the interface not really building anything. Right. And that's when I realized, like, I'm not going to be able to do this by myself. And that's when I reached out to my brother, who was like the best designer I knew, still one of the best designers I know, and convince him to move to my place into like the condo we're renting in early September of 2012. That's when we incorporated.

And that's when we just like heads down started working on this Kickstarter. Right. It essentially took all the vast majority of the money that we had to incorporate. I think that was like 10 grand. and then put in another 15 grand into this video. Got like, you Google sort of like. Nice Kickstarter video. Yeah, exactly.

And then two months later, what we want to do was like apply to Kickstarter, have like that big success, then apply to YC. And then use the Kickstarter success as like the YC kind of. Why do you want to go to YC? Sounds like you were pretty, even from early on you were like, all right. Then we applied YC. That was like a benchmark.

Yeah, it was just something, you know, I think I was kind of sold by the cashier or the brand or seeing like other companies. get into YC and just explode and go into the stratosphere, like sort of saw that as a right of passage. Right. And it actually hit me really hard when the first time we applied and we didn't get in. Right. I was sort of like, all right, this is never going to happen. So how many times have you applied in your life to YC at this point?

Or total. We had applied three different times. So one in 2007 early. That's the time that didn't work out. Didn't get an interview. Then in 2012, this latest attempt. And then six months later in 2013. Okay. And so, and this last one is a great story. You were telling me this before we started recording. So tell the story of your, the latest YC attempt. What happened? Actually, let me rewind just a little bit like with the Kickstarter thing. So we put all this money into Kickstarter and had this, you know, recorded most of the video, actually all the video. And it was all, hey, Kickstarter, we need your help, Kickstarter, et cetera. And then we receive a notification from Kickstarter that we don't support SaaS services.

Right. Yeah, they only like creative projects. that are like not a yeah exactly so it can't be hosted etc and the whole thing just goes out the window like we couldn't we couldn't use it we didn't have so you have this really nice 15,000 dollar kickstarted video still is this up on YouTube it's not it's sort of it's like internal to web flow right it's dude you should put it up after this people should go on YouTube and look for this well anyway like the next six months were like really really tough what we thought was going to like bring in income we didn't have anything coming in at this point and when you have a family and like rent and, you know, car payments and all this stuff and, like, kids need to go to school.

And the next six months were just, like, no income, going to debt, doing all the credit card, you know, like write a check to yourself that you then have to, it's like a balance transfer type of thing. I was privileged enough to have enough credit, but it was still, like, really tough to go through that. And then we got to the point where at the end of that year, my daughter needed to have surgery. And it was like, you know, we didn't have good health insurance.

Right. Right. So you switched to, like, catastrophic health insurance thinking, you know, nothing's going to happen. It's like these high deductibles or whatever. What happened was we found out that she needed to have surgery like around Christmas time in 2012. And all the tests to figure out what she actually needed to have done was like around 10 grand, right? Which was our deductible. Wow.

And like that was we had to sell a car to pay for that. Then the thing that we found out was like it rolls over to January when she actually have to have the surgery. You start all over again. Oh, no. Exactly. So then we were at a point where like, oh, my. Okay, we're completely out of money. We're talking about getting our jobs back.

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

And we put it up on Hacker News and that just exploded. which is like really, really surprising because here are all these developers and what we're presenting is a way to develop visually. Exactly. Like it'll generate code for you. And that finally, like we applied to YC again with that as a proof point that, hey, there might be something here. Because at that point we had like 25,000 people on our wait list, mostly from Hacker News. And these days it's probably be more from product hunt or something like that. And finally got kind of got an interview request or interview, you know,

got an interview slot. And we went and did this interview, completely nervous. You know, we, like, had no idea what we were doing. We did all this interview prep. And for those who don't know, the YC interview is 10 minutes. Yes. Rapid fire. They're going to make a decision after 10 minutes of whether you're in or you're out.

Yep. And, you know, I could do 10 minutes of, like, small talk. Yeah. And so there is no small talk in this. So what's that interview like? It was really intense. I mean, we walk into this room and it's Paul Bukai, who's the creator of Gmail, and a bunch of other people, we had no idea who they are.

They are some new partners. Do they even do intros or they just go? No, they just go. It's like, it's like boom, boom. And it felt like an interrogation, right? Like, why would this work when other, you know, when so many others have tried and haven't done it? At the end of it, we just walked out and we felt maybe there's a 25% chance that they'll ever talk to us again. Right.

Because we felt like we stumbled. We kind of like agreed on, you know, some categorization. Like if they ask a question about this, like you answer. If they ask a question about design, like another co-founder answers. and I think we like bungled quite a bit of that where at the end it just it just felt like we didn't get our entire idea across right so we're like super nervous we go to this beer place try to get a beer and you know there's this like gap between our interview which is around noon and 6 p.m. The format is they call you if you're in or they send an email if you're out and so we have like four hours to kill and we have beers and we're still like super nervous so we decide to go watch a movie. So we head over to shoreline the Century Theater and get tickets for Oblivion, which is like this Tom Cruise movie where he like clones himself or something like that. So we're watching this movie and I'm like looking at my phone like a hawk.

And finally a phone call comes through. It's 650 number. So I'm sure like, okay, this is this is it. So I sneak out of the movie theater. And sure enough, it's Peebee, the Gmail guy and he says, guys are in. Do you accept these terms? Like we're excited to work with you, et cetera. Doesn't say my name, doesn't say Webflow.

But we're like over the movie. Like Brian Sergi, my co-founders jump out of the theater. They're like, we're jumping up and down. We call our families, girlfriends, wives, et cetera. I started set up dinner. Right. Baby, we did it. Exactly.

This is like, holy crap. This is the biggest milestone for this company early on, et cetera. And then, you know, all of our families are arranging to meet at this restaurant and downtown Mountain View. But the movie's not over. So we just like decide to get, after we arrange everything, go back and watch the movie. And for whatever reason, I'm still checking my phone. And then it buzzes and I have an email.

from YC that says, unfortunately, we decided not to fund you because your product is too complex for beginners and not powerful enough for pros. And we're like, holy crap. So I sort of like signal to Brian Surgey to step outside.

And, you know, this is like the biggest roller coaster. Right. 30 minutes ago, we were in to this like prestigious startup accelerator that's harder to get into than Harvard. And all of a sudden,

we're like, here's a perfect reason why, if I was at Y, C, why I wouldn't accept us. Right. So for sure we thought that the phone call was a mistake because, you know, there's no identifying stuff in there. And for the next two hours, we're just like in complete hell and limbo because we couldn't reach anyone. It was, you know, this huge roller coaster.

And finally, we got, you know, we started driving to the office. We just thought, you know, if we can't get a hold of one. You're going to go meet him in person. Let's just go try to meet him a person who's already after 6 o'clock. Maybe somebody's going to be there. And on our drive there, one of the partners calls us and says, really sorry, the email was a mistake. You guys are in. Honestly, like, that was the biggest sort of like high point, low point, back to high point.

And, you know, the rest is kind of history. And so did you ever talk to them and be like, hey, what was the deal? Apparently, they have like a board where after they make a call, you erase the person. And then something like that didn't happen with us. So somebody had assumed that they needed to send a rejection email. They changed that process. And when does the company actually start to take off? Is it from that Hacker News thing or how did the company actually get off?

Like, this is just you getting to do the company. We haven't even talked about how the company actually started to succeed. Yeah. I think it was another couple of years. So we go through YC, you know, you sort of have this idea that you get into YC, everything else is going to work out. Right. Not the case at all. So we go through YC and, you know, go into Demo Day.

You know, we struggle. What are the numbers like at Demo Day? Because you have to stand up on stage and say, we're killing it. But you're not usually killing it. something like we had 25,000 users, not nearly all of them were active. We had this, like, stat that we were ramen profitable, which was barely true. Right. Like, we were making maybe two, three grand or something like that.

But, you know, three founders, one of that, like, I had kids and family. Right. That was. Ramen profitable, but we don't eat lunch or dinner. If we lived in, like, you know, backwards Russia or something. Right. Yeah. But I think it was mostly sort of like the story that we used.

But at the time, like, it was a terrible time for us to raise building a, a, you know, web-specific product because in 2012. Mobile is everything. In 2013, mobile is every. Exactly. So all these investors told us, like, what are you doing? Right. There's like, what's your mobile strategy?

Why are you? I think I even DM'd you this. Many, a long time ago, two years ago, being like, hey, can I use this to make an app? Yeah. And in my head, what I was really thinking was, why don't they just do this to make apps? Why isn't that the case? It's a hard thing to, essentially, we're all in on the web platform, right? HTML, CSS, JavaScript, et cetera.

where that was the problem that we wanted to solve with like responsive web design, to be able to build things that are not just websites, but like in the browser, right? And most of the time, like all the apps that you use, even though they might have a mobile app, so let's say Airbnb, let's say Twitter or whatever. The vast majority of folks who are experiencing it are using like the web version, right? Plus, that's all the skills that we had. We knew how to abstract away from CSS. We knew nothing about mobile.

Right. Like not a single person. Should there be a mobile flow? Should there be a web flow for mobile out there? Yes, yes. There are a ton of them that try. But I think, and if you are getting close, I think at the end of the day, that's going to be web flow. And mostly because we sort of like get to cheat a little bit in that the web platform is catching up.

And now there's something called progressive web apps, which is essentially the same exact technology as Webflow. Like we already can compile to progressive web apps. Right. But then they appear like full-on apps on your home screen. You just don't have to go through the app store. And they might not be as complex as something like a Snapchat, but for the vast majority of apps, it's good enough. You can't do push notifications, right?

At some point, on Android you can. And there's a lot of pressure for iOS to add that. So I think that's what I mean by like we kind of get to wait until more and more of this develops. And there's enough of a huge market on the website use case that when we get like time will bring us the sort of app case as well. Okay. So we're going back. So you're at YC, you're not crushing.

it, you get a demo day, add demo day, are investors flocking to you? Because if you haven't been to demo day, it's like a meat market where you got these startups who stand up on stage. You get, I think, one minute now or something like that on stage. Yeah, two minutes. Two minutes on stage to say your piece. And then afterwards, the investors are supposed to find you. And they're like, investors wear one color badge. And then the startups wear another color badge. And it's like this horrible speed dating experience. Yeah. It was a lot less clear back then because there were no badges. You know, you had the system where investors could say, hey, I'm interested. Right.

And we thought, you know, we're going to get hundreds or something like that. But you're checking your phone. Yeah, I was like trickling in. And after that, we had weeks and weeks, actually months of meetings with other partners. And it was like really slow going. And finally, it was sort of like investors are kind of like they work in packs where, like it's a social type of dynamic. Yeah. Her mentality.

Yeah. Once they know others are or the windows closing. So we had like almost, I think we had raised like 300K and we were like really struggling and went to Paul. Graham and said, this is really hard on us. Like, I was waking up every morning with panic attacks, like, thinking, okay, another day of, like, going into these, you know, boardrooms. Were you really? What is that like?

So you wake up? Like, my wife was, like, this is not healthy. Right. Yeah. Why? Do you wanted this? Like, is this what startups are about, right? It was even worse than, like, the times when, you know, one of our daughters were

going through surgery and we're running out of money or whatever. Like, it felt a lot worse. I was getting like cult sores almost every week. It was like super, super stressful. So we went to Paul Graham and he said, look, there's three of you. You have 300 grand. You can actually work on this idea. Sure, you can't hire anybody, but just go back to doing what you do best and just building

the product. And with that confidence, we just told all of the investors we're talking to, like, hey, we're not raised. We're winding down. Yeah. And, you know, we're just going to go back to building the product. Because at that point, like our customers weren't getting any attention. you know, it was just a really stressful time.

And when you say you're not raising anymore, like a bunch of other stuff came in. So we ended up raising like 1.4. That is the fundraising trick, which is we don't need money anymore. Right. Well, just take some. Take some for me. Yeah. So that worked out.

But then what we thought was, you know, we had like these 30 plus thousand people on our wait list. And then we thought, of course, we're going to get, you know, convert a bunch of them. And then we launched the product. And it was some, you know, sub 2% or sub 1%. that we converted. So it was because the product just wasn't powerful enough yet. You can only build one page and didn't have like the vast majority of things that we have now. So even though people found some value out of it, it wasn't so much that they were willing to pay and stick with it.

That was a pretty long journey of, you know, at least a year of growing pretty slowly, like slowly adding revenue and coming to the realization that we're not going to be able to raise again. So we have to get to break even somehow, whether it's, you know, hiring slower or building products that that will like add more to revenue so we started building our CMS and thankfully that was the right call of like just going slower and and getting to break even or what sometimes called like default alive right if you never raise again you're at least not going to die and once we got to that it was sort of like this freeing moment of you know we're just going to keep focusing on building the product right and that's what we did for the next like

and so what you guys like did you have a number on the wall every week that was like you know revenue or users, like, what was your big, like, I guess, what was your, how did you in the team stay focused? What did you guys focus on? What did you guys celebrate? Was at that time? I think we were a lot more idealistic and more product driven and a little bit naive in the sense that, all right, if we build this next feature, more users will come. Right.

So we're a lot more like that. Like, let's get this next thing out. Let's get interactions and animations out. Let's get the CMS out. And I think over time, that proved to be successful, but we did not do a great job of, like, orienting everyone around a similar goal. Gotcha. Until like the goal was make the product better.

Exactly. Exactly. Normally when I advise startups and they're like this next feature, that's what unlocks growth. I'm like, oh, don't do that. Yes, exactly. That always, I've done that and that doesn't work. But in your case, it actually kind of worked. I think over the long term it worked, but we were lucky in that the market is so massive.

And we had this like sort of tight window of opportunity where nobody else was working on, on website building products, more or less, because they thought that mobile was the, the next thing. Right. And responsive web design was like pretty brand new that all the old players had, haven't gotten into it yet. Like Adobe hadn't gotten into responsive web design. So it's sort of like this perfect overlap of enough market demand that it was sort

of like pulling us into product market fit. And, you know, our sort of like product sense of let's build something like really amazing that the designers are going to be like proud to work on. Right. And it worked out for us. But like, yeah, usually I don't. Usually when you say that statement about like, you. You know, we just need to work on this feature.

That'll solve our growth problems. You're actually circling the drain at that point. We did think about growth in the sense of, like, okay, everything that we're doing naturally is not working out. So we tried like this, you know, affiliate program and like a referral thing. None of them really worked for like our user base or maybe we just didn't get them right because people were trying to game them and everything. Over time, it was mostly the product that led to growth.

And so what does that mean? That means you see most of your traffic coming from word of mouth, SEO. Right now, most of it is more than 60% is word of mouth. We're getting just people like searching for web flow on Google and stuff. Over the last year or so, we started doing a lot more sort of like paid acquisition and trying to grow faster, things like that. But the vast majority still comes from people talking about it.

That's great. And so when did things start to really heat up and things started to accelerate faster? I remember something was posted on Twitter around like you expect growth to be really stable. and then, but the actual curve looks like super choppy. For us, it was always kind of, the kind of product we're building, I guess. It's always kind of capped by, like growth is capped by what it can't do because people sort of like naturally, earlier on, they would graduate past it all the time. Right.

Now it happens a lot less. But it was enough that we sort of, you know, grew us a certain percentage per month for like years. And it wasn't, you know, like we thought when we built the CMS, we thought when we built e-commerce, we thought when we built, you know, these big product additions, it's going to be like a huge inflection point. But over time it's just been like cumulative in the same rate over, over time. And it's actually pretty hard to maintain the same rate as the numbers grow. Yeah.

But we've been able to do that. And it's just been kind of slow and steady wins the race. Right. Well, not slow, but like not like hyper fast, but steady. Right. And here in Silicon Valley, not hyper fast feels like molasses. Yeah. It feels slow just because you'll see things popping up.

So if you didn't catch the whole story, you basically, in 2004 or five, you're like, I had this idea. And then you fall started a few times and then like kind of like, let's call it, the real start was let's say 2012 this time. And so now this is like seven, eight years in that you're into this business. And honestly, as I'm hearing this, this is kind of amazing you stuck with this. Like I don't know if I have that stick to itness like you had with this. business. Like I would have quit 10 to 12 times along the way. And not because I'm a quitter, I don't think, just because I'd be like, look, time is just going by. Why were you not that way? I don't know the answer to that. I think I'm just naturally not impatient. I'm just more oriented

around stability and a decent change in pace. Even something that feels slower to other companies or founders, you know, getting to where we are today, seven years from now. For me, it's just like feels like a natural progression to a much larger company because we want to be around like 50 years from now. Right. We want to be a foundational company. And how do you do that in a way that feels like it's still web flow, like the culture, the mission, the principles, the values?

And that just seems a lot easier to preserve when you have like a more measured sense of pace. And even, you know, like right now, we're winding down for the year, right? The company sort of shuts down for a while. There's a certain mentality among some founders are like, you got to be like grinding all the time, et cetera. We're more around how do we get people to like really dig this mission and the purpose of like doing this kind of work and be here five years from now. Like we have, we have such a big focus on like balance and culture and putting people first

that our team members stick around for a long time. Like we've been around for seven years. We've hired probably 175 total people over those seven years. we have 155 now. We've had like, that's incredible. 10 or 12 leave, like seven of those to start new companies. Three of them got into YC. Right.

One of those, like, sold their company and came back to work on our product team. So it's, and over the last four years, like one person per year has left. And I think that is because we like focus more on the long term. And I think it's required for the kind of product that we're building because for us to be truly successful to be able to build a tool that builds other products and services, you can't do that overnight. You can't do that by building like vertical. You have to get all those core foundations right so that it's almost like building a game engine that is like will last decades, right? You have to get those core parameters right. You have to get all the teams to work together.

It's very hard to do that by just like throwing money at problems or like spinning up new teams because you have to build relationships. You have to build like communication paths. You have to build kind of the ways that that other developers internally and externally are going to expand on this. So it just like that naturally needs time. That needs like time to adjust. It needs time to kind of get right and polish. Of course, we have like this sort of early on, we have the tendency to get everything completely perfect before we launch.

But thankfully, YC, like, hammer that out. Yeah. You got to like launch, launch, launch and get things out. And, you know, you learn a lot from being in market. Yeah. Yeah. The way I put it is anytime I run into that struggle, because when you work with really talented people, they have that inclination of like, well, we're just shipping stuff

too fast and it's like not great. And that makes me feel bad. I'd rather get it right and then ship it. Right. And my answer to them is, I believe the way. to get it right is to ship it and then iterate on it when it's out there. If you want to make it great, I agree with you. Let's make it great.

But the way to make it great is not to tinker with it ourselves and not show it to anybody for a long time. It's to give it to them and then figure out what's wrong with it in the real world and make it better. And sometimes it's not just what's wrong with it. My favorite story to tell about YC about the value that they added was, you know, I was a freelance web designer. I was working with my brother. I kind of thought I knew what we needed or what other people might be willing to pay for. So when we got into YC and as we were getting ready for demo day, we didn't actually want to launch with like pricing and, you know, to charge customers which just wanted to show a demo. And what we thought was what we needed to ship in order to charge people was our CMS, right?

We were like, nobody that's professional, that's building for clients is going to pay for anything that doesn't have like blogging functionality. Like this is WordPress 101, right? Who would pay for this? And YC was like, if you don't ship something in the next two weeks and you don't charge for it, like one of the partners, they're one of the more like I'm. ambitious ones, like, somebody's going to probably kick you out of this program. So we needed that kick in the pants, and we ended up launching. And it was enough that several, like, there was like this core set of users for whom it was life-changing.

Like, they literally could now make a living because they didn't have to pay another developer because for them, what they were building for clients was like these single-page landing sites or whatever. And they were able to build their own agencies. And for us, it was a huge surprise of like, holy crap. By the time we actually got to building our CMS, the thing that we thought we needed to launch in order to charge. We're already doing like 1.5 million in AR, which was, you know, for me a huge surprise.

It was like a humbling moment to think, right. Hey, let users and the market and customers decide. They'll tell you what's right and what's wrong. Exactly. Okay, I like that. And so you start to get this sort of steady growth. And I like that you said you sort of sounded like, to me, one of your superpowers is that you're not impatient, which means you're patient.

Are you like this with all aspects of your life? Like, do you, you know, wake up at the same? Do you go to bed early? Do you just not like carbs? You know, do you drive the speed limit? Like, what's your, does your life mirror that too? Or you have some adrenaline junkie in you? I definitely don't have an adrenaline junk.

I love, like, certain things, like snowboarding and which is like a hit of adrenaline for a little while. But mostly I'm a little more risk averse. Okay. You know, especially now with kids. I go in spikes. Like a lot of people will say, oh, you know, you need like all these defined rituals, et cetera.

I sort of go in every year is a little different. Like I did a year without sugar, right? I was like on this anti-carb bend. And then I figured out that that was not fun. You know, it was just, and it was kind of in some situation like really pretentious, right? Oh, I can't do certain things or whatever. Especially at kids' birthday parties.

That's when it's the most. Right. And I think generally I've settled on kind of a more stable schedule in terms of like going to sleep earlier. Like my wife sometimes laughs at me, you know, when I head into bed at like nine. Definitely was more of a 1 a.m. type of thing before when in the earlier years. But, you know, getting into work early, I'm usually in around like six or seven. And having some time to just like focus on things has really been helpful.

But I think I always adjust my patterns and in rituals. There's nothing. I don't like wake up every morning and work out and meditate and all that. Right. The Silicon Valley routine, which now takes like 16 hours. Yeah, exactly. To complete per day. Yeah.

So you now have the company is at like 150 people. Do you have like a CEO coach? Do you have like an exact coach? Yep. I've worked with a coach for a year and a half now. It's been really, really awesome. And tell me about it. So my coach's name is Michael.

And the biggest thing that I work with them on is just interpersonal skills and kind of personal prioritization. So I think over the last year, the biggest change for me has been focusing on a lot less, learning to say no to a lot of things, which overall sums up to being able to do things that might take an hour, but are like a 10x sort of impact to Webflow or to me personally or to my family versus doing 10 things that, you know, add up to that same amount. It's just... How did you make that shift? Is there an exercise you did or you're just more aware of it?

Honestly, was triggered by reading a book called Essentialism. And it's essentially, essentially, the, I think the byline of the book is the disciplined pursuit of doing less. And to me, that was pretty life-changing. I think over the last year that was the most impactful book I've read. I used to have this goal of like, how do I read the most books?

How do I get the most knowledge? More, more, more. Exactly. Over the last year, I've actually reread my two favorite books, which is essentialism. I read it like three different times. There's atomic habits.

I'm reading that right now. And this, like the book that essentially, again, essentially define my leadership principles, which is a book called Leaders Eat Last by Simon Seneck. I read that like three more times. Right. So I've been focused. a lot more on sort of reabsorbing the things that have been the most value at to me rather

than trying to get a lot more information. Yeah. When people talk about like I read faster now or I listen on 2X speed, I'm just like, that's awful. Not only because it just sucks to listen to something at 2X. Like if you're listening to this at 2X right now, slow it down. Yeah. I did have that like I think a couple years ago when I was really heavy into podcasts and audiobooks.

It was, you know, 2X everything. I think by the time, if you're if you're starting to think in your mind, mind like I'm going to listen to music at 2x speed too. You've ruined life. You ruined the one pure thing, which is music. So what I sort of feel about that is my opinion, of course, could be wrong. But my opinion is that comes from this place of insecurity, which is like, oh my God, there's, I have so much to do.

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

I've gotten a lot more out of it. It's just to all the two Xers out there. I encourage you to do the other way because it's really helped to me. Yeah, I think I've seen more and more of that like Justin Khan has been talking a lot more about this. The faster you go, you're never fulfilled, thinking of all these sort of success metrics in your mind, whether it's reading books or starting companies or hitting like revenue milestones or whatever, all these things always unlock like the next thing that you're dissatisfied about. So I've been really encouraged by just, you know, getting to a level of contentment

where you don't see sort of the outside world and the speed at which it goes. Of course, you have to like look at signals or like do things in a way that, you know, follow best practices, etc. but like seeing kind of constantly judging yourself against what other people are doing, reading, hitting, like whatever goals they're hitting, just ends up causing more and more kind of dissatisfaction. And to me, going through that transition has been really, really relieving, even in the way that I used to think like, okay, our company is not growing at the speed at which, you know, this, like cruise, right?

Right. They go from zero to a billion dollars in like two years or whatever. Like, why can't we do that or whatever? And then seeing over time that, you know, every company's different, every approach is different, every team is different. Like their product that have different needs than even like growth needs, right? Like you would fail as Uber or Lyft if you didn't grow that fast, right? Because the competition would outpace you or whatever. Then there are other environments where like, you know, being more methodical, being kind of like paying attention to customers, like pouring into your team, making sure they have the resources to grow, even if it's slower.

It adds up to being more beneficial in the long term. Right. So I think every person's different, but at the end of the day, if you're always sort of chasing those kind of milestones and comparing yourself to others, I don't think you're ever going to find contentment. Right. And so how do you feel about all these other no code tools? Is there anything that you really like? Oh, this one's cool. If somebody wants to, if somebody's new to the space, what should they check out?

What's cool to you? Yeah. So the cool, the most awesome thing about no code, just the whole sort of philosophy and the space and the set of tools is that a find, Finally, people who are makers, creators, builders, entrepreneurs, they have fewer barriers to be able to have this idea. I want to validate it in the market. You no longer have to sort of like do the laundry list of technologies that you have to know or people you have to hire.

And it's bringing that closer and closer to reality. And there's so many different tools in the space. Like, you know, you can go from like Zapier to Parabola to like Adalo to glide apps. And they all have sort of have like more nichey use cases, including Webflow. Webflow is primarily used marketing teams, and people are now starting to tie it with Zapier and like Integromat and all these like back end tools and sort of build like entire products and services. There's a bubble that ties a lot of these things together. To me, it just feels like the gold rush or like the pioneer era of the space where we're at the very, very beginning of it, sort of like the web in 1999, right? Like a bunch of people starting to make websites.

It kind of look like toys to a lot of people who are like professional in the industry. you know, not a lot as possible yet. So to me, it's sort of like the more tools, the better right now, almost in the kind of like this sense of a rising tide lifts all boats, if we get more people to believe, that you can actually, you know, build for the internet, build apps, build software without some of these sort of barriers, to open it up from like every one, I think the statistic is there's like 25 million developers on Earth that know how to code.

So that's one out of every 333 people approximately. So if we're going from 0.3,3,000. or zero point, let's say sub half percent of people building software and we can inspire another, you know, 10 times as many, if not 100 times as many to be able to do that. I think that's pretty magical. Like we don't know what people are going to develop. We don't know what kind of ideas that are not being developed right now that are going to make it out to market.

And that's where the more tools are better right now. I think naturally there's going to be some consolidation. Naturally, there's going to be, you know, some companies that are like kind of pigeonhole Exactly. Or pigeonhole into like specific, you know, there were some no-co tools before that wanted to build all kinds of apps. And then they sort of like most of the customers were events. So they ended up being like an event app building platform or whatever. But over time, this is sort of like the early days of the web where let's just see where this goes.

The most important thing is that people are fundamentally inspired to do this stuff and believe that it's not a limiting thing. So early on when AWS first launched and you could say, You don't have to learn how to rack your own rate drives. You don't have to, like, order your own Dell machines. You don't have to, like, get a network switch installed. A lot of the professionals in the field, especially, like, IT or even, like, companies are like, oh, this is never going to be a thing, right? Like, you're never going to be able to do, like, real workloads or build real products

on those things. And it was more of a mindset shift over time that was proven by a lot of people building lasting companies on these tools, even though it was, like, dollar for dollar, more expensive, right? But the things that unlocked were amazing, like, like, webflow. was built on AWS. If it didn't exist, we'd have to have a team twice as big probably. Right.

So I think right now, no code and visual software development is going through a similar journey where people are starting to believe like, okay, this is going to be, like, already real things are being built. Like products are going up on product hunt and like hitting number one. People don't even know that it's built with no go tools. People are creating companies and getting into YC without engineers on these no code tools. So that's, that to me is a really, really exciting. time to be alive because it's just a lot of, a lot of, like, really good vibes in this,

in this area. And, like, a lot of people are starting to believe that this is going to be a huge thing. Gotcha. And give me two no-code tools that you could shout out that people should check out that, you know, this, there's the name and here's what it does for you. Yeah. One of my favorites right now is Parabola. So it's never heard of that. What does it do? So it's a, it's a visual way to, like, do data transformation. So you give it, let's say a spreadsheet and that spreadsheet You can come from Airtable, from like Webflow CMS even. And then you have like this, it's almost like a electrical diagram of like gates and, it's like Yahoo Pipes.

If you've ever used Yahoo Pipes back in the day where you can like add something like, let's say filter the data and run it through some, you know, some formula or whatever. And you can create like here's an example that somebody built where you could take Webflow blog posts go through this whole like ranking algorithm where it pulls information from like SEO or whatever. and then creates an order based on popularity and puts it back into Webflow. And that is completely done without code.

You know, you just sort of like have this diagram. It's like a visual way to express that stuff. And another one of my favorites is this company called VoiceFlow, which is a visual way to build Alexa apps and like Siri apps. Right. And it's the same thing. Like you're sort of, you're empowering somebody that typically would need to figure out like the Alexa API to just drag and drop and say,

when somebody says this, do this. when somebody says this do this. And I think that layer of logic can be applied to way more than just like voice sort of conditionals. And over time, we're going to get closer and closer to building out, you know, something like an Airbnb or Twitter. Program that way. Exactly.

Like rebuild product hunt itself. Right. In a no-code tool, right, where you're doing all the logic, all the database stuff, all the like visual components, all the kind of state changes, upvoting, comments. Sounds like a good marketing idea for you guys. Exactly. Okay. Great.

And you let them on your block of flow. You let voice flow on your block. Yeah, there you go. That's nice of you. I would be like, hey, you need to, you know, look at this trademark I got in the mail 10 years ago. It's like Facebook trademarking face or something. Yeah. We actually did have a trademark on flow at one point.

And we just decided to let it go. Like, hey, it's very hard for SEO. Yeah. But yeah, it's also, you know, kind of be a bad move to say, like, you can't use the word flow. Awesome. Okay. And so if somebody wants to get a hold of you, so obviously they should check out Webflow, if somebody wants to get a hold of you, where do they get more of your thoughts, who should

reach out to you, who are you looking to hear from? There's your chance to give people a chance to connect with you after this. Yeah. So for somebody that runs a company that builds websites, I actually don't have a website. I used to have one, but I need to get one up. I'm mostly just on Twitter. So you can find me. I call me Vlad.

Yeah, that's where I shared a lot of my thoughts, sometimes way too many thoughts. Yeah. And who do you like to hear from? what type of person or in what context do you like to hear from people? Some people will say, you know, are you hiring? Okay, great. That's one reason to get in touch with you. Do you like to invest? That's another reason to get in touch with you. What's a reason? I love right now just talking about no code to as many people as possible, like hearing their stories, what people have built with it, you know, having conversations like this around getting more people to believe the power of visual

software development. If you're trying to get a job at Webflow, it's definitely webflow.com foresight jobs is your best bet. I'm no longer aware of everything that's going on there. And actually, on principles stay out of those decisions because, you know, I want to empower my team to make the right call for for their needs. But mostly I just want, I just want this, this movement to take off. I want to see who else is interested in making it happen. Like, I know there's just the kernels of, you know, a lot of meetups. People are starting to do like training programs around this. I want to be as helpful as possible. So if people want to reach out for me, to me, uh, around that stuff, I'd love to have a conversation. Right. Thank you for coming on, man. I, I'm a long time fan of any product.

that lets other people make stuff. I think that's sort of building a tool that helps other people make stuff is sort of one of the more high leverage things you can do with your life. And like you said, today, a very, very small segment of the population has the opportunity to make their ideas come to reality. I know for many years I felt I'm not a programmer. Therefore, these ideas I have, they're going to live and die in my brain. And, you know, I started to solve that problem by working with engineers and hiring

engineers and things like that. But I still, to this day, feel, you know, two steps removed from where I'd like to be, where I can just be in flow. I could just be sitting at my desk and then translating my ideas and my brain into something real. And tools like Webflow are helping with that. But there's a long way to go. Like, you know, my wife, my sister, I want to see them, basically. I've heard them so many times talk about ideas that to them feel like pipe dreams because the bar to making something on the internet is still too high. I think most people think it's very low. I think it's still way too high.

And when you bring those creative people into the fray and to an even playing field, you know, where they can make stuff to, I think you're going to, I think the world will change in a very fundamental way. And so I'm glad you're doing what you're doing. Thanks, John. And by the way, it's never going to be that easy to where you're like, oh, I have an idea. And boom, two hours later, I have that product. the hard thing is still going to be how do you how do you even quantify the idea how do you like

solve that user pain you have to you're going to have to be an expert in like you know interviewing users understanding your customer understanding like how your product or service actually solves a problem but as much of like sort of the back end piece we can get rid of so you don't have to think of all the incidental complexity of right how do I spin up a server how do I you know like just empower people to do their best work it's still going to be hard to build The analogy to me is like, you know, I was sitting down yesterday eating food and I was like, man, not too long ago in history, I would have had to go out there and hunt and forage to get this. And then we started, okay, now there's farms. And then today it's abstracted away where I don't even have to think.

I push a button on my phone and the meal appears. And of course, this is just going to keep going where, you know, people who love to cook will always cook. But you don't have to hunt, farm, cook in order to eat. And I think that when you remove those barriers, magical things happen. And that's what I see happening with creative projects as well is, you know, the hunter-gatherer days are over. But we're still in like the farm days. Yep. And we're nowhere near the, you know, the Postmates era where you want something, you push a button and it arrives.

But, you know, I think that's the inevitable of where this thing goes. So, okay, great. This was awesome. Thank you for coming. I appreciate this. All right. Right on.