#33 - Pioneering The No-Code Movement

we call it a visual software development platform it's a way for people to build things that typically code 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 gonna like bring in income we didn't have anything coming at this point and when you have 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 part you know couldn't get trademark when the c cofounder got less motivated day job got a lot more interesting i think we had raised like three hundred k 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 you know panic attacks like my wife was like this is not healthy right yeah why think you wanted this like like is this what startups ups are about right they've got seventy five thousand paying users they just raised a monster round of investment seventy two million series a those other website builders are kinda like imovie and then flows to like final on pro just feels like the gold brush heard of like the pioneer era of the space where we're at the very very beginning of it sort of like the web in nineteen ninety nine no technology in history has ever spread so fast products are going up a product on like kidding 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 it yes today it's abstract away where i don't even have to think i push a button on my phone in the meal of here 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's just feels like a natural progression to a much larger company because we wanna be around fifty years from now right we wanna be a foundational company five million is nine in enrolled ten million million twenty million dollars hundred billion dollar half a billion hundred and fifty million dollars one or two people in a bedroom actually for threats to these like giant multi million dollar because you have creativity and you have nothing to lose add another zero to that price buddy add two more zeros for first every week we sit down with self made million and asked 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 businesses that you find today i wanted to know the real stories where all the details like did you get your first hundred customers what did it feel like and shit with the fuck i ask them how do you spend your money now that you're rich and what would you do if you're starting over from scratch again today if you're like me and you wanna own your own business instead of living a nine to five job this is the podcast for you the hustle presents my first million alright 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 we're 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 as founder of a company called web flow and web flow is a company that is doing phenomenally well right now if you're in kind silicon valley i would say you guys have that pipe train right now you feel that definitely the last year has been a lot more high training yeah but it wasn't always like that we'll not at all that so they have the hype trailer right now because they've got you know seventy five thousand paying users they just raised a monster round of investment seventy two million series a which is you know ten times more than a typical series a i think so they're doing phenomenally well and we're gonna find out a couple things so i may interested in chatting with you because i wanna 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 yep so give me the two minute version of like of the web flow history and i will dive in deeper after that who two minutes c i started web flow four different times starting in early two thousand five back when i was still in college ended up being my senior project then i started try to started 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 kinda gave up then i got married started working into it sort of needed a real job right met a couple buddies at intuit it we were you know all fresh out of college working on pretty boring things there and kinda got together and try to give it another go so i had a couple cofounder try to start up this was like the web two point o days you know the heyday of like start starting to happen like the google maps there where you can actually build something in the browser right y was just starting up that was really exciting started 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 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 fizz 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 web plug and was it the same idea each of those times or so it's just the same name in your same name 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 back end development and make it visual right and then over the years developed into more what you see and so if somebody's never seen flow what how what's the simple way you describe it like how should one friend tell another friend about with this seven years ago we used to describe it as like a website builder you you know it's sort of wix wee at you need a website and you don't know how to code use exactly but it ended up that that wasn't a good description so now the kinds of things people build with web flow or just entire business product services etcetera so we call it a visual software development platform okay so it's a way for people to build things that typically code build just in a completely visual environment and it's kind of a new thing maybe the closest we had before was dream weaver or things like that where you had a little bit of that visual flare and then you had sort of a c 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 wee a squarespace doesn't do right because those are good if you wanna make a 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 mh where does web flow go deeper so web is essentially an abstraction layer over html css in javascript so people start from scratch weeks and wee believe 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 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 fig or whatever creating their own brand and then go and to implement that in code wealth the first program that can actually take those designs and enable a designer to implement any one of those right you know like custom super super custom layouts right the way i think about it sometimes is those other website builders are kinda like imovie and then sort like final cut pro right or after effects you know like super pros are using it but still means that if you're not a like a professional web designer you could still figure it out is like a startup founder as a creator entrepreneur or whatever it's gonna take a little longer than a w or wee but what you're gonna get is an actual product so like web flow if you go through the last couple years of product hunt launches above anything else like if a visual software development tool being used is probably a web flow interesting so it's either code or it's web like you usually won't see like a squarespace site being like number one on product 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 yeah to work on this and i kinda know i'll probably not gonna keep going with it right i wanna make it come alive quickly and not hit a dead end or where i'm like right oh this can't do that i like because it doesn't have those same dead so you had these full starts right mh you try to start it but you're by yourself you try to start it with a couple friends but life happens and one of them fades away do you start talking about having kids and that that's a 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 intuit it right so we incorporated we submitted a trademark for flow because we had the domain i thought you know especially in those days when you know twitter didn't have any valuables and it's a good name yeah it's i was really proud of there's was a another company called web flow back in nineteen ninety nine 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 web flow doc no it wasn't available okay it wasn't like it was for sale for like ten grand and i was a college student i 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 actually created some fake accounts right to send up like exactly low ball bids and then ended up picking it up for something like four grand which was really proud of like at that time that was like you know the vast majority of my credit card did right this domain and i got i was gonna work it off that's a pretty balls move to you know for like out of college or you're in are you in college at the time or you're i was still in college in college of time and to buy like who buys a four thousand dollar domain when they're in i mean i most people i was so and you'll see i so attached to the name that like in in this third attempt we when we got a denial for the trademark because there's 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 dot they're 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 you couldn't get the domain or whatever and i hated that so much that that was part of the reason why it fizz out just right didn't use it didn't feel right right exactly so so fast forward like six years and i was using web flow as i just an llc doing a bunch of websites for like other side income etcetera while working it into it and part of it was working with my brother who who's a designer and he was working a skate shop and still kinda go to school in san diego and then one day this was late twenty eleven in my mailbox this was already moved like three or four times since the intuit days and in my mailbox it was a trademark certificate for workflow apparently don't know exactly this is 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 yeah that literally seems like a sign that god the exact okay in your mailbox here in the trademark go forth and conquer exactly and i was like i was already resigned to the fact that this was never gonna happen you know this might be an agency and at that time i already thought that wee was winning and like right it does seem like when was this like sort of last attempt what year was this now this is two thousand twelve since two thousand twelve it did seem like this space was a like a solved problem and did you at that time feel like no i have an insight that why it's not you were just like i'm just gonna do it anyways and just see what happens it was kinda neither of those things i had thought that the space had coming 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 yeah we were planning to buy house in sacramento i i thought that it was gonna work at intuit for like another seven years at least and then i saw this video early in twenty twelve called inventing on principal by this guy brett victor and it was all about this concept of direct manipulation but more broadly it was like the that 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 looked took me like two hours the next morning i put in my notice at into it wait wait so what's in this video what is 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 animations like these timeline tools where you have an object and you kind of give it key 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 where how that animation happens and you literally get the same effect that looks a lot more natural and just by creating another interface that is way more intuitive for humans to understand right and he draws this analogy like he shows all these examples for creating games for doing sort of like electrical diagram for you know electrical engineers etcetera and it like all these things just just he's calling that direct manipulation exactly interface exactly not like direct me manipulating you fine exactly for right and so so the whole concept of direct manipulation is like when i do sculpting right and clay i don't like think of the change i wanna make and then go to some other place and like make that change and sort of look back and say right is that what i meant and that's exactly what we're do in coding and that's when all these things sort of like hit of i'm a code i'm like writing all this issue on css i'm hitting save going to this other browser i'm sort of like refreshing even if something auto of 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 changed this live change the actual thing that you're trying to manipulate almost like three d animation software like video editing software etcetera and like that's the moment that i knew that something had to like be created in the space that no other tool who is this guy who did this video he's is he dead it's he he's still alive he's to reach out and be like hey yeah this video me quit my job and start web 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 fig mo was inspired by this i know a ton of people on twitter have said once i saw that video it changed the trajectory of my life wow it's really incredible because 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 that principle how your work yeah because if the purpose is like to make a paycheck it's not as exciting as like i wanna make this big dent in the universe right and for me that was the video that made me question like am i doing what i ultimately wanna do with my life yeah and it just so happened that his principle around creating direct manipulation tools was something that really resonated me so i got sort of a double w from that video in terms of operation alright it's twenty twenty new year it's gonna be a big year and you know we had to come in with some new awesome partners so for january rear 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 zero dollars see for yourself at a k a dot ms slash the hustle again that's a k a dot ms slash the hustle to check out teams brought to you by microsoft i love it microsoft that is a trillion dollar company 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 i'm at work together and i think it's awesome alright great let's get back to this episode you watch this video you read the guy's paper you're like i'm gonna do you said you put in your notice yep pretty much the next day yep what would did you tell your wife 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 like started the all these conversations around what would it take like would we move somewhere else because you kinda had to move to the bay area at that point to go to like yc and things that were already started talking about what would it take to apply i and she she knew it was always sort of like after that became kind of a a nagging thought that if i don't do something like that something entrepreneurial like it's it's gonna be something that's gonna you gonna regret exactly so it she was definitely on board especially after i saw this video and like came to like all this just this bundle of energy right sort like alright we gotta do this but those those problems you know how do kids of insurance those didn't go away so how'd did you address those how did you make sure you so very very naive and i think this is one of the reasons my wife is super excited was like look we have three months of savings that's like infinite runway right that's what it seemed like you know we're gonna do this we're gonna spend a month making a kick kickstarter video and make whatever three hundred k to fund the next fund the next like year and a half or whatever then we're gonna build this product in like two months and then everybody's gonna pay for it and we're gonna you know i honestly imagine that it was just gonna be myself and my brother like running this company and you know building a product for ourselves and kinda using it to to make websites and empower other people to make websites for other clients or whatever and so there's 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 you've rose eye drops that you put directly in your eye like that is so crazy right but you believed it in an i totally believed it and i think i i used that as like rationale to get you know my family to believe and to pick up everything and move you know i definitely didn't turn out as rosie rosy not even close but so what happened so you you do the move you bet you put your new move so we move in april and then i i was still working into it sort of like interim right i started i shifted my hours to start at like six thirty in the morning and i left at two two thirty and i would work on web flow from like two forty five to like seven right if they knew what was up or or they were like hey if floods getting up early balances i just sort of like negotiated with my with my team as sort of a small team right and that team was already kinda of winding down i don't remember ever having like feeling kinda eighty about that because i was putting my hours of just like different hours exactly and some of the team was remote so it's 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 gonna be able to do this by myself and that's the when i reach 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 two thousand twelve 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 ten grand then put in another fifteen grand into this this video got like you know you sort like kick kickstarter video yeah exactly and then two months later what we wanna do is like apply a kickstarter have like that they could success then apply to yc and then you use the kickstarter success as like the yc kind of why why do you wanna go to yc sounds like you were pretty even from early on you were like alright then we applied yc that was like a a benchmark just yeah it was just something you know i think i was kinda sold by the cache or the brand or seeing like other companies get into y and just explode and go into the stratosphere like sort of saw that as a rite of passage right and it actually hit me really hard when the time we applied and we didn't get in right i was sort like alright this never gonna happen so how many times have you applied in your life wisely at this point our total we applied three different times so one in two thousand seven early that's the the time that didn't work out didn't get an interview then in two thousand twelve this latest attempt and then six months later in twenty thirteen 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 the latest i attempt what what i actually let me rewind just a little bit like with the kickstarter thing yep so we put all this money into the kickstarter and had this you know recorded most of the video actually all the video and it was like hey kickstarter we need help kickstarter etcetera and then we receive a notification kickstarter that we don't support saas services right yeah they only like creative projects that are like not a yeah exactly so it came etcetera 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 fifteen thousand dollars take start of video still is this up on youtube it's not it's so it's it's like internal to to flow right dude you should put it up after this people as you go on youtube and look for this yeah well anyway like the next six months were like really really tough what we thought was gonna like bring an 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 at the next six months we're just like no income going to debt doing all the credit card you know like write check 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 already you switched to catastrophic health insurance thinking you know nothing's gonna happen it's like like these high deductibles or whatever what happened was we found out that she needed to have surgery like around christmas time in two thousand twelve and all the tests to figure out what she actually needed to have done was like around ten grand right and which was already deductible wow and like that was we had to sell a car to pay for that then my thing that we found out was like it rolls over to january when you she actually that again you you start all over again so oh no exactly so then we were at a point we're like okay we're completely out of money we're talking about getting our jobs back like sergio wanted to move back to san diego i wanted move back to sacramento and we gave each other six weeks of like what can we do to it was like the the bare minimum on the the remaining credit that we have to 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 ground dot web flow dot com and we put it up on hacker news and that just exploded which is like really really surprising because here all these developers and what we're presenting as a way to you don't need to do exactly like it'll generate code for you and that finally like we applied to yc again with that as a proof proof point that hey there's might be something here so at that point we had like twenty five thousand people on our weight mostly from hacker news and these days is probably be more from product content something like that and finally got kind of got an interview request or interview you know got an interview slot and we went into this interview completely nervous you know we like had no idea what were doing we did all this interview prep and for those who don't know that yc interview is ten minutes yes rapid fire yeah they're gonna make a decision after ten minutes exactly of whether you're or you're out yep and you know i could do ten minutes of like small talk yeah and so there is no small talk in miss so what's that you're like it was really intense i mean we walk into the room and it's paul guy who who's the the creative gmail and a bunch of other people we had no idea who they are they are the seventy parts so they even do shows the just go no they just go it's like it's like boom boom and it felt like an interrogation right like why why would this work when other you know when so many the others have tried and haven't done a blah blah at the end of it we just walked out and we felt maybe there's a twenty five percent chance that they'll ever talk to us again right because we felt like we stumbled we kinda like agreed on you know some categorization like could they ask a question about this like you answer if to ask a question about design like another founder answers and i think we like bundled 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 play try to get a beer and you know there's this like gap between our interview which was around noon and six pm the format is they call you if you're in or they send you 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 at the century theater and get tickets for oblivion which is like this tom cruise movie already like clones himself or something like that so watching this movie and i'm like looking at my phone like a hawk and finally a phone call comes through and sits six five o number so i'm sure like okay this is this is it so i i'd sneak out of the movie here and sure enough it's pb the the gmail guy and says guys are in do you accept these terms like we're excited to work with you etcetera doesn't say my name it say flow but we're like over the moon like brian searching my c cofounder jump out of the theater they're like we're jumping up and down we call our families girlfriends wives etcetera started set up dinner right baby we did exactly this is like holy crap this is the the biggest milestone for for this company early on etcetera and then you know all of our families are arranging to meet its it's restaurant and down downtown mountain view but the movie is not over so we just like decide to go after we arrange everything go back and and watch the movie and for whatever reason i'm still checking my phone and then it buzz and i have an email from yc that says unfortunately we decided not to fund you because product is too complex for beginners and not powerful enough for pros and we're like holy crap so i'd sorta of like signal to the brian surgery stuff outside and you know this is like the biggest roller coaster right thirty minutes ago we were in to this like prestigious startup up accelerator it's harder to get into than harvard and all of a sudden we're like here's a perfect reason fought why if i was a yc 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 incomplete hell and limbo because we can reach anyone it was you know this huge roller coaster and finally we got you know we started driving to to the office we to just thought you know if if we can't get a hold on one you're gonna go meet him in person let's just go try to meet him a person who's already after six o'clock maybe somebody gonna be there and on our drive there one of the partners calls in says really sorry the email was in 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 kinda history so did you ever talk to him and be like hey what was the deal or you apparently apparently the there's they have like a board yeah where after they make a call you erase brace the person and then something like that didn't happen with us i somebody had assumed that they needed to send a rejection email they changed that process so 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 years so so we go through i you know you you sort of have this idea that you get into i everything else is gonna work out right not the case at all so we go through yc and you know go into demo day you know we we struggle what are the numbers like at demo day because you have to stand up on stage and say we're we're killing it but you're not said something like we had twenty five thousand users not nearly all of them were active we had this like stat that we're ramen profitable which was barely true right like we're were making maybe t three grand or something like that but you know with three founders one of that like i had kids and family right that was rowan profitable right we don't eat lunch or dinner if we lived in like you know backwards rush or something yeah but i think it was mostly sort of like a story that we use but at the time like i was a terrible time for a to raise building a you know web specific product because in two thousand twelve mobile in two thousand thirteen mobile is everything exactly so all these investors told us like what are you doing right there's like what's your mobile strategy why i do i even dm 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 need to do this to make apps why why isn't that the case it's a hard thing to is essentially work all in on the web platform right html css javascript etcetera where that 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 are using like the web version right plus we that's that's all the skills that we had we knew how to abstract evaluation says we knew nothing about mobile right like not should there be mobile flow should there be a web flow for mobile out there is there are a ton of them that try but i think and and a you are getting close i think at the end of the day that's gonna 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 essentially the same exact technology as web flow like we already can compile to progressive web apps right but then they appear like full on apps in the on your home screen yeah you just don't have to go through the app store and they might not be as like complex as something like a snapchat but for the vast majority of apps it's it's good enough you can't do push notifications right i have to point on andrew android you can yeah and and there's a lot of pressure for ios i to add that so i think that that's what that's what i mean by like we kind of get to the wait right until more and more develops yeah 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 right case as well okay so we're going so you're at yc but you're not crushing it you get a demo day add demo day our investors flock to you because if you haven't been to demo it's like a meat market right where you got these startups who stand up on stage you get i think one minute now or something like that on two minutes two minutes on stage to say your piece mh and then afterwards the investors are supposed to find you and then like investors wear one color badge and then the startups were another color badge and it's like this horrible speed dating experience yeah it's it was a lot less clear back i think it's there were no badges you know you had the system where where investors could say hey i'm interested right and we thought you know we're gonna get hundreds or something like that but you're checking my phone yeah 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 kinda like they work in packs where or like it's a social type of dynamic where hurt mentality yeah once they know others are or the windows closing so we had like almost i think we had raised like three hundred k 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 you know panic attacks like thinking okay another another day of like going into these yes you know boardroom rooms and you really what what 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 like is this would startups ups are about right it was even worse than like the times when you know one of our daughters would go through through surgery and we're running out of money or whatever like it felt a lot worse you i was getting like cold sores almost every week it was it was like super super stressful so we went to paul graham and were and he said look there's three of you you have three hundred grand you can actually work on this 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 told all the investors who were talking to like hey we're we're not raising winding down yeah and you know we're just gonna go back to building the product because at that point like our customers weren't getting any attention you know it was 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 i ended up raising like one point four that is the fundraising charge yeah which is we don't need money anymore right well we'll just take some take exactly yeah so that that worked out but then what we thought was know we had like these thirty plus thousand people on our waitlist list and then we thought of course we're gonna get you know convert a bunch of them and then we launched the product and it was some you know sub two percent or was sub one percent that we converted so it was because the product just wasn't powerful enough yet we can you can only build one page and it 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're were willing to pay and stick with it and that was a pretty long journey of you know at least a year of growing pretty slowly it looks slowly adding revenue and coming to the realization that we're not gonna 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 start building our cms and thankfully that was the right call of like just going slower and and and getting to breakeven or what sometimes called like default alive right if you never raise again you're at least not gonna die and once we got to that it was sort of like this freeing moment of you know we're just gonna keep focusing on building the product right and that's what we did for the next like it's so what you guys like 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 and the team stay focused what did you guys focus on what did you guys celebrate was at i think we were a lot more idealistic and more product driven and a little bit naive in the sense that alright 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 right in interactions and animations out let's get the cms out and i think over time that proof to be successful but we did not do a great job of like granting everyone around a similar goal gotcha until like the goal was make the product better exactly case normally when i advise startups and they're like this next feature that's what unlocks grow i'm like oh don't do that yes exactly that always i've done that and that doesn't work but in case it actually kind of war i think over over the long term it work it but we were lucky that the market is so massive and we had this like sort of tight window of opportunity where nobody else is 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 response web design so it's sort 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 that designers are gonna be like proud to work on right and it worked out for but like yeah usually i don't usually when you say that statement or about like you know yeah we just need to work on this feature that'll solve growth problems you're actually circling the drain at that point and we did think about growth in the sense of like okay everything that we're doing naturally not working out so we try 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 are trying to game them and everything over time as mostly the product that led to growth and so what does that mean does that means do you see most of your traffic coming from word seo what we're right now do you actually more than sixty percent is word 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 trying to grow faster yeah 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 supposed 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 kinda capped by like growth is capped by what it can't do mh because people sort of like naturally earlier on they would graduate pass 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 what we thought when we built the cms with that when we built e commerce with that when we built you know these big product additions it's gonna be like a huge inflection point but over time it's just been like cumulative in the same rate over over time it's it's actually pretty hard to maintain the same rate right as the numbers grow yeah but we've been able to do that and it's just been kind of slow and steady ones race right now well not slow but like not not like hyper fast what's steady right that and here in silicon valley not hyper fast feels like molasses yeah it feels slow right just because you'll see things popping up episode so if you didn't catch the soul story you basically in two thousand what four five you're like i have this idea mh 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 twenty twelve mh 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 is kind of amazing you stuck with this like i don't know if i have that stick to it ness like you had with this business like i would have quit ten to twelve times right along the way and not because i'm a quit i don't think just because i'd be like look mh 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 okay even something that feels slower to other companies or founders you know like getting to where we are today seven years from now for me it's just like feels like a a natural progression to a much larger company because we wanna be around like fifty years from now right we wanna 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 gotta you gotta be like grinding all the time etcetera we're more around do we get people to like really dig this 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 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 a hundred and seventy five total people over those seven years we have a hundred and fifty five now we've had like that's incredible ten or twelve leave like seven of those 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 localized solutions if to get all those core foundations right so that it's 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 or like spinning up new teams because you have to build relationships you have to build that communication pass you have to build kind of the ways that that other developers internally and externally are gonna expand on this so it just like that naturally needs time that needs like time to adjust and needs time to kind of get right and polish of course we we have like this sort of early on we have the tendency to get everything completely perfect before we launch but thankfully yc see like hammer that out of yeah yeah you gotta like launch launch launch and get get things out and you know you learn a lot from being in market yeah yeah the way i put it time anytime i run into that struggle because when you really talented people to 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 mh 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 so if if you wanna 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 sometimes it's not just what's wrong with it my favorite story itself about yc about the value that they added was you know i was a freelance web designer i was working with my brother i i kinda thought i knew what what we needed or what other people might be willing to pay for so when we got into and as we were getting ready for demo day we didn't actually wanna 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're like nobody that's professional that's building for clients is gonna pay for anything that doesn't have like blogging functionality like this is wordpress one zero one 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 ambitious ones like somebody's gonna 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 it they literally could now make a living because then didn't have to pay another developer because for them what they were building for clients was like these single age landing sites or whatever and they build like able to build their own agencies and for us it was a huge surprise of like holy crap right 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 one point five million in ar yeah which was you know for me a huge surprise like a humbling moment to think right hey let let users in the market and customers size let's i'll tell you what's right what's wrong that 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 it sounds like what to me one of your superpower is that you're not impatient which mean you're patient mh you like this with all aspects of your life like do you you know wake up at the same you go to bed early do you just not like carbs you know do you do you drive the speed limits like what's your or did your life mirror that too or you have some adrenaline junkie india i definitely don't have an adrenaline junk i love like certain things like snow snowboarding and which is like a a hit of adrenaline yeah for a little while but mostly i'm a little more risk ave hers 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 etcetera 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's and it was kind of in some situations like really pre right oh i can't do certain things or right that's what kids birthday parties that's one it's the the most right and i i think generally i've settled on kind of a more stable schedule in terms of like i going to sleep earlier like my wife sometimes laughs at me you know when head into bed like nine right definitely was more of a one am 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 i think i always adjust my patterns and in in rituals there's nothing don't like wake up every morning and work out and meditate in all that through the silicon valley exactly routine which now takes like sixty hours yeah exactly per day yes so you now have the companies at like hundred fifty people do you have like a ceo coach do you have like an exec coach yep i've worked with the coach for a year and a half now it's been really really awesome and tell me about it so my coach name is michael and the the biggest thing that i i work with him 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 like a ten sort of impact to web flow or to me personally to my family versus doing ten things that you add up to that same amount it's just how'd do you make that shift is there an exercise you did or you're just more aware of it honestly what's triggered by a reading a book called the central and it's essentially essentially the i think the by line of the book is the disciplined pursuit of doing less and to me that was pretty light 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 or more exactly over the last year i've actually re reread my two favorite books which is essential as when i read like three different times there's atomic habits i'm already that right now and this like the book that essentially again essentially define my leadership principles which is book called leaders z last by simon cena i read that like three more times right so i i've been focusing a lot more on sort of re absorbing 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 two x speed i'm just like that's awful not only because it just sucks to listen to something at two x like if you're listening to this at two x 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 two x everything right i i think by the time if you're if you're starting to think in your mind like i'm gonna listen to music at two x speed too right things you've ruined light yeah you've ruined the one pure thing which is music so so what i sort of feel about that this is my opinion of course mh it could be wrong but my opinion is that comes from this place of insecurity mh which is like oh my god there's i so much to do yeah don't have enough time i'm gonna hyper i'm gonna go in hyper speed to try to essentially catch up and it's sort of like a fo driven thing yeah 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 the reason i say this is when you go slow and you read or re reread or take notes really just read something and then stop and think how would i apply this to my life like am i doing this right i've gotten a lot more out of it just to all the two extras out there i i encourage you to do the other way because really helped to me yeah i i think i've i've seen more and more of that like josh 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 a level of contentment where you don't see sort of the outside world and the 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 etcetera but like seeing kind of constantly judging yourself against what other people are doing reading hitting like whatever goals are hitting just ends up causing more and more kind of dissatisfaction and 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 is different every approach is different every team is different at like their product that have different needs then even like growth needs right they're like you'd fail as uber lyft if you didn't grow that fast right because the competition would out pace you or whatever but then there 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 they have the resources to grow even if it's slower it adds up to to being more beneficial in the long term right so i i think every every person's is 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 gonna find contentment right and so how do you feel about all these other no code tools is there anything that you really like that y'all like this this one's cool if somebody wants to if somebody 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 a whole sort of philosophy in the space and the set of tools is that finally people who are makers creators builders entrepreneurs they have fewer barriers to to be able to say have this idea i wanna validate in the market you no longer have to sort like do the laundry list of technologies that you have to know where people you have to hire right 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 para travel to like a dollar to light apps and they all have sort of have like more niche use cases including web flow like is primarily used like marketing teams and people are now starting to tie it with zapier and like in and all these like back end tools and sort of build like entire products in services a bubble that ties a lot of these things together to me it just feels like the the gold rush or of like the pioneer era of the space where we're at the very very beginning of it sort of like the web nineteen ninety nine right like a bunch of people start to make websites it's it kinda 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 right that you can actually you know build for the internet build apps built software without some of these sort of barriers to open it up from like every one i think this statistic is there's like twenty five million developers on earth that know how to code so that's one out of every three hundred and thirty three people approximately so if if we're going from zero point three three or zero point let's say sub half percent people building software and we can inspire another you know ten times as many it's not a hundred times as many to be able to do that i think it's pretty magical like we don't know what people are gonna develop we don't know what kind of ideas that are not being developed right now they're gonna make it out to market and that's where the more tools the better right now i think naturally there's gonna be some consolidation naturally there's gonna be you know some companies that are like kind of playing out just be exactly or or pigeon hole into like specific you know there there were some no go tools before that wanted to build all kinds of apps and then they sort of like most of the customers were events right so they end up being like an events right app building platform or whatever but over time this is sort like the early days of the web where let's just see where where this goes the the most important thing is that people are fundamentally inspired to do this stuff and believe that it's not eliminating so early on when aws first launched and you could say you don't have to learn how to rack your own raid drives you don't have to like order your own dell machines you don't have to like get the 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 gonna be a thing right like you're never gonna 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 like dollar for dollar more expensive right but the things that unlocked were amazing like like flows is built on aws it didn't exist we'd have to like have a team twice as big probably right so i think right now no code visual software development is going through a similar journey where people are starting to believe like okay this is gonna be like already real things are being built like products are going up time and like hitting number one people don't even know that it's built with no tools people are creating companies and getting into yc without engineers on these no 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 that this is gonna be a huge thing gotcha and give me two no code tools that you could chat out that people should check out that you know this there's the name and here's what it does for you yeah of my favorites right now is para blah yep so i've never heard of that what 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 can come from air table from like web flow 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 the 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 that somebody built where you could take web flow blog posts go through this whole like ranking algorithm where it pulls information from like seo or whatever and then creates a an order based on popularity and puts it back into web workflow like and that is completely done without code right know you just sorta like have this diagram it's like a visual way to express that stuff and another one of my favorites is a company called voice flow 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 conditional and over time we're gonna get closer and closer to building out you know something like an airbnb or a twitter program right exactly like rebuild product tent itself right in a no tool right where you're you're doing all the logic all the database stuff all the like visual components all the kind of state changes up uploading comments a good marketing idea for you guys exactly okay great and you let them on your your block of flow you let voice flow on your block there you go that's nice of you yeah i would be like hey you need to you know look at this trademark i got a until ten years ago it's like facebook trademark face or something yeah yeah we actually did have a trademark on flow at one point and we just set it to let it go like hey it's it's very very possible y yeah but yeah it's also you know we'll kind of be a a bad move to say like you can use the workflow awesome okay great and so if somebody wants to get hold so obviously they should check out web flow if somebody wants to get a hold you where do they get more of your thoughts who should reach out to you who you're looking for 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 and i you get one up i'm mostly just on twitter so you can find me at 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 what in what context do you like to hear from people some people 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 into in touch with you what's the reason i love right now just talking about no code to as many people as possible like hearing their stories what what people have built 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 of flow it's definitely web foot dot com for so i job is your best bet i'm no longer aware of everything that's going on there and actually on principle stay out of those decisions because you know i wanna 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 wanna 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 wanna be as helpful as possible so wanna reach out for me to me around that stuff i'd love to have a conversation right thank you for coming on man i i'm a long fan of any product that's and lets other people make stuff i think that sort of building a tool that helps other people make stuff is sort of one of the more high leverage things you could do with your life and and like you said you know today a very very small segment of the population has the opportunity to make their ideas come to reality mh i know for many years i felt i'm not a programmer therefore these ideas i have they're gonna live and die in my brain yeah 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 mh and tools like web are helping with that but there's a long way to go like you know my wife my sister i wanna see them basically i've heard them so many times talk about ideas yep that to them feel like pipe dreams because the bar to making something you know on the internet is is still too high i think most people think it's very low i think it's still way too high wait and when you bring those creative people into the fray and to an even playing field you know where they can make stuff too i think you're gonna i think the world will change in in a very fundamental way and so i'm glad i'm glad you're doing what you're doing thanks shawn and by the way it's never gonna be that easy to where you're like oh i an idea and boom two hours later i have that product the hard thing is still gonna be how do you how do even quantify the idea how do you like solve that user pain you have to you're gonna 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 spin up a server how do i you know like just empower people to do their best work it's still gonna 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 yes to get this and then we started okay now there's farms and then today it's abstract away where i don't even have to think i push a button on my phone and the meal appears mh and and of course this is just gonna keep going where you know people love to cook will always cook but you don't have to right hunt farm cook in order to eat and and i think that sort of 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 gather days are over but we're still in like the farm days yep and and we're nowhere near the you know they post made error right where we push it 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 alright right on