#33 - Pioneering The No-Code Movement

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.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  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 really, really tough. What we thought was going to bring in income, we didn't have anything coming in at this point, and when you have a family and rent and car payments and all this stuff and kids need to go to school. Then just stuff started falling apart. Couldn't get a trademark, one of the co-founders got less motivated, day job got a lot more interesting.

• 0:44Speaker 00

  I think we had raised like 300K and we were really struggling and went to Paul Graham and said, "This is really hard on us." I was waking up every morning with panic attacks. My wife was like, "This is not..."

• 0:56Shaan Puri?

  Healthy, right.

• 0:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, "Why? You wanted this? Is this what startups are about, right?"

• 1:01Shaan Puri?

  They've got 75,000 paying users. They just raised a monster round of investment, 72 million, Series A.

• 1:09Speaker 00

  Those other website builders are kind of like iMovie and then Webflow's like Final Cut Pro. It just feels like the gold rush or like the pioneer era of the space where with the very, very beginning of it, sort of like the web in 1999.

• 1:21Speaker 02

  No technology in history has ever spread so fast.

• 1:24Speaker 00

  Products are going up on Product Hunt and hitting number one. You don't even know that it's built with Noco tools.

• 1:29Shaan Puri?

  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 away 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.

• 1:45Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:56Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 1:57Speaker 00

  We want to be a foundational company.

• 2:08Shaan Puri?

  Five million is not enough. Ten million. Fifteen million. Twenty million dollars.

• 2:11Speaker 03

  Hundred million dollars.

• 2:12Speaker 04

  Almost a half a billion in revenues. Eight hundred fifty million dollars.

• 2:14Shaan Puri?

  One or two people in a bedroom actually the threats to these like giant multimillion dollar companies because you have creativity and you have nothing to lose.

• 2:23Shaan Puri?

  Add another zero to that price, buddy. Add two more zeros.

• 2:30Speaker 03

  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 businesses that we find today. I wanted to know the real stories with all the details, like, how did you get your first hundred customers? What did it feel like when shit hit the fan? I ask them, how'd 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.

• 3:12Shaan Puri?

  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, 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 who don't know, so Vlad's the 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?

• 3:43Speaker 00

  Definitely the last year has been a lot more hype trainy.

• 3:46Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, but it wasn't always like that.

• 3:48Speaker 00

  Not at all.

• 3:49Shaan Puri?

  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... 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.

• 4:24Speaker 00

  Who 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 started solo a couple of times. You know, incorporated, try to build this thing based on .NET. You know, we're looking at a Windows machine right now. Then the company that I could sort of based all the technology on went out of business.

• 4:46Shaan Puri?

  Always good.

• 4:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. And kind of gave up. Then I got married, started working into it, sort of needed a real job.

• 4:53Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 4:53Speaker 00

  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 of co-founders. Tried to start it up. This was like the web 2.0 days, you know, the heyday of like startups starting to happen, like the Google Maps era where you can actually build something in the browser.

• 5:12Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 5:13Speaker 00

  Y C 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 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.

• 5:33Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 5:33Speaker 00

  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.

• 5:44Shaan Puri?

  And was it the same idea each of those times or it's just the same name and you're.

• 5:48Speaker 00

  Same name. Generally the same idea, but it sort of started on the backend and moved more and more towards the frontend. So the first idea was really about how do you automate backend development and make it visual.

• 5:59Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 6:00Speaker 00

  And then over the years developed into more what you see.

• 6:03Shaan Puri?

  And so if somebody's never seen Webflow, how, what's the simple way you describe it? Like, how should one friend tell another friend about this?

• 6:09Speaker 00

  Seven years ago, we used to describe it as like a website builder. You know, it was sort of like wix weebly.

• 6:13Shaan Puri?

  Right. You need a website and you don't know how to code, use this.

• 6:16Speaker 00

  Exactly. But it ended up that wasn't a good description. So now the kinds of things people build with Webflow are just entire businesses. 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 flair. 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.

• 6:52Shaan Puri?

  So what can it do that a Wix, a Weebly, a Squarespace doesn't do, right? Cause those are good if you want to make a out of the box thing where it's like, here's my portfolio. Here's my storefront with just like a contact me button. Where does Webflow go deeper?

• 7:06Speaker 00

  So Webflow is essentially an abstraction layer over HTML, CSS and JavaScript. So people start from scratch. Wix and Weebly, 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. Webflow is the first program that can actually take those designs and enable a designer to implement any one of those.

• 7:37Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 7:38Speaker 00

  You know, like custom, super, super custom layouts.

• 7:41Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 7:41Speaker 00

  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.

• 7:47Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 7:48Speaker 00

  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 of years of Product Hunt launches, above anything else, like if a visual software development tool is being used, it's probably Webflow.

• 8:11Shaan Puri?

  Interesting.

• 8:12Speaker 00

  So it's either code or it's Webflow. Like you usually won't see like a Squarespace site being like number one on Product Hunt.

• 8:18Shaan Puri?

  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.

• 8:26Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 8:26Shaan Puri?

  To work on this. And I kind of know I'm probably not going to keep going with it.

• 8:29Speaker 00

  Right.

• 8:29Shaan Puri?

  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 Webflow 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 that's a not a great thing to do at the same time as you're starting a startup. And so when did you ultimately get the timing right?

• 8:56Speaker 00

  Okay, I'll rewind back a little bit to the third time. So this is that Intuit, 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 and

• 9:08Shaan Puri?

  It's a good name.

• 9:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's, I was really proud of it. There's another company called Webflow back in 1999.

• 9:13Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 9:13Speaker 00

  And I guess they let the domain go to like collections or something. Somebody picked it up and it was relatively cheap.

• 9:19Shaan Puri?

  So one night you were just looking, you saw, oh my God, webflow.

• 9:21Speaker 00

  No, it wasn't available. It was like, it was for sale for like 10 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, I actually created some fake accounts.

• 9:38Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 9:39Speaker 00

  To send some bids. Exactly, lowball bids and then ended up picking it up for something like four grand, 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.

• 9:52Shaan Puri?

  That's a pretty ballsy move to, you know, for like out of college or you're in, are you in college at the time or you're out of?

• 9:57Speaker 00

  I was still in college.

• 9:58Shaan Puri?

  You're in college at the time and to buy like, who buys a $4,000 domain when they're in college?

• 10:03Speaker 00

  I mean, I knew, I was so, and you'll see, I was so attached to the name that like in, in this third attempt, we, 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, 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. Could use the name.

• 10:44Shaan Puri?

  It didn't feel right.

• 10:44Speaker 00

  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

• 10:52Shaan Puri?

  Other people.

• 10:52Speaker 00

  Side income, et cetera, while working at Intuit. And part of it was working with my brother who was a designer and he was working at a skate shop and still kind of going to school in San Diego. 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.

• 11:13Shaan Puri?

  Out of nowhere.

• 11:14Speaker 00

  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.

• 11:26Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, that literally seems like a sign from God. Okay, in your mailbox, here's a trademark, go forth and conquer.

• 11:33Speaker 00

  Exactly. And I was like, I was already resigned to the fact this was never gonna happen, you know, this might be an agency and at that time, I already thought that Weebly was winning and like.

• 11:43Shaan Puri?

  Right. It does seem like, when was this like sort of last attempt? What year was this now?

• 11:47Speaker 00

  This is 2012.

• 11:48Shaan Puri?

  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 gonna do it anyways and just see what happens?

• 12:01Speaker 00

  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, I thought that it was gonna work at Intuit for like another seven years at least. And then I saw this video early-ish in 2012 called Inventing on Principle by this guy Brett Victor. And it was all about this concept of direct manipulation. But more broadly, it was like that he asked this 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 Ink that same night. It took me like two hours. The next morning I put in my notice at Intuit.

• 12:43Shaan Puri?

  Wait, wait, so what's in this video? What is the?

• 12:45Speaker 00

  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? Or you're making animation, right? If, uh, one way to think about animations, 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 humans to understand.

• 13:25Speaker 00

  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.

• 13:37Shaan Puri?

  So he's calling that direct manipulation, that's like the interface.

• 13:40Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 13:40Shaan Puri?

  Not like direct me manipulating you into buying this coffee from me.

• 13:44Speaker 00

  So, 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 and 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 HTML CSS, I'm hitting save. I'm going to this other browser, I'm sort of like refreshing, even if something auto refresher 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.

• 14:16Shaan Puri?

  See it live.

• 14:17Speaker 00

  Change 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.

• 14:31Shaan Puri?

  And who is this guy who did this video? He's, uh, is he dead? Is he alive?

• 14:34Speaker 00

  No, he's still alive.

• 14:35Shaan Puri?

  Did you reach out and be like, hey, bro, this video made me quit my job and start Weblog?

• 14:39Speaker 00

  And there's actually a bunch of other companies that started because of that video.

• 14:43Shaan Puri?

  No way.

• 14:43Speaker 00

  It's incredible.

• 14:44Shaan Puri?

  What else do you know?

• 14:45Speaker 00

  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.

• 14:51Shaan Puri?

  Wow.

• 14:52Speaker 00

  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 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.

• 15:07Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 15:07Speaker 00

  And, and for me, that was the video that made me question like, am I doing what I ultimately want to do with my life?

• 15:12Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 15:13Speaker 00

  And it just so happened that his principle around creating direct manipulation tools was something that really, really resonated with me. So I got a sort of a double whammy from that video in terms of inspiration.

• 15:25Shaan Puri?

  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. See for yourself at aka.ms/thehustle. Again, that's aka.ms/thehustle to check out Teams brought to you by Microsoft. I love it. Microsoft, that is a trillion dollar company, right?

• 16:10Shaan Puri?

  We're talking about my first million. They're, 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.

• 16:31Shaan Puri?

  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.

• 16:35Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 16:36Shaan Puri?

  Pretty much the next day.

• 16:36Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 16:37Shaan Puri?

  What did you tell your wife? What was her reaction?

• 16:40Speaker 00

  Uh, this was, uh, well, of course I told my wife after I got the trademark certificate. I think it was this four months before we already like started the, all these conversations around what would it take? Like, would we move somewhere else? Cause you kind of had to move to the, to the Bay area at that point to go to like Y C and things like that. We already started talking about what would it take to apply? 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 going to be something that I'm 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.

• 17:21Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 17:22Speaker 00

  Sort of like, all right, we gotta do this.

• 17:23Shaan Puri?

  But those, 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?

• 17:30Speaker 00

  So 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, right? That's what it seemed like. You know, we're gonna do this, we're gonna spend a month making a Kickstarter video and make whatever, 300K to

• 17:48Shaan Puri?

  Fund the next?

• 17:48Speaker 00

  Fund the next like year and a half or whatever. And 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 imagined that it was just gonna be myself and my brother, like running this company and, you know, building a product for ourselves and kind of using it to, to make websites and empower other people to make websites for other clients or whatever. And so it was like the sort of rose colored glasses of, you know, we definitely got this, right?

• 18:11Shaan Puri?

  Right. That's not rose colored glasses. That's like rose eye drops that you put directly in your eye. Like that is so crazy.

• 18:18Speaker 00

  Right.

• 18:19Shaan Puri?

  But you believed it and it actually.

• 18:20Speaker 00

  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, it definitely didn't turn out as rosy, not even close, but.

• 18:32Shaan Puri?

  So what happened? So you, you do the move, you put in your notice?

• 18:35Speaker 00

  Move. So we move in April, then I was still working into it, sort of like interim.

• 18:40Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 18:40Speaker 00

  I started, I shifted my hours to start at like 6:30 in the morning and I left at 2, 2:30 and I would work on Webflow from like 2:45 to like 7.

• 18:49Shaan Puri?

  Right. And they knew what was up or, or they were like?

• 18:52Speaker 00

  They, uh.

• 18:54Shaan Puri?

  Vlad's getting up early nowadays.

• 18:55Speaker 00

  I just sort of like negotiated with my, with my team. It was sort of a small team.

• 18:59Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 18:59Speaker 00

  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.

• 19:07Shaan Puri?

  Different hours.

• 19:08Speaker 00

  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.

• 19:21Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 19:21Speaker 00

  And that's when I realized like, I'm not. I'm not gonna 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 convinced 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.

• 19:44Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 19:44Speaker 00

  It essentially took all the vast majority of the money that we had to incorporate. I think that was like 10 grand, then put in another 15 grand into this video. Got like, you know, you Google.

• 19:55Shaan Puri?

  Nice Kickstarter video.

• 19:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. And then two months later, what we wanted to do was like apply to Kickstarter, have like that big success, then apply to Y C and then use the Kickstarter successes like the Y C kind of.

• 20:07Shaan Puri?

  Why'd you want to go to Y C? Sounds like you were pretty, even from early on, you were like, alright. Then we applied to Y C, that was like a benchmark.

• 20:13Speaker 00

  It's just, yeah, it was just something, you know, I think I was kind of sold by the cachet or the brand or seeing like other companies get into Y C and just explode and go into the stratosphere. Like sort of saw that as a rite of passage.

• 20:25Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 20:25Speaker 00

  And it actually hit me really hard when the first time we applied and we didn't get in.

• 20:29Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 20:30Speaker 00

  I was sort of like, alright, this is never gonna happen.

• 20:32Shaan Puri?

  So how many times have you applied in your life to Y C at this point? Um, or total?

• 20:37Speaker 00

  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.

• 20:49Shaan Puri?

  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 Y C attempt. What, what happened?

• 20:59Speaker 00

  Actually, let me rewind just a little bit, like with the Kickstarter thing.

• 21:02Shaan Puri?

  Yep.

• 21:02Speaker 00

  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 like, hey Kickstarter, we need your help Kickstarter, etc. And then we received a notification from Kickstarter that we don't support SaaS services.

• 21:18Shaan Puri?

  Right. Yeah, they only like creative projects that are like not a.

• 21:21Speaker 00

  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.

• 21:28Shaan Puri?

  So you have this really nice $15,000 Kickstarter video still? Is this up on YouTube?

• 21:32Speaker 00

  It's not. It's sort of, it's like internal to Webflow, but 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 gonna 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.

• 22:13Speaker 00

  And it was like, you know, we didn't have good health insurance. We sort of switched to like catastrophic health insurance thinking, you know, nothing's gonna happen. It's like, 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 is 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 had to have that surgery. You, you start all over again. So Oh no. Exactly. So then we were at a point where like, okay, we're completely out of money. We're talking about getting our jobs back. Like Sergey wanted to move back to San Diego. I wanted to move back to Sacramento.

• 22:55Speaker 00

  And we gave each other six weeks of like, what can we do to, it was like the, the bare minimum on 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 dot webflow.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 You don't need to be a developer. Exactly. Like it'll generate code for you. And that finally, like we applied to YC again with that as a, a proof. A proof point that, hey, there's might be something here. Cause at that point we had like 25,000 people on our waitlist.

• 23:37Speaker 00

  Mostly from Hacker News and these days it'd 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 into this interview. Completely nervous, you know, we like had no idea what we were doing. We did all this interview prep.

• 23:55Shaan Puri?

  And for those who don't know, the Y C interview is 10 minutes.

• 23:58Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 23:58Shaan Puri?

  Rapid fire. They're gonna make a decision after 10 minutes.

• 24:01Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 24:02Shaan Puri?

  Of whether you're in or you're out.

• 24:03Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 24:03Shaan Puri?

  And, you know, I could do 10 minutes of like small talk.

• 24:07Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 24:07Shaan Puri?

  And so there is no small talk in this. So what's that interview like?

• 24:10Speaker 00

  It was really intense. I mean, we walk into this room and it's Paul Buchheit, who's the creator of Gmail, and a bunch of other people. We had no idea who they are. They are some new partners.

• 24:19Shaan Puri?

  Do they even do intros or they just go?

• 24:20Speaker 00

  No, they just go. It's like, it's like boom, boom, boom. And it felt like an interrogation, right? Like, why, why would this work when other, you know, when so many others have tried and haven't done, blah, blah, blah? 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.

• 24:37Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 24:37Speaker 00

  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.

• 24:54Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 24:54Speaker 00

  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 was around noon and 6 P M. The format is they call you if you're in, or they send you 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 a 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 PB, the Gmail guy, and says, guys are in.

• 25:38Speaker 00

  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 moon. Like Brian and Sergio, 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 start to set up dinner.

• 25:52Shaan Puri?

  Right, baby, we did it.

• 25:53Speaker 00

  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 in downtown Mountain View. But the movie's not over, so we just like decide to, 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 signaled to Brian Sergi to step outside. And you know, this is like the biggest roller coaster.

• 26:31Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 26:32Speaker 00

  Thirty 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 a YC, why I wouldn't accept us.

• 26:43Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 26:44Speaker 00

  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.

• 27:02Shaan Puri?

  You're gonna go meet him in person.

• 27:03Speaker 00

  Let's just go try to meet him in person. It was already after six 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.

• 27:20Shaan Puri?

  And so did you ever talk to him and be like, hey, what was the deal?

• 27:23Speaker 00

  Apparently, apparently, they have like a board.

• 27:27Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 27:27Speaker 00

  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. So.

• 27:39Shaan Puri?

  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.

• 27:51Speaker 00

  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.

• 27:59Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 27:59Speaker 00

  Not the case at all. So we go through YC and, you know, go into demo day, you know, we struggled.

• 28:06Shaan Puri?

  What are the numbers like at demo day? Because you have to stand up on stage and say, we're killing it.

• 28:10Speaker 00

  But yeah, I think we said something like, we had 25,000 users, not nearly all of them were active. We had this like stat that we're ramen profitable, which was barely true.

• 28:19Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 28:20Speaker 00

  Like, we're making maybe two, three grand or something like that. But, you know, with three founders, one of that, like, I had kids and family.

• 28:26Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 28:27Speaker 00

  That was.

• 28:27Shaan Puri?

  Ramen profitable, but we don't eat lunch or dinner.

• 28:30Speaker 00

  If we lived in like, you know. Backwoods Russia or something.

• 28:33Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 28:35Speaker 00

  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, you know, web specific product. Cause in 2012.

• 28:44Shaan Puri?

  Mobile is everything.

• 28:45Speaker 00

  In 2013, mobile was everything. Exactly. So all these investors told us like, what are you doing?

• 28:50Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 28:50Speaker 00

  There's like, what's your mobile strategy? Why are you?

• 28:52Shaan Puri?

  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?

• 28:58Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 28:59Shaan Puri?

  And in my head, what I was really thinking was, why don't they just do this to make apps? Why, why isn't that the case?

• 29:04Speaker 00

  It's a hard thing to, essentially we're all in on the web platform, right? HTML, CSS, JavaScript, et cetera. 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 away HTML CSS. We knew nothing about mobile.

• 29:36Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 29:36Speaker 00

  Like not a single person.

• 29:37Shaan Puri?

  Should there be a mobile flow? Should there be a web flow for mobile out there?

• 29:41Speaker 00

  Yes, yes. There are a ton of them that try. But I think, and a few 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 web flow. Like we already can compile to progressive web apps.

• 30:02Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 30:02Speaker 00

  Uh, but then they appear like full on apps in the, on your home screen.

• 30:07Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 30:07Speaker 00

  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, uh, it's, it's good enough.

• 30:15Shaan Puri?

  You can't do push notifications, right?

• 30:17Speaker 00

  On Android, you can.

• 30:18Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 30:19Speaker 00

  And, and there's a lot of pressure for iOS to, to add that. So I think that, that's why, that's what I mean by like, we kind of get to, to wait.

• 30:26Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 30:27Speaker 00

  Until more and more of this develops.

• 30:28Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 30:29Speaker 00

  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.

• 30:34Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 30:35Speaker 00

  Use case as well.

• 30:35Shaan Puri?

  Okay, so we're going back. So you're at YC, you're not crushing it. You get a demo day. At demo day, our investors flocking to you because if you haven't been to demo day, it's like a meat market.

• 30:45Speaker 00

  Right.

• 30:45Shaan Puri?

  Where you got these startups who stand up on stage. You get, I think, one minute now or something like that on stage?

• 30:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, two minutes.

• 30:50Shaan Puri?

  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.

• 31:01Speaker 00

  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.

• 31:08Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 31:09Speaker 00

  And we thought, you know, we're going to get hundreds or something like that, but.

• 31:12Shaan Puri?

  You're checking your phone and.

• 31:13Speaker 00

  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, or like it's a social type of dynamic where.

• 31:29Shaan Puri?

  Heard mentality.

• 31:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, once they know others are, or the window's closing. So we had like almost, 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 thinking, okay, another, another day of like going into these, you know, boardrooms and.

• 31:47Shaan Puri?

  Were you really? What is that like? So you wake up?

• 31:50Speaker 00

  Like my wife was like, this is not.

• 31:52Shaan Puri?

  Healthy, right.

• 31:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, why? Do you wanted this?

• 31:58Speaker 00

  Like, is this what startups are about, right? It was even worse than like the times when, you know, one of our daughters would go through surgery and we're running out of money or whatever. Like it felt a lot worse. I was getting like cold sores almost every week. It was like super, super stressful. So we went to Paul Graham and we're like, and he said, look, there's three of you. You have 300 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 just told all of the investors we were talking to, like, hey, we're.

• 32:31Shaan Puri?

  We're not raising.

• 32:31Speaker 00

  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, 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.

• 32:46Shaan Puri?

  That is the fundraising trick.

• 32:47Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 32:47Shaan Puri?

  Which is, we don't need money anymore.

• 32:49Speaker 00

  Right.

• 32:50Shaan Puri?

  Well, just take some, take some from me.

• 32:52Speaker 00

  Yeah. So that, that worked out, but then what we thought was, you know, we had like these 30 plus thousand people on our waitlist 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. We can, 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,

• 33:37Speaker 00

  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's sometimes called like default alive.

• 33:51Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 33:51Speaker 00

  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.

• 34:00Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 34:00Speaker 00

  And that's what we did for the next like.

• 34:02Shaan Puri?

  And so what did 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 and the team stay focused? What did you guys focus on? What did you guys celebrate at that time?

• 34:16Speaker 00

  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.

• 34:24Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 34:24Speaker 00

  So we're a lot more like that, like, let's get this next thing out. Let's get

• 34:27Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 34:27Speaker 00

  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.

• 34:37Shaan Puri?

  Gotcha.

• 34:38Speaker 00

  Uh, until like.

• 34:38Shaan Puri?

  The goal was make the product better in that case.

• 34:41Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 34:42Shaan Puri?

  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.

• 34:47Speaker 00

  Yes, exactly.

• 34:47Shaan Puri?

  That always, I've done that and that doesn't work. But in your case, it actually kind of worked.

• 34:52Speaker 00

  I think over, 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.

• 35:05Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 35:06Speaker 00

  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, that designers are going to be like proud to work on.

• 35:28Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 35:28Speaker 00

  And it worked out for us. But like, yeah, usually I don't.

• 35:32Shaan Puri?

  Usually, when you say that statement about like, you know,

• 35:35Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 35:35Shaan Puri?

  we just need to work on this feature, that'll solve our growth problems, you're actually circling the drain at that point.

• 35:40Speaker 00

  And 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 are trying to game them and everything. Over time, it was mostly the product that led to growth.

• 36:00Shaan Puri?

  And so what does that mean? That means you see most of your traffic coming from word of mouth, SEO? Where do you actually grow?

• 36:06Speaker 00

  Right now, most of it is more than 60% is word of mouth. We're getting just people like searching for Webflow on, 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.

• 36:17Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 36:18Speaker 00

  Things like that. But the vast majority still comes from people talking about it.

• 36:21Shaan Puri?

  That's great. And so when did things start to really heat up and things started to accelerate faster?

• 36:27Speaker 00

  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. Now it happens a lot less. But it was enough that we sort of, you know, grew a, a certain percentage per month for like years. And it wasn't, you know, 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,

• 37:07Speaker 00

  Cumulative in the same rate over over time. It's actually pretty hard to maintain the same rate.

• 37:13Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 37:13Speaker 00

  As the numbers grow.

• 37:14Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 37:14Speaker 00

  But we've been able to do that. And it's just been kind of slow and steady wins the race.

• 37:19Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 37:20Speaker 00

  Well, not slow, but like not not like hyper fast, but steady.

• 37:25Shaan Puri?

  Right. And here in Silicon Valley, not hyper fast feels like molasses.

• 37:29Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 37:30Shaan Puri?

  It feels slow, just because you'll see things popping up. So, so if you didn't catch the story, you basically in 2004, five, you're like, I had this idea. And then you false 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 it-ness like you had with this business. Like, I would have quit 10 to 12 times.

• 38:03Speaker 00

  Right.

• 38:04Shaan Puri?

  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?

• 38:12Speaker 00

  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.

• 38:23Shaan Puri?

  Okay.

• 38:23Speaker 00

  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 want to be around like 50 years from now.

• 38:38Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 38:38Speaker 00

  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 gotta, you gotta be like grinding all the time, etc. We're more around, how 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 big focus on like balance and culture and.

• 39:17Speaker 00

  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 one hundred and seventy five total people over those seven years. We have one hundred and fifty five now. We've had like

• 39:30Shaan Puri?

  That's incredible.

• 39:31Speaker 00

  Ten or twelve leave, like seven of those to start new companies. Three of them got into Y C.

• 39:35Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 39:36Speaker 00

  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 verticalized solutions. You have to get all those core foundations right so that it's 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. 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 going to expand on this.

• 40:21Speaker 00

  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 we have like this sort of early on, we have the tendency to get everything completely perfect before we launch, but thankfully Y C like hammered that out of us. Yeah, you gotta like launch, launch, launch and get get things out. And, you know, you learn a lot from being in market.

• 40:41Shaan Puri?

  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. 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.

• 41:14Speaker 00

  And sometimes it's not just what's wrong with it. My favorite story, it's all about Y C about the value that they added was, you know, I was a freelance web designer. I was working with my brother. I I kind of thought I knew what what we needed or what other people might be. willing to pay for. So when we got into Y C 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 one on one, right? Who would pay for this? And Y C 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,

• 41:55Speaker 00

  they're one of the more like 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 like 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 A R.

• 42:31Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 42:31Speaker 00

  Which was, you know, for me, a huge surprise. It was like a humbling moment to think like, hey, let, let users and the market and customers decide.

• 42:39Shaan Puri?

  They'll tell you what's right and what's wrong.

• 42:41Speaker 00

  Exactly, exactly.

• 42:43Shaan Puri?

  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 sounded like to me, one of your superpowers is that you're not impatient, which I mean, 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, do you drive the speed limits? Like what's your, does your life mirror that too? Or you have some adrenaline junkie in you?

• 43:08Speaker 00

  I definitely don't have an adrenaline junkie. 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. Uh, you know, it's just, and it was kind of in some situations. It's like really pretentious, right? Oh, I can't do certain things or whatever.

• 43:40Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 43:40Speaker 00

  Especially at kids' birthday parties. That's when it's the most.

• 43:43Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 43:45Speaker 00

  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.

• 43:55Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 43:55Speaker 00

  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 rituals. There's nothing, I don't like wake up every morning and work out and meditate and all that.

• 44:18Shaan Puri?

  Right. The Silicon Valley routine, which now takes like 16 hours.

• 44:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly.

• 44:23Shaan Puri?

  Per day.

• 44:24Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 44:25Shaan Puri?

  So you now have the company's at like 150 people. Do you have like a CEO coach? Do you have like an exec coach?

• 44:30Speaker 00

  Yep. I've worked with a coach for a year and a half now. It's been really, really awesome.

• 44:34Shaan Puri?

  And tell me about it.

• 44:35Speaker 00

  So my coach's name is Michael and the biggest thing that 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 are like a 10x sort of impact to web flow or to me personally or to my family versus doing 10 things that, you know, add up to that same amount. It's just.

• 45:04Shaan Puri?

  How'd you make that shift? Is there an exercise you did or you're just more aware of it?

• 45:08Speaker 00

  Honestly, it 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 or whatever?

• 45:31Shaan Puri?

  More, more, more.

• 45:32Speaker 00

  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.

• 45:40Shaan Puri?

  I'm reading that right now.

• 45:41Speaker 00

  And this, like the book that essentially. Again, essentially, define my leadership principles, which is a book called Leaders Eat Last by Simon Sinek. I read that like three more times.

• 45:52Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 45:52Speaker 00

  So I I've been focusing a lot more on sort of reabsorbing the things that have been the most value add to me, rather than trying to get a lot more information.

• 46:01Shaan Puri?

  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.

• 46:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, I did have that, like, I think a couple of 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, like, I'm gonna listen to music at 2X speed, too.

• 46:28Shaan Puri?

  You've ruined life. 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, I 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. Don't have enough time. I'm gonna hyper, I'm gonna go in hyperspeed to try to essentially catch up. And it's sort of like a FOMO driven thing.

• 46:52Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 46:52Shaan Puri?

  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 2Xers out there, I encourage you to do the other way, because it's really helped me.

• 47:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, I, I think I've, 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, 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, et cetera. 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.

• 48:02Speaker 00

  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's not growing. At the speed at which, you know, this like cruise, 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. Like their product that have different needs than even like growth needs, right? They're like, you would fail as Uber or Lyft if you didn't grow that fast.

• 48:31Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 48:32Speaker 00

  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 they have the resources to grow, even if it's slower. It adds up to to being more beneficial in the long term.

• 48:48Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 48:48Speaker 00

  So I I think every 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.

• 48:58Shaan Puri?

  Right. And so how do you feel about all these other no code tools? Is there anything that you really like that you're like, oh, this 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?

• 49:10Speaker 00

  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, finally, people who are makers, creators, builders, entrepreneurs, they have fewer barriers to to be able to say, I 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.

• 49:32Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 49:33Speaker 00

  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. Like Webflow is primarily used like marketing teams. And people are now starting to tie it with Zapier and like Integromat and all these like backend tools. And start to build like entire products and services, like Bubble, that ties a lot of these things together. To me, it just feels like the 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 that kind of look like toys to a lot of people who are like professional in the industry. You know, not a lot is possible yet.

• 50:16Speaker 00

  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, 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 0.33 or 0.1, 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.

• 50:58Speaker 00

  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 Fly out, yeah. Exactly. Or, or pigeonhole into like specific, you know, there were, there were some no code tools before that wanted to build all kinds of apps. And then they sort of, like most of their customers were events. Right. So they ended up being like an event Right. 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, where this goes. The, the most important thing is that people are fundamentally inspired to do this stuff and believe that it's not a limiting thing.

• 51:38Speaker 00

  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 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, you, 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 is built on AWS. Right. If 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,

• 52:22Speaker 00

  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 code 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, that this is going to be a huge thing.

• 52:51Shaan Puri?

  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.

• 52:58Speaker 00

  Yeah. One of my favorites right now is Parabola. So

• 53:02Shaan Puri?

  I've never heard of that. What does it do?

• 53:03Speaker 00

  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 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, 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 a, an order based on popularity and puts it back into Webflow.

• 53:45Speaker 00

  Like, 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 Voice Flow, which is a visual way to build Alexa apps and like Siri apps.

• 53:59Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 53:59Speaker 00

  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 a Twitter.

• 54:20Shaan Puri?

  Programs that way.

• 54:21Speaker 00

  Exactly. Like rebuild product tons itself.

• 54:24Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 54:24Speaker 00

  In a no-code 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, uploading comments.

• 54:33Shaan Puri?

  Sounds like a good marketing idea for you guys.

• 54:34Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 54:36Shaan Puri?

  Okay, great. And you let them on your, your block of flow. You let Voice Flow on your block?

• 54:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, there you go.

• 54:42Shaan Puri?

  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.

• 54:49Speaker 00

  It's like Facebook trademarking face or something?

• 54:51Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 54:52Speaker 00

  We actually did have a trademark on flow at one point and we just decided to let it go. Like, A, it's, it's

• 54:58Shaan Puri?

  It's not gonna be forcible.

• 54:59Speaker 00

  SEO. But yeah, it's also, you know, would kind of be a, a bad move to say like, you can't use the word flow.

• 55:06Shaan Puri?

  Awesome. Okay, great. And so if somebody wants to get ahold of you, so obviously they said, check out Webflow. Somebody wants to get ahold of you, where do they get more of your thoughts? Who should reach out to you? Who are you looking for to hear from? This is your chance to give people a chance to connect with you after this.

• 55:20Speaker 00

  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 at CallMeVlad. Yeah, that's where I share a lot of my thoughts, sometimes way too many thoughts.

• 55:34Shaan Puri?

  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 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?

• 55:46Speaker 00

  I love, right now, just talking about no code to as many people as possible. Like, hearing their stories, what, 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/for-sidesjob 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 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, around that stuff, I'd love to have a conversation.

• 56:30Shaan Puri?

  Right. Thank you for coming on, man. I am a longtime 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 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. 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

• 57:14Shaan Puri?

  translating my ideas in 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, 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.

• 57:38Speaker 00

  Way too high.

• 57:38Shaan Puri?

  And when you bring those creative people into the fray, into an even playing field, you know, where they can make stuff too, I think you're gonna, I think the world will change in a very fundamental way. And so I'm glad, I'm glad you're doing what you're doing.

• 57:51Speaker 00

  Thanks, Sean. 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 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 backend piece we can get rid of. So you don't have to think of all the incidental complexity of, 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.

• 58:28Shaan Puri?

  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 abstracted away where I don't even have to think. I push a button on my phone and the meal appears. And, 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, 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 gatherer days are over, but we're still in like the farm days. Yep. And, and we're nowhere near the, you know, the Postmates era. Right, right, right.

• 59:13Shaan Puri?

  Where you 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. All right, right on.