From a narrow ICP to a wide-open market – Lessons from Webflow’s Bryant Chou on using customer empathy to get product-market fit 

 All right, so welcome to the show, Bryant.

 Since Webflow launched in 2013, the company has found massive success ever since like the original viral announcement on Hacker News. And you've kept growing by building off your own balance sheet and tapping into true customer obsession across the entire web design community. And so now you're a series C company, you know, over a hundred million a r, uh, backed by some very big names, Excel, capital g, y Combinator, um, and with over 200,000 customers now, Webflow has really established itself as the leading no-code visual development platform for freelancers, agencies, startups, enterprises.

And so, Brian, I think when people look at stories like yours, they have this tendency to assume that the road to success was smooth the entire time. Uh, but we know that's never really how company building, you know, the journey goes. And so today I wanna zoom in on those details from the early pivots you had to make, you know, to, to your path to defining product market fit.

So that people can hear the lesser told side of the story. And so to kick things off, I'd love to rewind the clock to before you co-founded Webflow. Um, can you tell us a little bit about your background, Brian, and what you were working on before you started the company?

 yeah. On, on reflection, um, I think I started, I like to say at the bottom of the stack, like I, my first job was at Qualcomm. I was working on really low level like RF software and embedded systems, and, um, started working on storage area networks at Veritas, um, which was owned by Symantec. And then slowly and slowly I just realized that I just got a lot more value building much closer to the customer.

So eventually found my way to Intuit. Um, I joined Intuit in 2008. and um, really kind of cut my teeth there in Silicon Valley, just learning about how products are built, how to talk to customers, how to develop products, uh, in the right way. Um, kind of a lost art nowadays, but, um, I've kind of found a happy home building web software, uh, at Intuit.

 And so I, you've talked before about the, what you learned at Intuit and the way that they approached customer obsession, and I think a lot of that is credited to Scott Cook, one of the co-founders. Can you share more about what that looked like inside the company? Bryant?

So, my very first day at Intuit, you know, 30 minutes of new hire orientation, welcome to the company, here's the company handbook, and then boom, we're out the door. And I was like, where are we going? And we actually, every single new hire at the time, um, did what was called a, a customer Follow me home.

 So Scott and the executive team there just thought it was just so important for, for new, new hires to just get really, really close to the customer. To the point that 30 minutes into your first day on your new job, you think you're gonna be firing up your development environment or setting up, you know, with the HR systems, no, you're actually out the door.

 So you're actually going to their house.

 actually going to their house or their home office or their office place and literally sitting down and watching them use QuickBooks. And I was like, okay, wow, this. This is not what I expected. And a few of us were just like, oh, this is probably not what I signed up for.

I just signed up to code. But you know, that particular experience kind of drilled down that it's all about the customer and never lose sight of it. Fast forward a couple years, um, into it had these concepts of idea Jams and Brad Smith, the c e o at the time, Scott Cook, they would pull together a bunch of different executives and they would have the entire company participate in these idea jams.

And they would set a general theme. It'd be like social, mobile, global, and they would just unleash the workforce on these themes. It was like, we care about these things. We don't care exactly what it looks like. We're gonna leave it up to you because you're talking to the customers, you understand our products.

You tell us what our next biggest ideas could be.

 that, that just left a huge imprint on me because you know, as you know, a early career engineer, it was just like, oh wow. Like these are execs that actually care about what we think, and it really unleashed the entrepreneurial spirit inside of me actually.

 And so what were some of the things that were said, um, in those meetings, in those idea jams that really reinforced kind of the voice of the customer.

 Well, it all sort of rooted in what problems we're looking to solve. So for example, if a team got up and presented in front of Scott, and Scott would probably interrupt you mid-sentence, he was like, okay, this all sounds great. You know, a beautiful product, great execution, but what problem are you looking to solve?

What is the customer pain? And sometimes people would have a good answer and sometimes people would come like, oh yeah, actually, you know, we might need to take a step back here. And that kind of rooted everyone in this type of customer empathy, all the way from ideation all the way through the execution phases of the product.

And those were simple questions, right? Just like, what are you building and why is it important? And what is that pain point? Um, but it really sort of drilled down, um, in all of us, uh, that everything that we're doing kind of ties back to the customer.

 Totally. And so how did you get from Intuit to then, you know, starting the idea around Webflow? I, I believe that you met your co-founder Vlad at Intuit. Is that right?

 Yep, that's right. So we met in 2008. Vlad had already been at Intuit a year or two. Uh, he's a couple years older than me. And we were both, you know, young enterprising engineers there. And we actually met because he first, uh, started working on this product called Intuit Brainstorm. And this was a idea management platform, uh, for the company.

And it was actually an internal tool. And then, um, all of a sudden, uh, it started turning into a product idea for Intuit. So there actually was an initiative to productize this idea management platform. And, um, I turned out to be the first engineer to join Vlad on it. And, uh, Set up our company's first AWS account back in 2009, um, back when it just had S3 and E C two and we brought that product to market and, uh, signed up our first customers with it.

 And had you met, I, I know, I mean, Vlad and Sergie are brothers, right? The it's you, Vlad, and sei, the three co-founders. How did you meet Sergie

 So I actually met Sergie for the very first time after I left. I had started another company called Vunga. It was, uh, a video advertising network and um, it was typical Silicon Valley 2011, you know, office in a really run down part of Soma. And Vlad actually paid me a visit and he, he, I had left Intuit, um, maybe a year by then.

 And he was, he wanted to tell me about the new company that he wanted to start, which was Web Flow. He wanted to introduce me to his brother, who he was starting it with, called Sergie. Was Vlad looking for feedback on the idea or why did he reach out to you?

 um, so he, he wanted, um, to just catch up and then also just tell me more about, let. And I had known about Webflow, but you know, it, it was just a very loose idea. And even at that point it was, it was still relatively amorphous. And, um, Sergie had just joined and they started to put more meat on the bone. And then slowly and slowly over the course of a few months, I started getting behind this idea.

I started getting, um, a little bit more well versed in what they were trying to do. And I was like, oh, okay. This is actually something that is solving a need that I have as a startup cto, as someone that really struggles building a website. Um, and it turned out to be that Sege was literally the best designer I've ever met at the time, and he still is.

And he turned out to be an incredible, incredible business partner along with Flat. So,

 You've talked a little bit about how the three of you are kind of the, the perfect trifecta of, of skillsets, of what it takes to get a company off the ground. Say a little bit more about that.

so the founder market fit was, I, I think, kind of perfect. So Vlad literally the best front end engineer I've ever worked with my life. Um, se was just like this incredibly detailed and prolific product, ui, ux designer.

 He had it all. And I think I would, you know, I think I was, and still am pretty decent at backend in infrastructure. So coupled with the fact that the three of us had a deep understanding for the problems that we were solving for and the fact that we each tried and failed at building websites for clients.

Not failed, but struggled. We just felt like there's got to be a better way to build a website in a, in 20 20, 20 12 at this time. So, um, I think the combination of the skillset and the fact that we just had, you know, such bad scar tissue and lived experiences in this particular domain, um, it gave us the motivation and it gave us the, the drive to really build webflow the way, uh, we built it.

 And so what was the kind of core product idea back at that time? Is, is it very similar to what Webflow is now, or did you start somewhere different?

 So Vlad and Sergie, I believe, wanted to build this visual abstraction over something like Jengo or Ruby on Rails. . And if you're familiar with those products, you know, these are kind of like full blown application frameworks and they were very popular at the time. But the idea is, is that you wanted to be able to build these visual abstractions over, over, you know, the concepts of compute, the concepts of backend logic, the concepts of ui, and that that didn't necessarily, um, get a lot of momentum because it was just too big. It was, again, very amorphous.

And the kind of focus of that initial effort was, was a bit all over the place. So the team started to coalesce around the idea that, hey, let's actually just solve for the segment of the visual of the development lifecycle, where the people that are involved in building for that segment are the most disenfranchised from the process. And that actually turned out to be, Web design, web development, and it was just an incredibly old school process. People, I, I'm sure you remember Todd, like Photoshop PSDs floating around of mockups of a, of a website and then you have to go find a developer to translate a P S D to HT m l and there's literal services out there called P S D to html and we're just like, okay, this is like, it's, it's it's modern web, right?

With H M O five just came out. There's gotta be a better way.

 And so there was a very early pivot in there, you know, going from sort of like the framework on top of rails, uh, you know, to to the website builder idea. And I believe actually you got, you applied to YC at that time and got rejected initially based on that original idea. Is that right?

 Yeah. So, so Vlad and Sergie got it rejected. After I joined. After I joined, we got in. Uh, no, but like, um,

 that one of the, is that, is that rejection, one of the things that sort of, that was a piece of feedback that said, Hey, we need to narrow this idea. We need to change this idea.

 I believe it was. because, you know, I, when I looked at that initial YC application, it was just too broad. It was so horizontal. It was like, we want to reimagine software development. And I don't think any of the YC partners at the time felt like we had a really firm grasp of the precise pain points that were looking to solve.

And the funny thing is, is that now the mission of the company is to bring development superpowers to everyone. So we've kind of like kind of gone full circle and like, you know, 10 years later we're still kind of talking about the same thing and trying to do the same thing. Um, but the second go around of our YC application, we're just like, okay, let's just focus on a particular segment and let's just do that really, really well.

 And so how did you make that choice of, here's the segment that we want to focus on. Here's the, here's the product we think we want to build for that segment. Talk about some of those decisions.

 So P s D to H T M L was the way, um, web freelance, web designers, they had to split 50% of their earnings to a developer to get their designs coded up. Adobe Flash had just been killed by Steve Jobs. There were no visual ides, so to speak, to build rich experiences on the web. There were some products that were out there though that were similar to Webflow.

So there was obviously Dream Weaver. Um, there was Edge Reflow, there was a company called Macaw. There was, um, there were a bunch of companies that had this vision of becoming like, you know, the, the next dream weaver effect. And at the time we felt like we were kind of going into a problem that was more or less solved or attempted to be solved, but we just had a firm belief that no one was doing it really well.

And we just had a feeling that even though these products have been out and people have been investing in it, there weren't products that we would use. So we were just like, man, we, we need to will this product into existence. And we, we set out to just really, really focus on web design. We set out to focus and ride the waves of responsive web design, of mobile, of web consolidation around HTML five and the rise of just how important design was.

We just felt like design was one of those underappreciated professions that was going to be a lot, a lot bigger. So we could kind of like. Cognizant of some of these movements and these waves and we just like threw our weight behind it.

 And so I, I, I think of you guys as having massive empathy for this user, for the freelance web designer you even mentioned like the economics and how that works for them. The, you know, the different products that they struggle with, how hard it is to do what they're trying to do. That part makes sense to me as like real product motivation.

Did you ever also say, you know, is this a big enough market? Like, you know, this is something that VCs always ask, right? And I'm always curious the difference between how VCs think about this stuff and how founders think about this stuff. How did you think about kind of market sizing once you had chosen that segment?

 Yeah, it's funny cuz like even to this day we are underestimating how big this market is and back then we for sure underestimated it and everyone else around us underestimated even more. I think the thing that we realized was we were trying to bring together two disciplines that never existed together.

And that's web design and web development. And effectively what we were building is a product to make that unicorn designer, developer, there was no market for it. And depending on how you looked at it, you know, that market size of that unicorn was zero because there weren't any unicorns. And when we kind of continued to evolve our product and we kind of developed a community behind it, we were in essence building our own market.

And now that market is huge. Now there's a lot of Webflow competitors, there's a lot of, uh, parallel products that are similar to Webflow. And you know, I would like to think that, you know, we helped, you know, mold. Mold the thinking that a product like this should exist. And I'm really happy that there's a lot of other products that people can choose from now because I think this is something that, that the world needs.

We need to lower these barriers of entry to software development. So I think at the time, you know, we got so much feedback that your product is gonna be way too complicated for designers that don't know how to code. And it's gonna be not sophisticated enough for developers. And we're

 investors? Um, mostly investors. Um, I think, I think unless you were an investor that didn't know enough about this space, for example, some of our earliest investors are not technical nor nor designers. They're the ones that are, have the biggest markups on them in the, we flow  round. So those are investors like Tim Draper, Ron Ro, uh, from Rainfall Ventures.

these are not technical or, designer. Um, they didn't have any design background, but they, they kind of just saw the, just like how passionate we were about making this happen. And I think that's, that's what kind of pushed them over the line because we actually had a lot of trouble raising. We had a lot of trouble raising in the early days.

 We couldn't put together much of a seed round at all. Um, and in some of those anchor investors in the very beginning have been just huge for.

 Wow. Okay. So you've got a ton of conviction around the problem to be solved, the user who you're solving it for, and, and this sort of just like conviction long term that this, this is going to be a big market. It doesn't exist today, but it's gonna be a big one. And so I think now we're in sort of like 2013 time, what did the first version of Webflow look like?

 Yeah, so we actually launched in March of 2013, um, what we call a technology preview. And what we did was we took the core concepts of web design and web development, and we essentially built a proof of concept of how webflow would work. And we put together what's called a webflow playground. And you actually go to it today.

It's playground.webflow.com. And we put so much energy into it. Um, everything was just super polished and the idea. With putting together that developer preview, and this was after our first YC rejection, was we wanted to kind of prove to the world that something like this could be made and that it can be useful to a broad swath of audiences, designers and developers included.

And, um, it was essentially the first version of Webflow. And, uh, we put it up on Hacker News. It was number one for more than a day, something like 850 points, uh, or up votes. And we actually got something like 30,000 beta signups just from that, just from that one, uh, launch, you know,

 And so, so this is why I see the second time that you applied, you're now in and you're

 this is before, before the second application. So we actually took the momentum from that, from that launch and from those beta signups and, and definitely put that into our second application for yc. Yeah.

 So how do you make something blow up Hacker News like that? I know it's probably, you know, you've, you've done it. I, I think a lot of probably founders have that question. Is there anything that you think really made that work?

 Well, I think the things that benefited us at that time was the algorithm was a bit more relaxed to maybe posts like this. I think it's getting more uncommon for  promotional, not promotional posts, but companies, um, originated posts to rise up the ranks like that and stay there. Um, and I think for a good reason cuz just, you know, there's sometimes, you know, the, the, the audience sort of demands it, right?

But at the time, you know, I think the things that resonated really well, Was the execution behind it, right? Like this thing was fast, this thing was powerful, the code was clean. So it kind of captured the zeitgeist of what's possible with modern web technologies today. And, you know, back in 2013, the Webflow playground, just like, there's nothing really that came close to it in terms of how like impressive it was in terms of the actual, you know, working, functioning holy cow in my, in my browser type of tool.

Right? Of course, nowadays you have like incredible products now that are built in the, in the browser. Um, but at the time there really wasn't much like it in terms of, um, the power and the sophistication. Behind it. And, and I think, you know, the Hacker News community respected that, and I think they still do, they still respect things like that?

Uh, to this day, um, I can't say our subsequent hacker news launches were as successful, right? . But, um, I think that first one, um, really had all of, all the elements.

 Yeah, I think there's something to when you show people something and they were like, wow, I did not think it was possible to do this. That does create like phenomenal word of mouth and, and real excitement, you know? I think of products that have been able to do that, so that's amazing. How did you get from playground.webflow.com to the first release of the product?

 So after um, about two weeks we got like maybe 35,000 beta signups. Um, we.

 Wait, wait list signups, right. Um, the YC application deadline was maybe two weeks away from that sometime in April. And then after we finished that, we got all of our metrics, um, and we put our YC application round two together. And that's when, you know, we started to really focus on the application actually.

So, um, we actually took a break from development and we were just like prepping for the interviews, you know, getting feedback on the applications and, you know, doing mock interviews, doing all the things that founders used to do back in the

 How, how do you prep? How do you prep for a YC interview?

 We did mock interviews. So there were actually other YC founders that would do these mock interviews.

And I remember doing a mock interview and I was like, oh man, we've done like three of these already. And so I was kind of like not on my game. And during the mock interview, the founder was like, Brian, stop touching your face or like, you know, like, look, look me in the eyes, or like, you know, you have to look present.

I'm like, oh man, this is such a grind. You know, I just wanna code. I just wanna build product. but we got in and then as soon as soon as we got in, we just started coding 12 hours a day for, you know, six days a week for the next 12 weeks.

 Got it. You know, when it comes to yc, I think, there's a couple real teachings, right? The first thing is launch early and often. The second thing is talk to customers. Talk to customers, and I get the sense that you actually went a little bit against the grain on both of those, right?

Um, like I think of Webflow as taking a long time to build. You know, not ship early and often, and I think that you guys mostly talk to yourselves, um, as the, as the ideal customer. So Will, will you talk about each of those and how your approach was a little different?

it was different. Um, I remember doing group office hours and, you know, companies in our batch were like, you know, we signed up this customer and we shipped this feature and we launched again yesterday and, um, numbers and revenue and, you know, when it was our turn to give the update and we're. We built this feature and we still haven't launched, and all the feedback was like, well, you should launch yesterday.

 Right? Um, so there's a few things, uh, to your point. The first one is we just knew that in order for Webflow to be successful, we not only had to execute near flawlessly on the technology and on the product, but we only had one window to convince people that Webflow could even exist because there were so many previous failed attempts to build something like Webflow, that the target audience were not conditioned to even welcome a tool like Webflow when we launched. we saw the same kind of feedback, just like, yeah, this tool is not going to be as powerful as they needed to be.

 even after you launched, you were still getting.

 yeah, yeah. From people that, from people that like didn't even try it. Right. So like, you know, in TechCrunch comments or on Twitter or something like that. But then as soon as they tried it and they saw like how polished everything was, how clean everything looked, how responsive, how fast everything was, and how integrated everything was.

Cuz you, you cannot just design a website in Webflow. You could also publish it and host it. You just do it in a couple clicks, right? We knew that we needed to focus on all the right details. We needed to have as many of the checkbox, all the p zeros, as many of them ready to go by the time we hit ga and.

We just knew that if we were to launch something half-baked, we're just immediately gonna be put in this bucket of tools that never could even get into the conversation. So it was just so important for us that our launch was a continuation of our playground. So super high quality bar in terms of the product.

Responsive, fast has enough features to be useful and we just wanted to make sure we clear that super, super high hurdle that we set, that super high bar that we set for ourselves because we knew that more or less, we only had one shot. Um, it took us long to to launch, but we did launch before demo day.

We got it out there. We got some early revenue and. I suppose at the time we're glad that we took our time, but also we also just sprinted. Uh, we were already working so hard, there was no way that we can, you know, spend more time, uh, waiting. Like we, we did everything we could to launch as quickly as we could have.

 and so on the talking to customers part, like I know that you are all, all three co-founders, very customer centric, right? And it goes back to the Intuit days that we talked about. And I know that you talked to lots of customers nowadays, but I think back at that time you were like, Sergi is the customer, right?

So, so talk about that and decision to build something for your.

So, oh, Sege love this guy. So he's not just a really quirky guy. He's not just hilarious. He's a decent ping pong player, but he also is someone that, um, knows a little bit about code. So he'll, he knows the difference between display in line and display block, right? In CS house.

 And our hypothesis was that there's a lot of designers in the world like him. There's not, probably not like that many and they're probably not the majority, but we focused on that particular niche because we felt like they could become the unicorns of the future with Webflow.

And so everything that we did, we just wanted to make sure that it was like, okay, does Sergie need this? Can, does Sergie need, um, multiple background images? Does he need border radiuss? What type of gradients? How many stops in the gradients does he need? So like, we never built a product spec. Because we just operated off of our intuition for what Sege needed, and we operated off of speed.

And just like having a super high octane in the early days where we would come up with a product idea in the morning and ship it by the afternoon, and that level of velocity was, was required in the very beginning because effectively we're trying to catch up to the decades of HTML five and c s s technology that was represented in code.

But we had to apply a visual interface on top of all of that. So like very quickly we got up to like 150 CSS declarations that were supported in Webflow. We got up to all these different types of easing animations and all these things that now designers geek up about. And we knew that some of those products might not get used a lot, but we knew that designers cared about them.

I'm always interested. moments of validation, like this thing is starting to work. And so you had some early validation that Sergio liked it you a big point of validation on the Hacker News launch announcement. And then how about ga? Like when did you first start to get the validation from customers?

 I would say about a week into our launch. Um, , all the founders were doing customer support tickets and, um, most, 90%, 95% of the tickets were, Hey, I ran, ran into a bug or, you know, exception got thrown. And every so often we'd get a love letter, right? And for example, we got a love letter [00:31:00] from this user, Leo Zor. He was based in Germany, and he was like, I have been a web developer for 15 years. I've been waiting for something like Wefl to come about. Let me know how I can support you. I'm happy to give you more feedback, but I am moving my entire agency operations over to Webflow

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Bryant Chou, co-founder and founding CTO of Webflow, rewinds the clock to the early days of building his company, sharing lessons on how to hone in on an ideal customer profile and frameworks to collect customer feedback. 