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

Todd: All right, so welcome to the show, Bryant.

Bryant: Thanks Todd. I'm stoked to be here.

Todd: 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?

Bryant: 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.

Todd: 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.

Bryant: 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.

You're actually

Todd: So you're actually going to their house.

Bryant: 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.

Todd: Oh, that's

Bryant: 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.

Todd: 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.

Bryant: 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.

Todd: 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?

Bryant: 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.

Todd: 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

Bryant: 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.

Todd: 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?

Bryant: 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,

Todd: 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.

Bryant: 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.

Todd: 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?

Bryant: 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.

Todd: 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?

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

Todd: 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.

Bryant: 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.

Todd: 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.

Bryant: 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.

Todd: 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?

Bryant: 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

Todd: coming from? Mostly

Bryant: 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.

Bryant: 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.

Todd: 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?

Bryant: 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,

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

Bryant: 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.

Todd: 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?

Bryant: 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.

Todd: 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?

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

Todd: wait list signups.

Bryant: 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

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

Bryant: 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.

Uh, cuz we knew demo day was around the.

Todd: 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.

Bryant: 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.

Todd: even after you launched, you were still getting.

Bryant: 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.

Todd: 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.

Bryant: 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?

Bryant: 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

Todd: Wow.

Bryant: another. Buffalo user, Vincent Bedo, he's based in France.

Um, similar love letter. Like, I can't wait to see what you guys do next. Like, this is the best tool I've used in ages. And that's when we started to know that it was like, okay, we've captured the attention of the right users because these were freelance web designers. They built sites for clients. They had been struggling with their previous workflows and tools and you know, there were, there were little pick me up, right?

Because of all the issues that we had with fundraising and we almost pivoted to building like another Squarespace, honestly, because we're just having such problems putting together our, our first round. And all that feedback came in, but then when we got those emails, it was just more and more validation that we're doing the right thing.

Todd: Yeah. That's incredible. I mean, I love the fact that you remember their names and their stories, like to this day. Um, so were they, were they paying right off the bat or, uh, because I think you guys launched with, uh, monetization very early on. Right.

Bryant: Yep. I think Leo is probably one of our first subscribers to our professional plan. It was $42 a month. Uh, Vladin surgery. Thought it was too expensive. I thought it was just right and people bought it . So,

Todd: Did you, how did you, how did you come up with $42 a month? Did you, were the, was that tested or was that just sort of off the top of your head?

Bryant: we, we looked at comparable tools, like we looked at Sketch, we looked at, um, you know, how much of a creative, uh, cloud license cost. Um, we looked at Dream Weaver, we looked at the other things. So it was more so just like, Hey, they're charging that much. Um, maybe we go a dollar or two cheaper, uh, or something like that.

And in the very early days, honestly, like we, we priced for adoption. So, you know, back then it was very, very cheap to host a website in, in Webflow. Um, I still think it's pretty cheap, right? You can get online for $120 a year, uh, in, in Webflow, which, you know, for our type of product that's prosumer professional, I think is a really good entry point.

Um, but at the time, you know, everything from our marketing to our pricing and packaging and monetization, we had to be pretty adoption centric. We wanted, we, we didn't want to price ourselves into a corner and prevent adoption.

Todd: Got it. Um, so what other kind of milestones do you remember from those days, Bryant? Like, you know, 20 13, 20 14, first couple years after ga, like how was the product doing? How was it growing?

Bryant: Let's say it was growing steadily. We never had, you know, breakout viral growth. You know, we had a few nice articles written about us in Smashing Magazine, which was like a well-known web design magazine back in the day. Um, we had, you know, a few writeups and Creative block, which is another well known, uh, right up back in the day in, in the design, uh, world.

Um, but I would say we focused our growth by just building more things. like with every single feature that we built, it was almost the world's first feature. And what I mean by that is, for example, we launched, uh, Webflow IX Webflow interactions in 2014. And. What it was, was, it was, uh, it was a, it was a UI tool that helped you kind of craft, you know, animations.

Okay, so when you click on this, do this, or when you hover over that, do that, and it gave you the ability to just bring your website to life in a much more animated fashion. And previously people had to use like jQuery or some other tools to do similar things. But one, our very first engineer, Dan Rogers, he came up with this idea and he was like, Hey guys, I think we should really build it.

I was like, dude, this is not gonna work. You know, no one's gonna care about this. And he was like, no, I think people really will, I think, I think this is going to be really, um, successful in the community. And I was like, all right, whatever. And then like, Vlad and Sergie were like, all right, whatever. And he just went out and built it.

Six weeks later, um, I think we had another successful Hacker News launch. That started bringing us tons of customers, and it was precisely because it was the only web product at the time that gave you this type of control to build these animations and interactions on a webpage without code. So all of our growth was a variant of that.

Identify something that people want to do visually that requires code and builds. The visual version of that. And all of our growth in the first four or five years came from that particular product development mindset.

Todd: And so you guys were inventing new things here and it, it, it really, the question that I come back to sometimes, cuz you had customers at this point, right, is like when you're inventing stuff that is brand new that people haven't seen or don't think will work, when do you listen to customers and when do you sort of ignore them or try to, you know, think about what they're saying in some other.

Bryant: So I think founders have a superpower, which is when you know, you know, and a founder's role in the company is to be able to push through the status quo and say, I have a belief that this needs to exist and we should just do it. There's no amount of rationalizing, there's no amount of customer research that will prevent a founder from executing on that person's vision.

I'm talking about more about product founders, right? Like yourself, myself.

Todd: Yep.

Bryant: And when you don't know or when you scale the company to a certain point. Something that I learned at Intuit from one of my mentors was root cause analysis. So a very simple framework to teach your team about how you get to the root of what your customers are saying.

So this framework's called five Why's. So you just ask the customer why five times in a row, no matter what their answer is. So the question could be, Hey, Webflow, I want you to build a WordPress plugin. We'd respond with Why? Well, it's because I want to use Webflow and WordPress together. Why? And then you kind of like go down, you know the chain far enough, and then you kind of get to the root of what they're asking, which is, well, ultimately I want to be able to display dynamic information on my website. And that's when we're like, great , thanks for telling me. So we didn't build a WordPress plugin, so we went out and built a world's first visual c m s, where the c m s is cleanly integrated into the visual development canvas of Webflow. And it turns out to be a much better experience than using WordPress custom fields,

And it's our most, it's our most popular feature now. So, I try to coach my team on like, Hey, let's let's try to walk a mile in our customer's shoes. Let's try to use root cause analysis to really understand like what is the gem of the customer feedback that you're hearing.

That way you can really pinpoint what actions you should take based off of it.

Todd: Yeah. I love that. It's such a simple technique, the five why's, but it, it lets you get from kind of the stated preference that a customer has walking it all the way down the chain to what is the revealed preference that's really underneath that. And it's not an, you know, sometimes it's hard to do, but like, I think techniques like that are, are, are very powerful and, and led you guys to really the underlying, you know, preference that the customer had.

Um, okay, so, so 20 13, 20 14, 20 15. We're sort of through this period now, is there anything in those early years, Bryan, that you wish you had done differently?

Bryant: there's so many things , like everything maybe . I can go down the list from product strategy to operational, to hiring, to marketing, to sales. Like, I think the theme though, um, let's call it in the, in the wishy-washy years of webflow, was we needed just more rigor and we just needed to find other modes of operating past initial product market fit.

So 20 13, 14 15, from our launch to the launch of the c m s, uh, in October, 2015, it was just stable growth. It was stable growth. We got product market fit, broke through 1 million of a r r, and effectively for the first, you know, seven years of the company, 70% year over year, year growth just boom, boom, boom,

Todd: Hmm. Very consistent.

Bryant: and and we, we only started marketing in 2016 and it was just very light content marketing and dabbled in performance. So, you know, the company had kind of just settled into this groove, right? We're just like, okay, what are we gonna do next? And okay was just like, you know, we need to hire more people here.

Okay, like we've never managed before. So let's just promote this person that says they want to manage with no type of management experience. We didn't know how to manage, no one in the company knew how to manage. No one knew how to properly hire to the point where like the first hundred people in the company were founder led hires.

No one else hired a single person in the company, uh, outside of the three founders at that point. So I think we could have really benefited from having. Either investor play a more active role to help us kind of shape the growth of the company or having an advisor, having coach, because I think we just kind of like were settling in.

Uh, and it wasn't until Excel walked through the door in 2019 that we're like, Hey, we actually have an opportunity to do something much, much bigger and put us on a trajectory. Um, that really captured the market opportunity. And I think it, it wasn't until then that we really kind of realized, hey, we can be doing things differently.

Todd: And so Excel in 2019. So that was your series A.

Bryant: Yep.

when did you raise the seed route? Like it sounds like there was a big period of time here where, where you guys were sort of going without VC funding.

Bryant: yeah, pretty much. We didn't raise any money between, uh, our seed extension in 2014 or early 2015 and 2019, and we were just growing and hiring off of the backs of, of revenue. And what we would do is we'd go into our S V V B account, we would check our bank balance, make sure it wasn't below a certain water. We, we, we check our incoming wires from Stripe. Tally them up. Okay. Is it more than our expenses? If yes, we can hire If no, don't . That was our, uh, that was our fp and a, why did you make that decision, right? Because the, I think the, the common approach for founders in Silicon Valley is to raise the seed round, you know, 18 months later, raise the series A, 18 months later, raise the series B. Um, assuming the markets are, are better than where they are today, but, um, why did you guys choose to do that differently?

I wish I had a smart answer for you, Todd, but I think it was just because we had scar tissue from raising our seed round. I think it was just like we had to do everything we could to be default alive in the early days because it just felt so hard to put together capital. Like our seed note was like 6 million cap.

we just like, just had all that scar tissue. We were just like, man, I, we just, that was such a painful experience. Um, and then Excel convinced us, we didn't even run a process and we were just like, sounds like the right thing to do. it kind of strapped rocket boosters to the company and we're really, really glad we did that.

Todd: That's awesome. And so what, what was revenue when you raised a Series A?

Bryant: Um, 16 million. So we were, we're profitable. Um, we, our rule of 40 was 60%. Like, because No, or, or even higher, right? Because I think we're growing 70% and you know, I think we're adding, I, I think we're like 10% free cash flow positive. So like, yeah, we had a very attractive business, uh, honestly at that time because we're a cash efficient and we had very predictable.

Todd: And so to get to, you know, 18 20 million, um, you, you've gotta have actually a pretty mature go to market by that time. What was the, like, what was the go to market for Webflow? What, what, what did it used to be and what, what was it around that time? 2019?

Bryant: So, so like I said earlier, we kind of treated product development as growth. Every new feature, we treated that [00:45:00] as our time to capture more mindshare and to bring webflow to more people I told the marketing team, it was just like, Hey guys, like this is our ammunition.

Let's not shoot a blank because we have a, such a golden opportunity to position these really unique features that the world has never seen in a way to just generate momentum for the company signups and conversions. So for example, um, when we came out with Box, this is 2016, um, you know, we had the idea to build a game.

So if you go to flexbox game.com today, you'll actually see that we built, um, a level by level, froggy inspired game where it kind of like gamified our product and it kind of, it kind of like, uh, used our UI as the remote control to progress through the game

Todd: Yeah, I'm looking at it right now. This is cool. I love that you, you guys have just left all this stuff up, like playground.weblo.com and, and, uh, Flexbox. It's cool.

Bryant: We'll take some buyers for it, I guess, so that was one of those examples, right? Again, you know, this was probably number two or three on Hacker News for a good part of the morning. Drove a ton of signups and if further, kind of chipped down the barrier that visual tools like Webflow can compete with hand driven development.

And um, so we used those opportunities in the early days of our go to market to just, uh, drive word of mouth. And then, you know, we had very light content marketing, very light performance marketing and, um, we really just used it to kind of just spin the organic word of mouth engine a little bit more. And, uh, that's, that's how we were so cash efficient in the early.

Todd: And the, the market that you're going after at this point is still basically freelance web designers, or had you thought about like, cause I know that a lot of enterprises use Webflow now. What, what was the journey there?

Bryant: Yeah, so today, you know, we have massive, um, fortune 500 companies running, um, their websites on, on Webflow across a range of industries, from FinTech to insurance to consumer, um, fun facts orange theory.com, powered on Webflow now, so you can, you know, book your class on the Webflow site. Um, we, we were probably too late to include mid-market enterprise customers into our, into our decision making and strategy.

Um, And, you know, this is like a point of healthy tension maybe amongst, you know, the founders. But, you know, there is a belief, which I understand that like, as, as long as we make Webflow accessible, easy to use, um, we're gonna become something comparable to WordPress one day. And on the flip side, there's also an argument that as Webflow scales and you know, attracts more and more customers, there's inevitably going to be more logos, really large companies and users that also need value from Webflow.

So there's also, there's this constant push and pull and that that, that tension still exists in various forms today. Um, and I think when we realize that, okay, these enterprise customers, they also. Or deriving a ton of value from Webflow. We actually started to think of it as just like a different, not just same product, but different go-to-market motions.

And [00:49:00] that's when we started to align the company around, Hey, we can actually do both. So, you know, our company's, um, strategy is still to do both. We still want to be the defacto web platform for freelance web professionals and agencies, and we want to attract the enterprise main dot coms. And, um, and it's, it's working so far and I think, um, I think that strategy is always gonna have core tensions.

It manifests itself most often in things like pricing and packaging. Um, but I think it's a healthy tension and I think it's something that, uh, for as long as we can, we should try to strike that balance.

Todd: Was there anything you figured out during that time period, Bryant, of how to take something that's working in the freelance design community and get it to work inside an enterprise environment? Because I think that's a, a lot of founders kind of ask themselves that they've got something. Kind of works, it's kind of organic, right?

But outside of kind of the walls of enterprise, and then they, they're trying to figure out a way in. What was it for, for you that, that you found worked?

Bryant: So we definitely had to invest in the product. Um, you know, for a long time, the only thing that separated. Um, our self-serve product from our enterprise product was single sign on. We knew that was not gonna be tenable, Um, it, it requires, it requires the ability to essentially find what is the concentric circles around self-serve audiences and enterprise, uh, audience's needs.

And we just build into overlap. So, um, as much as we can, we try to release the same features, uh, across both. Of course, there's gonna be certain things that we know, um, only enterprises care about, or only, you know, service professionals or web designers care about. Um, but I think it's our job of our pricing and packaging teams to really find, you know, what is the true willingness to pay for some of that.

So now I think we've gotten much better at, you know, having a more disciplined. and specifically buyer persona centric, uh, pricing and packaging methodology that really fits kind of the needs of the business and the needs of our customers and meets them where they're at. Um, but I can't say that these are things that are easy in the company because, you know, for a company like Webflow, we're not a natural seat expansion type of product.

Like, let's call it a sauna or monday.com. You know, those are companies that just have great seat expansion naturally. So what we're gonna have to do is we're gonna have to innovate our way into that type of growth for both types of market segments. So if there's certain market segments that are okay with a single product, you know, uh, subscription, that's fine.

We want to continue serving them. But for our enterprise customers or for more [00:52:00] sophisticated agencies, we have to think about how to go multi-product. How do we want to expand our product portfolio to grow as they grow? And it requires a different kind of thinking because you know, as you know, we talked about earlier, the first six years of the company was about pushing the boundaries of visual development and what you can do in the UI interactions, animations, all this like sexy design stuff.

And now we have to do some of the things that may not be so sexy. And I think that's gonna be a transition for us. We're gonna have to think about how thoughtfully we stay on the cutting edge of visual development and become a multi-product company in the future.

Todd: it's a really interesting question. You know, the founders who are 5, 6, 7, 8 years into their journey of like, when do you go multi-product or when do you try to find a new buyer? You know, basically like your, your TAM is sort of as big as it is what's gotten you where you are today, but then you wanna try to expand that.

And so how do you think about that of like, when is the right time to go multi-product or what is the right way to.

there's so many different business books that talk about this, right? From, you know, layers of the cakes and talking about horizon one, horizon two, horizon three to, you know, product portfolios and just, you know, how you actually build by or partner. I think for Webflow, the way I think about it, um, and maybe it's too simplistic, is we think about the buyer persona of our core product.

Bryant: you have a website and I just try to build a list of what is the second product you buy or use After the website, what's the third product you buy or use? And then hopefully you'll find themes around some of these products. They're just like, oh, these are obvious things that could be boltons or add-ons. So I think it really depends company to company when you do it. And there's a lot of different ways of how you do it, but at least you know, taking the customer centricity approach. It should be, you should put on the hat of the buyer personas that buy your core product today and you should understand really well what other products they're buying.

And then you should think about what is that overlap, what type of advantage would we have if we incorporated different types of product suites, um, that are adjacent to our core product? And sometimes it makes sense and sometimes it doesn't. And honestly, a lot of companies don't have a clear next button to hit or click on.

Um, but you know, something we're still working on. So I can't say I'm the expert at that

Todd: Got it. So one of the things, Brian, that, you know, as I reflect on all of this, um, it really feels to me like Webflow is an expression of the way that you and Vlad and Sergie kind of saw the world. You know, back at, in 20 13, 20 14, 20 15, uh, you know, a pretty contrarian way of looking at things. And does, does that sort of hold true today?

Or what, what are the things today that you think the way that, you know, the leaders of the company see the world maybe differently than the rest of the market or the rest of the companies that are out there?

Bryant: I think the things that are true today that may not be true in 2013 when we started selling webflow and building webflow are designers are important. They're a really critical part of the process. Whether you work at a bank or whether you work at, you know, a Silicon Valley company, the world is. Realizing the importance of well designed products. And to take that even further, designers want to feel control over the production process as well. They don't want to feel like they're throwing something over the wall. And you know, we talked about this earlier, but the concept of a unicorn, a designer or developer that could do both,

So we believe that unicorn should exist just as popular as horses and zebras, like they should be walking amongst us. And we, we feel like, um, it's our, it's the mission of the company is to give them superpowers, give them more powerful visual abstractions over the underlying technology, and give them the control to bring it to life.

Todd: I love that. So it's, I mean, it's very consistent over the years, right? The, the way that you guys look at that, the persona that you're trying to serve and how you do it differently than other companies. I think it's what's made you successful. what's next? What's next for Webflow?

Bryant: Yeah, we wanna stay at the forefront of the visual development world. We want to bring webflow to more places. We want to expand its power. We want to deepen its power. We want to solve use cases that are adjacent to the a web design one. Um, and you know, honestly, the company also needs to scale. We need to find ways of operating better.

We need to find ways of becoming a multi-product company so that we can hopefully one day become a multi-generational one.

Todd: Amazing.

So Brian wanted to wrap up with a few questions that, you know, I'd love to ask founders just about, you know, what they're inspired by, where they learn from. Um, which people or mentors did you learn the most from in your career and, and what did they teach you?

I had two people that I think often about, um, one is a professional mentor and then, uh, one is a family member. So professionally, uh, my first boss at Intuit, Roy Rosen, he was the first general manager of QuickBooks Online, kind of like, um, an Intuit alumni, kind of one of the most pro prolific leaders that company has had.

Bryant: And he was the one that taught me five whys how to, you know, talk to customers. And, you know, I often think of him, you know, we haven't caught up in. Probably 10 years, but, um, ever since he left into it. But he's someone that I think often about and, uh, just because of how much he's taught me, he's shaped who I am professionally, uh, today. And the other person, um, is my grandfather. So my mom's father. So he taught me resilience. He taught me determination. And you know, when I was a kid, he would tell me his life story. He got on a boat by himself when he was eight years old, and he was from Taiwan and he went to Japan to study, didn't speak a word of Japanese.

And it wasn't for 10 years that he came back to Taiwan. So imagine an eight year old boy getting on a boat for the very first time, going to a foreign country, not speaking a single language, having to live by herself at a school for 10

Todd: Oh my God, I can't imagine that. I mean, I have a nine year old son, , and there's no way he could do that, you know?

Bryant: Not only that, when he came back to Ty Taiwan, that was when the nationalist party and Jenk essentially came over to ti Taiwan. And he was a student and he was the leader of a student rebellion actually at the time. And he had, um, he had a, he had a warrant out for his arrest for, for starting these, these rebellions. And long story short, he lived in the jungle hiding from the nationalist party, police and army, and eating rats and snakes and just like being a fricking boss. Um, and eventually he, he turned himself in when he realized that his family members were being held for ransom. Um, and he's someone that. Just has taught me so much from his early years.

So I think of them all the time. I'm just like, man, this is really hard at work. This doesn't fricking compare

Todd: Wow.

Amazing.

Bryant: keeps me going.

Todd: Awesome. So last question here, Bryant. What is the best piece of. That you've received, that you actually use.

Bryant: Um, ode said most device is bad advice and I use it quite a lot.

Todd: Awesome. Well, Brian, it's been so nice having you on the podcast, uh, the story of, of Webflow the company and just your personal stories and how those things intertwine to have built something so successful that so many people love. So, really, really appreciate you being here.

Bryant: Thanks Todd. This was really fun. Thanks for having me.