How I Built A $4B Startup Called WebflowㅣWebflow, Vlad Magdalin

a lot of people assumed that it just couldn't be created right because somebody else tried especially one of the biggest players in the space like Adobe and macromedia they failed so something must not be possible but in my mind I was like 100% sure even when I got a lot of Doubt from other people like you talk to investors like oh this will never work out I walked away from that almost like just discounting it I was like oh they don't know anything like it's it's obviously going to work to me it was just so

obvious that it's the current way that things work is broken and it needs to be thick that I was just 1,000% convinced that I need to build that thing that specific hi I'm Vlad magdalin I am the CEO and one of the co-founders of webflow and we create web platform to allow people to create really professional websites webflow is Visual Web development platform that allows companies Freelancers agencies to create really really sophisticated websites we have over 200,000 customers and the last thing I think we shared publicly is were over $100 million in Revenue kind of

up there in terms of important platforms but we're still compared to things like WordPress and larger platforms still getting started I sort of stumbled into it by accident so I came to the United States as a refugee with my parents and I didn't really see myself becoming like a designer or visual artist but my dad was trying to make some of these like trying to create some businesses on the side and that kind of require he asked me convert some cataloges from English to Russian uh and that required learning graphic design and that led to

me getting a job at this place called Russian ameran media which is like running this Russian Yellow Pages where I was making ads business business cards different things that was just like rapping design for customers or for clients that sort of snowball then led to me wanting to learn 3D animation it sort of Blossom the story was a little bit complicated cuz first I was doing graphic design and then when I first started going to college I made the decision to go study computer science because that's what my brother was doing that's sort of what

I heard was like lucrative career to follow so I started doing that I did that for a year and I had such a hard time doing that I like really didn't enjoy it that I dropped out and then moved up here to San Francisco to go to the Academy of Art to study 3D animation thing that that really inspired me to do that was seeing what Pixar was doing so this was 2001 2002 where Pixar was like blowing up like they were making all these Incredible movies and I was downloading all these tutorials from the

web learning how to do 3D modeling 3D effects and it just gave me this feeling of like empowerment whatever story you can imagine you can kind of like create these scenes and translate them into 3D space and then make a movie from that I don't think I ever got like really far to creating My Own Story end to end like some people could like where they were you know animating from the time that they were a kid but what really spoke to me was like this technical aspect of like really sophisticated 3D animation tools that

were being used at 3D and movie industry and trying to learn them through all of these tutorials and sort of like I felt like I was getting superpowered I actually didn't finish I dropped out of art school cuz I you know was too expensive it I decided to go back to study engineering to the school I was going to before then I got a job at a web design agency to sort of start the payback student loan in that job I was working with a design team creating essentially web design in Photoshop and I was

like intern that was translating those designs into HTML CSS basically the web that's when you know one time I had this flash of an idea that why can't the way that 3D animation work where creatives are doing all of the work in the sophisticated software they pressing a button it's going to live screen without a translation layer why can't something like that exist for web so that was the initial inspiration for like web flow has to be a thing like I want to create something like 3D animation tools for web design and I think that

that's was the even though after that I got another job and started working and into it it already like that idea had already sparked in me that I wanted to try to start this on the side whether I was like Moonlighting or working nights and weekends or trying to find co-founders on the side like it was that moment when I was still in college before my first real job that I had this inspiration like I have to build a company around this or I have to build a product that is kind of like 3D animation

tools but for and effectively web Flow came it just took four different attempts to make it happen honestly I didn't know anything about business didn't even think much about how we were going to monetize it how I was going to make money I just just saw that something was clearly broken or something that could be better and I just had this very intense confidence that if you were to if I was to build it somebody would be willing to pay just like the 3D animation software I was using some of it I was paying for

even as a student I saw that like hey this provides me enough value that going if it was like a student Edition like it's so valuable that I'm willing to pay for it so I sort of had this thought that I'll figure out how to monetize it later but the most important thing was like how do you actually create the tool that solves the problem in a way that I was imagining and I always thought that that was like the first thing to focus on and a lot of entrepreneurs have this if you build it

they will come mentality and that's exactly what I had I was like I'll figure out those details later I just got to build this thing prove to myself that it's possible and then we'll try to prove to others that and I honestly thought at that time that it was going to be a company of one like I thought I was just going to create it and like maybe sell it to some folks to use I never thought I was going to become like a company with multiple employees let alone hundreds so I was very maybe

naive about it like I didn't know all the details that go into building a company but the first thing was like I need to solve this problem for myself and I can see that it's kind of broken and I wanted to create a better solution first time we wound things down it sort of felt like not really a big failure it felt more like hey I'm getting married we're talking about having a kid I have to get a real job I will keep working on it nights and weekends so it didn't really feel like a

failure at the time it ended up like petering out so I just kind of forgot about it for a year but then the second time it was a combination of finding another co-founder working on at nights and weekends and then that sort of petered out but I also didn't feel like it was a big failure the third time definitely felt uh there was a lot of ups and downs where we got some funding we actually got Incorporated we had two other co-founders then the biggest thing that happened like everything was on track we had applied

for a trademark kind of towards the end after we had pitch put together we applied for a trademark that's sort of kind of what you do to get permission to make sure that you have all your duts in a row U but then we got a response from the government saying like there's already a company that has this trademark and then we got a notice from that company saying like better not use it so we got really discouraged but not discouraged enough to like totally we started working on rebranding the company so it was going

to be not webo but something called marked up like HML markup but with some missing vowels so we had sergy who ended up being my co-founder created a new logo and we're about to go live but then that's when kind of Life took over and it was like a slow trickle of like one co-founder being uh demotivated and leaving another co-founder sort of saying like maybe this is I wouldn't be willing to like Risk Everything to start a company around this and a competitor came out weely at the time I got like $20 million in

funding and I was like crap it's over they already won like how can you possibly catch up when we have zero uh we're out of money and they you know just got $20 million so it was like maybe like giving up then but you know maybe a year later the idea started to come back around seeing how the competitor was going in a different direction and not building quite the same thing that we would have built and gaining more confidence in myself as an engineer KN that I could like build something independently started sort of

like thinking about bringing the idea back again it was sort of a fluke think an accident or something it's just like great timing or or luck that it was 4 years later at the end of 2011 I had already moved from Mountain View in this in the Bay Area to Sacramento which at that point had that second kid a trademark certificate arrived to my house that said congratulations you own the trademark for web flow cuz I guess something happened with that other company where they let it expire or they went out of business or whatever

by that time I was already working sort of still working at my day job but working with my brother Sergey who ended up being one of my co-founders to build more websites on the side and sort of like starting to develop web flow that was like the perfect sign of like okay maybe it's meant to be uh now you can use the name web flow again that's like started the ball rolling again on like starting to plan how we would like leave our jobs get enough funding to start it again in 2012 it was 1,000%

idea based and it's not just 3D animation it's like game design video editing film uh production and compositing all of these industries have a way to visually directly manipulate very sophisticated like all of these ways to do like hair simulation and and rigid body simulation so it's not basic sketching like in Photoshop you're creating like entire systems that are really sophisticated to do like visual effects when I looked at web design it was like it's so obvious that something like that needs to exist and some companies tried like Dream Weaver and like Adobe tried many

years ago but I think because they failed early they were just too early in the market a lot of people assumed that it just couldn't be created right cuz somebody else tried especially one of the biggest players in the space like Adobe and macromedia they failed so something must not be possible but in my mind coming from that 3D background it was just obvious this needs to exist so I was like 100% sure even when I got a lot of Doubt from other people like you talk to investors like oh this will never work out

I walked away from that almost like just discounting it I was like oh they don't know anything like it's it's obviously going to work sometimes that's bad cuz I was wasn't looking at critical input and it would have been helpful for me to be more critical of like what might not work but to me it was just so obvious that it's the current way that things work is broken and it needs to be thick that I was just 1,000% convinced that I need to build that thing that's specific idea and I even told my wife

and I honestly thought this that if it wasn't for this idea I'd have no interest in starting a startup like it was specifically to make this idea happen if I didn't have that conviction I'd be perfectly happy like working for Google or Microsoft whoever but it was that specific idea around upload that I I just knew had to become a reality unlike the previous session I don't have any prizes to give out ideas are very important to me I think that bringing ideas into the world is one of the most important things that people do

and I think that great ideas these things take on lives of their own which give meaning to our lives as people I think a lot about how people create ideas and how ideas grow what sorts of tools create a healthy environment for ideas to grow this was late 2011 that I got this approval to use a trademark and that got my brain spinning around like okay should I start this again the thing that actually Sparks the fourth attempt where I was like I'm 100% sure I saw this video called inventing on principle which I think

every single founder should see it's by this person named Brett Victor and I saw that in early 2012 and when I saw that video and it has to do with kind of the intersection of art design and programming but another part of it also like half of the talk is about why do you do the work that you do like what is the purpose behind your professional Endeavors the combination of both of those things like something that he was talking about being very similar to webo the visual development visual manipulation land asking this question of

like are you really fulfilled and do you a deep sense of purpose from the work that you're doing that after watching that video literally the next morning I called my boss and said I'm going to be starting a company then started building kind of a demo we didn't really have a product so the first thing we thought of like okay we only have really 3 months of Runway of savings to fund our kind of family expenses Etc so we're going to make a Kickstarter video so we went all in kind of got Incorporated started making

a Kickstarter video and started designing the product what it would look like how we would show it in the kickstarter video so that other people could see what it's going to become so they can pledge and like give us some financial support so that we can actually build the product Etc uh it turned out that we had completely miscalculated and by the time we were almost done with the video we found out that Kickstarter doesn't allow hosted software so like the entire thing we were building was not not compatible with their terms of service so

we kind of had to start from scratch that was basically money wasted started building a demo and started applying to YC once we had the first version of a demo without any customers we applied didn't get in that was like a really discouraging very surprising I thought we were like for sure going to at least get an interview but but it was a kind of a rude awakening to be like hey you're too early like all you have is sort of a demo you don't really have a product yet or any users you just kept

building and kind of decided cuz the the window to apply again is 6 months later but by that point we were already like running out of money so we just decided all right we're going to go like super lean save as much money as we can and just keep it like try to build a product that we can actually put into in front of people so they can see exactly what it looks like and get it closer to or like would people be willing to pay for it so those next 6 months were like really

really tough but also really fun like we were trying to extend every possible like credit card uh loan that we could arrange borrowing money from Friends selling cards converting them to leases but it was also one of the most motivational time as a company because we were like do or that uh we were day and night working on the design coding like and building the actual application by the time March 2013 came around we had a demo to show all these designer fors like Reddit dig at the time there was like designer news and it

didn't get much traction but then we put on Hacker News which is more of like in developer community and we thought developers would probably not care about this because the entire tool kind of talks about maybe replacing developer but it really took off it's funny they actually a lot of developers that saw us launch on Hacker News really resonated with the product because they saw how much it could help the people they partner with like the designers to get a bunch more done without including them it's actually one of the things that you know I

was a developer before where I would take Photoshop files from a designer and translate them to you know a CMS or something like that it was some of the most kind of tedious Med and boring work a lot of developers are pulled into you might have like an entire development team working on product right and and then the engineering team is pulled into marketing projects to say like hey we have this new landing page for a new marketing campaign can a developer come in and using this figma prototype build the marketing page and code that's

some of the most kind of tedious work to do that translation work cuz what developers really want to be doing is the more sophisticated thing right and there's so much demand for those developers on their time that they'd rather be doing that so I think that's why uh webflow resonated so well with developers not only that they see that the tool helped designers create by themselves but also the way that they created by themselves generated really clean code CTIC code that was performant and didn't have the types of issues that other website Builders did that's

when we started getting our first Le in like track and that you know with that we applied to YC with that we got into that program and then like that kind of gave us a Lifeline to keep working on it and the rest is kind of history from there for a while I was really happy when we initially launched the idea and started collecting like a list of folks cuz before we could actually sign people up and it was just really overwhelming to go from failed multiple times and then we are definitely out of money

and at our last attempt in like the last draw cuz if if that didn't work out like there's probably no way that it would have taken another 10 years for me to feel confident again to try again for my wife to feel comfortable taking another Financial Risk Etc so it felt really awesome to see that traction and that validation when we actually launched for real and convert try to convert that list of I think it was like 30,000 people in our weight list to customers I think only like 40 or 50 signed up so out

of like 30,000 40 or 50 we were like shocked we thought that maybe we' built something wrong or something how could we go from tens of thousands of people interested to only a handful only tens actually paying for it that didn't feel great but like over time we started to like really pay attention to those folks and get closer to them and serve their needs and that's like slowly started to build a base of more and more customers being honest it wasn't a deep framework it was customer centricity like how do we keep delivering on

our mission like how do we keep listening to customers and keep solving their problems in a way that feels valuable to them how do we build our team that can help us do that there was a a little bit more of a formal framework called I read this book called The Infinite game by Simon Sy and it had this structure of like the responsibilities of each business are to First Advance a just Mission so something that or just cause something that brings 10 times more value to the world than it does to you for us

that was like always been the case for every like $10 we make through our software one of our users probably making like $1,000 because using it to like sell Advanced websites builds to clients Etc and the second responsibility is to prioritize people in your business decisions so like how do you build up your team how do you create an environment of bringing in amazing people that are empowered to solve these problems for customers but not just people in your company but also what uh effect do your business decisions have on people outside of the company

how do our decisions around how we structure our business impact our users pack the communities that we live in pack the environment like really think through that and only the only third the respons posibility is to generate Revenue but importantly not just make money but in order to do the first two things for as long as possible so to keep funding and advancing your your mission that you believe is like a good thing for the world and to make sure that you like factoring in how people along the way and I've sort of thought about

it like that since the early days of like how do we what decisions do we need to make to keep advancing our mission to keep bringing the power of web development to more and more people honestly always come down to finding people who like really care about doing this like bringing more more power into other people's hands spending a lot of time like trying to hire them and bringing them in and empowering them to be successful within the company Etc I think the two biggest fact like really thinking about customers and really thinking about the

team that is going to get you there everything else is like details there's a lot of like learning and scale and things that we've had to figure out a lot of mistakes that we made but ultimately it's those two things that are always at the center our customers and the people who we build bills for who our entire mission is meant to serve and our team like how we behave together like who comes together to solve this problem for customers well I think the thing that motivated me the most was I wanted to this idea

to exist and the other thing is because my family came here 9 years old when we came here as a refugee family we had we were on welfare for like 3 years my dad was trying to like make ends meet that experience showed me that even like a more modest job was way more than the kind of life that I would have had Back in the USSR so I already felt like I made it I didn't have like a normal entry level for engineering job but into it I didn't feel like I was like trying

to make a ton of money I was just like trying to find ways to make this idea that I have happen I think that was the main motivating factor I wasn't really trying to figure out which path gets me the most sort of monetary or financial outcome cuz I already felt like my life is already so much better than it would have been that was just never a goal and I was always I think after the idea came to me just chasing how do I make it happen and not thinking of that as a business

vehicle I was just thinking of like what do I need to do to bring this to reality not to make as much money as possible like I I literally thought when we were starting web flow even this fourth time that it was going to be the three or four of us building a small product and having more and more customers but having this small agency where it's we're all sitting around one table and building this product but it turned out to be much bigger than we ever imagined um but that wasn't by design it was

just because we were trying to make this idea and bring it to life and then putting it into the hands of more people and I just required more and more people the best advice is there's never a great time to start a startup or have kids but the other part of that advice is like you always figure it out assumed when we were getting started that I had to hide the fact that I had kids from like investors advisers like the general assumption was that you can't do both you can't be a parent and start

a startup I think it's fundamentally not true and I'm glad to see that it's becoming more of a trend where people are just like not afraid to be doing both at the same time you can totally figure it out I would say it was probably know the biggest factor in US shaping our company culture the fact that I already had kids to make sure that we were working in a sustainable way that we were creating like great benefits we attracted a lot of other people with families who were generally tended to be more experienced kind

of fresh grads Etc it was definitely hard but I think so many great companies have been created by parents um and so many great Founders have had kids along the way and it just worked out the important thing there is to make sure that you're not choosing one over the other you like then you find a way to balance both your family and and your life's work it was definitely my wife and I talked about having a third kid after the startup already happened and it felt for a while that web flow was that third

kid and then by the time kids got a little older we just decided not to have more kids but there was a in the thick of it it was like really hard to decide to have more kids which I think was the right decision but in a world where I had to choose between having kids or starting a startup definitely pick both uh because both can be like so rewarding and so fulfilling in many different ways I think a lot of people have like this mental block around if I already have kids then it's not

possible or if I start a startup then I should never have kids or until it's like stable it's never going to be stable you know there's never a a great time when everything is figured out so go for what you truly want and need in your life and a lot of times that's both of those