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Comment by JMTQp8lwXL | Hacker News Reader

Congrats to these folks. But I have a serious, genuine question: How many of these click-and-drag, WYSIWYG website creators are we going to see?

I get there's a need for the long-tail of web traffic (small businesses, etc) to create an internet presence. But is it all that profitable, which I imagine is plenty of competition to undercut your prices? I don't know how a Wix, etc. can stand out or have a competitive advantage in this space. There are so many of them it seems.

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Webflow is different. It doesn't limit to set of templates and their styling, which most other site builders do. It's a GUI layer above raw CSS and HTML, which gives you the ability to build virtually anything. It's an order of magnitude more powerful than its competitors. Webflow's own website[1] is a great example of what you can make with it.

Considering how many marketing departments I have seen struggling to pull someone from the dev team to fix a tiny, tiny change, this is a massive opportunity.

[1]: https://webflow.com/

So when there isn't a template to do what you need, you have to know CSS and HTML, and must code yourself. The premise is "no-code". The uniqueness of this editor is it's ability to play nicely with anything you write yourself.

Nope. You don't have to code anything. That's the whole point. If you don't have a template, you start from a blank page and you build it using the GUI.

My original discussion point (top-level comment) was that feature alone doesn't sound like much of a differentiator from other WYSIWYG web builders out there.

That is, in fact, our main differentiator – and the main reason people choose Webflow. Check out this very diverse set of sites [1] that can be built with Webflow, this ability to visually develop any kind of custom layout/experience really does go a long way to distance us from any competitors.

[1] https://webflow.com/discover/popular

These sites are quite varied, I do agree. One small thing I noticed. Some sites could have improved tab navigation, for example https://www.memberstack.io/. The site, without any interaction, is buttery smooth 60fps. When I start tabbing through the "What others are saying..." carousel, though, it destroys the animation frame rate (Chrome, Mac OS, 32 GB RAM).

Most WYSIWYG web builders are about assembling pre-existing blocks. Webflow gives you total freedom. Webflow is to Wix/Builders as Photoshop/Illustrator are to Canva.

I tried looking on the site but wasn't able to find a definitive answer, does this support the ability to add custom JS?

Yes, you can! https://university.webflow.com/article/embed

One thing to note is that we're also creating visual abstractions over common things that are hand-coded with JS. For example, see our declarative GUI for interactions and animations [1] – it allows designers to get the same exact effects that you'd build out manually, but without the need to learn how to write that JS from scratch.

[1] https://webflow.com/interactions-animations

Thanks for the info

webflow's designer seems to be heavily inspired by https://grapesjs.com/

I think it's the other way around

Bingo :)

Well, ironically Lambda School uses Webflow (https://twitter.com/austen/status/1159145385891205120), so it's not just "mom and pop" small businesses that are customers. If anything, those businesses would be better served using something like SquareSpace or Wix, not Webflow.

Even if you remove the massive long tail for a second, there's huge opportunity in the enterprise. I've never really met a marketing team satisfied with the speed in which they're able to create, edit, and deploy changes. A bit hyperbolic of course, but there's definitely room in the market.

I've heard great things about Squarespace's customer service, which is why I recommend them. So from my perspective, customer service can be one way to differentiate one company from the other.

It might be all about projecting a number of tiny businesses without websites yet (or not maintained, or old, or only on FB, etc) and convince VCs that you can get a large cut of those.

I know Wix isn't making any money yet losing $30-$50M a year

Source?

WIX is a publicly traded company.

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/wix-reports-second-...

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