Startup Weebly takes profitable leap forward | Hacker News Reader

Startup Weebly takes profitable leap forward

sfgate.com

128 pointspg17 comments

I love that they are profitable, growing rapidly, and generally kicking butt. My biggest wish for them is to start taking market share from Adobe by making their website toolkit more flexible and advanced. When a professional designer can get everything they want in a browser, no extra software, and changes are real-time...for me, they win.

We actually just did that! http://blog.weebly.com/2/post/2011/08/a-summer-focused-on-de...

When we launched the Designer Platform, we completely revamped our theming engine to be super flexible and introduced a pretty cool web-based IDE with real-time preview of HTML and CSS changes (and pop-out functionality for dual-monitor development).

It's a huge focus for us going forward -- we'd love to hear your feedback on whether the new changes allow you to do everything you'd like to, or if not, where we can improve.

Yeah I think the market for Designers is huge - that's basically all we're focused on at Decal is the deployment model and integrating with designers' existing workflows.

It's hard trying to make people realise that we're not "DIY" though :) I've just come up with the phrase "DIY for Designers" which I think captures it pretty well. Designers have, for too long, been punished by dynamic web deployments (the "big 3" Joomla, Drupal and Wordpress) - time to disrupt!

I love Weebly. My only complaint is this I couldn't find any professional looking templates for a dance studio. Everything looks like a blog template.

Awesome product and awesome progress from a small dedicated team with a ton of determination and passion! These are the kind of stories that inspire others(myself included) to work those extra hours on their idea. Keep up the great work Weebly team!

I'm a big fan of Weebly. It's by far the easiest tool to recommend to a new web client. I can build a simple template and then hand over the reins.

I didn't realise you guys had taken money from Sequoia - congrats. Could you be the first YCC to go public? I've got high hopes.

We're working on it... we certainly have some stiff competition! :)

Genuine interest: why is it so important to go public? What does your company win by doing so?

I understand companies who need the one-time cash injection to stay ahead of competition. It doesn't look like you guys need that much. So what is it, then?

I can't speak for the Weeblies but in the event that you don't need the capital for growth and you don't plan to be acquired then going public is the only way for founders, investors and employees to see a significant release of capital from the company. You can just take revenues from the company but in many ways going public is lower risk (and obviously releases more capital too).

Are the domain renewals still $39.95 through Weebly? Maybe if they raised the price on that they could have already built their new office.

We add a lot of value on top of the domain name that we think justifies the price (our customers seem to think so too).

If you don't, you're free to buy your own domain at GoDaddy (or anywhere else) and point it to Weebly, completely free of charge.

You've surveyed the customers on the domain renewal price compared to GoDaddy and they prefer the $39.95? Or, they are given the option to purchase/renew from GoDaddy at checkout? Or, maybe what they don't know won't hurt them?

"If you don't, you're free to buy your own domain at GoDaddy (or anywhere else) and point it to Weebly, completely free of charge."

Sounds good. Didn't happen - tried to move a domain off the platform after a year. After 3-5 emails with support the domain eventually just expired. Glad it wasn't anything critical - just a simple site I had thrown together for a family member's business which was remade in Joomla.

I think the product is great for many people, the founders sound like nice people. Just unsure if the experience I had trying to get the domain back is a tactic or incompetence/honest mistakes. Of course I hope it's the latter because that'll get fixed.

We definitely support transferring domain names out of Weebly. Once you purchase it, it's your domain name. If we didn't do that when you asked, I'm really sorry. That's our mistake and it definitely shouldn't happen. Would you mind emailing me at david+c@weebly.com with your account username or email so I can look into the situation and make sure that never happens again?

As far as domain name prices go, we handle a ton of things for you that are otherwise really hard. The domain purchase experience from Weebly compared to GoDaddy is night and day, and we've put a lot of effort into making it extremely simple and hassle free. A lot of people are willing to pay a premium to save them time and hassle with a domain name, but on the off-chance they'd prefer to go directly with another registrar (GoDaddy or otherwise), they are completely free to do so.

Hey - no problem. Not like I spent much time on the original site. No need to apologize either - everyone these days loves an apology it seems! (sickening) I thought about it before you responded and my goal isn't to get anyone in CS in trouble or anything or make a big deal of it. Just seeing the article reminded me.

If you really support transferring domains out that's all I was wondering. I was told I would be sent an EPP code to switch registrars and never was. Asked for it to be sent again, then again, did the whole, "Did you check your spam?" exchange of emails, etc. The people I spoke w/ through email seemed genuine. For whatever reason I was just never sent the code and eventually gave up. Probably just honest mistakes - it happens. Anyways, continued success.

What's a good email to reach you at? Would love to do an interview.

I love that they are profitable and have been for a long time. I've recommended their product to small business novices and they have been impressed with how easy it is to use.

I'd love to see more articles about companies that are profitable and how long/what it took to get there. We are seeing a lot of hype in the consumer/social media space, but it seems to me that it is much harder to be profitable in that space (but also more likely to have a massive exit). It seems that the B2B space offers less risk and reward.

Way to go, Weebly! (disclosure: they are a customer of ours)

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