Interview with Webflow co-founder | Hacker News Reader

Interview with Webflow co-founder

forbes.com

4 pointscomeagain10 comments

Webflow seems like a nice enough company and good product, but I find their marketing as "No code" platform to be very misleading. It's cool WYSIWYG website builder, they have added a small handful of features that allow you to build something a bit meatier than a static page (ecommerce, or gated publishing tools mostly), but a lot of their marketing lingo and the communities in which they advertise themselves are trying to pass the tool as a web app builder.

As a non engineer tinkerer I've used a handful of "true" no code platforms (adalo, glide, retool) experimented with a few more (thunkable for one), and investigated a ton (currently contemplating noloco.io for a new side project), and every once in a white I fall prey to Webflow announcing a new version and promising no-code heaven... only to waste considerable time deciphering the offering and realizing it doesn't do a fifth of what I really need.

Airtable, Notion and Coda do the same btw, and like Webflow they're nice enough tools on their own, but I wish they would't use the no-code or low-code moniker so loosely, because it creates a lot of noise to dilute the signal of actual no code tools.

I think the difference between a no-code tool and a "WYSIWYG website builder" is only something outside of their target group would care about.

The target audience just wants to get some kind of website up and running and if there's some plumbing to be done with no-code tools that's just part of building a website.

> The target audience just wants to get some kind of website up and running and if there's some plumbing to be done with no-code tools that's just part of building a website.

"up and running" is different from "I want to continually build and grow on top of this".

Had someone last year reach out to me re: webflow. They'd chosen it to migrate stuff to, but... hit some walls and wanted customization to their process and capabilities, and were needing to have to rebuild because webflow wouldn't be able to handle it. This was a group creating dozens to hundreds of new sites per week. The initially loved the drag/drop "so easy and flexible" aspects of webflow, and assumed "get up and running and we'll figure the rest out later". "Figuring the rest out" meant months of head banging and many more months of having to rebuild something else from scratch.

I was met with "hey, we need to rebuild all of this and have it ready for Q2". This was... Feb or so. I said "so... you're needing to build a custom web site builder to be used by half a dozen folks concurrently to collaboratively build websites based on the a directory of themes, and you also need a theme builder to let another half dozen folks build up hundreds of themes with customizable commerce and misc functionality, have the ability to scrape/import the existing 400 sites you have now, and you need this done in 6 weeks. Do I have this right?" "well... doesn't have to be 6 - we could live with 8 or 9, but we're planning some new marketing campaigns to launch around that time so the earlier the better, so we can work out any kinks we find".

I had to pass on that.

I think my point here is that it isn't always 'a website' that people consider using these tools for - often they're trying to build large scalable businesses on these types of tools. Trying to be 'lean' while building on someone else's platform without planning for what might be essentially a total rebuild under the hood (and hitting that point more quickly than you think) has to be part of the planning, and rarely seems to be. Once you hit any success or traction with the initial piece, "rebuild for the future" falls off everyone's radar, and the tech folk may often be left with impossible tasks.

Check out https://draftbit.com for mobile (native iOS/android) apps.

Draftbit doesn’t come with a database, but has many of the mobile apis productized and you own the source code!

Adding a disclaimer is common courtesy.

Will do, owning the code is nice, I always worry about lock-in or my tools going bust

If you are developing software, imo, the toolchain has to be open source.

Hey just a bit of a random question since you mentioned you were looking at noloco - did you come across Stacker at all while investigating tools in the space? I work at Stacker and am always interested to find out if and how people are finding us.

I don’t think i had. I mostly learn of new or alternative tools via the inside no code newsletter, no code subreddit, product hunt, indie maker or hacker news. It seems your tool is more enterprise driven, like mendix and appian, these don’t often come up in the side hustle communities.

Are you actually calling Retool a true no code platform? You have to connect to an external datasource and you have to write JS.

Budibase, glide, Adalo are more no code.

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