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Comment by debarshri | Hacker News Reader

We started out with webflow for our landing page. Problem with low code or any abstractions in general is that it becomes leaky the moment you want to do complex stuff. The reason webflow worked for us initially was we did not have to bother with hosting, CMS etc. It because very restrictive at one point. Only couple of people know how to make certain changes.

Eventually we moved to nextjs and vercel. We are faster with iterating on our landing page as well as any engineer can be pulled into the implementation.

All lowcode platforms are great in basic usecases but fails when the usecases because complex.

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We went the other direction (to be fair, just building a simple static site). I’m a developer therefore I should make the marketing site! Problem is that with limited resources that took away time from building the product.

We’ve moved to various platforms over the years so that our designers with a touch of web knowledge can build our marketing site. They’re happy bc they don’t have to wait to make changes and devs are happy bc they don’t have to work on marketing sites.

The designers actually enjoy the constraints to a degree bc it simplifies their job as well.

But like I said, it’s just a simple static marketing site

This is our marketing website https://adaptive.live/

As you can see, it is more than a static website. Implementing this in webflow was nightmare.

Maybe I'm not clicking deep enough, but that marketing site looks like a super trivial Webflow CMS use-case.

Although if your team is all engineers pushing to git every day, I could totally see how they'd find Webflow frustrating (since a UI instead of a codebase would be a huge pattern-interrupt for their daily workflow).

That said, once your startup grows, what typically happens is you'll need to bring in specialized marketing/sales/design/SEO folks (vs. Swiss army knife SV startup hustlers). Their hours are far cheaper than engineer-hours and they're also much better at marketing/sales/design/SEO work, like your landing pages & blog.

They will not be able to change anything on your slick NextJS/Vercel setup , and will be filing tickets daily and overwhelming your engineers.

Then you'll probably have to resort to some nightmarishly bloated "headless CMS," and waste a huge amount of time on implementation, and then it will be impossible to change.

That's when it makes sense to switch back to something like Webflow.

I've seen this happen multiple times.

We use one of those headless CMS already. You have a point. It works for us for now, we will see how it turns out. You need a bit of discipline to execute it.

Webflow does seem to at least dogfood their own product.

https://webflow.com/blog/webflow-at-webflow

But the big issue seems to be that they're not marketing anything to the developers. They're marketing everything at the managers -- particularly the kind of manager that doesn't really understand software.

Also, agencies who build and design websites.

That site looks tidy. It's clean, modern, and pleasant to watch. Your team did a great job.

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