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Comment by AndrewWarner | Hacker News Reader

I just booked an interview with him for Mixergy.

Anything I should know about Weebly? Or that I should ask about?

This is one of the startups that applied to YC at the last moment. IIRC David applied about half an hour before the deadline and didn't even have time to tell his cofounders he was doing it.

I usually ask YC founders why they think you picked them. I wonder the reverse. Why you picked him.

For young founders (they were still in college) they seemed unusually formidable.

Ask about how and when they scaled their team. They built this beast on a small amount of angel money, by keeping a small team. Their profitability allowed them to scale the company how and when they wanted to. I'd also ask them about their price/funnel/etc optimizations. These guys have a lot of traffic - so small changes have moved the needle a lot. Easily one of my favorite business in San Francisco.

They run 2% of the websites on the internet:

http://www.weebly.com/jobs.php => "Running 2% of all of the websites on the Internet presents some very interesting technical challenges."

I would be really interested in their metric of "counting websites", especially in today's mostly dynamic internet.

Do they count Facebook/Google, too?

I have heard these guys run a great service, however that seems like an amazing statement. 2% seems like a massive amount - especially considering the international reach that I suspect would be needed. Anyone have any stats to back that up or how they came to that number?

I'd be interested too, if we assume 1 user = 1 website, that means they have 20% of the websites that webs inc has (http://www.webs.com/company.htm) which translates as webs inc running 10% (!!) of the internet's websites, which is an incredible figure too.

One user can have up to 10 free websites in their account (and unlimited "designer platform" websites too) so more than 1 website is the average per user.

I spoke with David a few months ago. He said that the percentage was based on the number of active websites, which according to http://www.whois.sc/internet-statistics/ is 139,902,673.

I don't know for sure if Weebly uses this number to calculate the percentage. But probably not, since it only indicates ~2.8 million Weebly websites, and they claim 11 million (7.8% of that active domain number).

Isn't this the number of domain names that point to a nameserver rather than the number of websites?

By that metric MySpace hosts about 100% of all websites, and YouTube hosts 100 000% of all TV channels.

So you're saying their potential growth is limited by a factor of 50? Heh.

Jessica Livingston interviewed him a while ago. You could pick up the thread from there.

Edit: Here it is - http://vimeo.com/10123713

He spoke at YCNYC and really hammered on the 'trough of sorrow' where they didn't think it was going to work out. I think there is definitely some inspiring back story there.

David has written a bit about how they got their initial traction in his blog. Can you ask him to comment on how Weebly got their users later on - word of mouth (they have a very high net promoter score), SEO, etc?

I am a huge fan of David. He helped us in a moment of crisis purely in a pay it forward way.

Ask what he believes drives his 80 percent Net Promoter Score. Also ask if in that number matches with his actual experience (IE, is that how they're seeing growth actually come in).

Looking forward to that interview. Weebly is the kind of company we should hear more about.

ask about the company culture. they have a really great and interesting one.

Thanks. What's interesting about it? What should I know about the culture?

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