Weebly Valued at $455M Amid Website-Building Boom | Hacker News Reader

Weebly Valued at $455M Amid Website-Building Boom

blogs.wsj.com

131 pointscsmajorfive89 comments

hey everyone, happy to answer any questions you have! worth pointing out that we've also launched a new home page (check out the video, pretty fun), we have a pretty kick-ass new eCommerce platform we launched last Nov, and we're also launching some pretty awesome new themes this week -- you can see two previews here:

http://purplehazetheme.weebly.com/ http://collectiontheme.weebly.com/

Congrats David. The new homepage looks super clean. Excited to see what the future has to offer for Weebly.

Why is there a limit on password length for a Weebly account? How are you storing passwords?

Pretty sure this is a vestige of times past. We should definitely allow longer passwords.

We salt and hash all passwords using a variable-cost bcrypt implementation.

With bcrypt you should set a limit of 72 bytes to avoid fooling users into thinking the stuff beyond the 72nd byte matters (bcrypt truncates it.)

Why should I have to choose a different, shorter password because of your implementation details? Seems like an unnecessary annoyance.

It is annoying, but it is necessary to avoid users choosing longer passwords where the necessary randomness is beyond the 72nd byte. Allowing a password of unlimited length when you support only e.g. 20 or 50 bytes is just as bad as putting in a maximum length restriction when you don't have one. Ideally, just use scrypt or PBKDF2, which don't have length restrictions.

I wouldn't want to limit the password a user supplies. Any password should work, including 1 byte or 1 gb passwords. Restrictions of any form have always just caused more problems than they've solved.

But the solution I've favored is hashing the user's password on the client with a hash that provides enough significant bits that your key derivation on the server is not weakened. This way you get the benefit of not needing to deal with differences in transmission size and the user's plaintext password is never exposed to any listener (regardless of whether the connection is secure, or believed to be secure).

Your passwords are routinely longer than 72 bytes, and this is an inconvenience?

Or hash it first using SHA3. Then you get the slowness of bcrypt (which is what you're using it for) and the variable length input of SHA3. You're only risk is a SHA3 collision, which is not something that is realistically going to happen.

Yep. Absolutely.

We fixed the password limit. Thanks for the great feedback.

Now that, folks, is how you take care of your users. Other startups (Coinbase I'm looking at you...) would do well to take note.

Hey, just a small point: the link to your "Plans & Pricing" page from Google (search for Weebly) just goes to your homepage. I'm interested in that information before I sign up.

In new theme pricing and options seems to be hidden for non-registered users... To bad.

We're fixing that!

I agree. Was interested in signing up or at least seeing how much it cost but there is no link from menu for plans and pricing... Pretty big deal breaker for me.

Went to sign up but sign up page was on a non SSL page. I don't like sending passwords in the clear.

It's free to sign up for an account and start making sites with it, and you can easily transition to a paid plan after trying it out or even remian on a free one.

How big is your team now?

120

The video is really nice but the site is really hard to navigate. The scrolling on the front page is really wonky (I use a regular mouse on PC and I have to scroll the wheel about a dozen times before the page goes down), browser back navigation is totally broken when you have the menu open, the menu is really hidden it almost feels like you're not supposed to use it. I was trying to find the list of features and it took me a while to even see the menu with the features page. Maybe add a "see more features" on the front page where you list the most important ones to take you to the more detailed view.

The app itself is very nice.

Are you doing a Denton/Kinja thing with the "editmysite.com" dependency?

Would love to get know (knoxpayments.com) as a payment option on the weebly ecommerce platform. Anyway we can do that, do we need to build a plugin?

How do I get in touch for feature requests or to report bugs I've been using Weebly for a couple weeks to sell my new product and there are two things with it that I think might be easy to fix that are kind of really annoying for me in what would otherwise be a perfect experience.

I tried your feature request voting website but it didn't seem like my suggestions showed up at all after submitting them.

feel free to email me directly at david@weebly.com, i always love hearing about the things that aren't working perfectly.

What % of resources does Weebly devote to personal websites (www.myname.com) versus business websites (www.mycompany.com)?

60% of people starting something on Weebly consider themself an entrepreneur. The majority of people are doing things like http://thewhiskeyball.com or http://unfoldyogaoc.com or http://ourtable.us. That's what we focus on.

There are plenty of people using Weebly for personal projects or educational purposes (teachers, professors, students), but our core focus is entrepreneurs.

I'm one of those people using it for personal projects. I'm a member of a local air cadet unit and i use weebly to run a webste for the unit that is used primarily to communicate info with the other members of the program and the unit. Weebly is a fantastic tool and I enjoy all of the improvements tha you guys have been making!

I would like only answer for one question. Are your paid members above 1% of all accounts, or below?

Are you guys pursuing Real Estate and Restaurant Industries[1] ? Both industries continue to produce some of the worst websites.

[1]http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2011/08/...

We are focused on real estate. Check out http://www.Everdwell.com

Here are a few example sites:

http://2200pacific.everdwell.com http://465diamond.com/

Do you have any API or importer? I'm involved with an vertical which sometimes don't even have a website set up.

I don't want to be in the web site or CMS business. I've sufficient metadata from my application to export enough information to generate a single page website for these clients. How can I send them your way?

Can we take pre-orders with your e-commerce platform?

Purple Haze isn't purple at all!

"happy to answer any questions you have" - well for now it looks like you are rather selective with answering them...

Any chance of getting custom template editing for the mobile sites?

Would love to add some buttons to page and what not.

I remember having a look at a friends Weebly sites and couldn't help but notice you insert your own Google Analytics tracking code on every website without any option to remove it. Is this still the standard for Weebly sites? If so is this a part of the business model? Do you plan on allowing people to opt out?

Honestly, it's just for our own reporting purposes so we can understand the traffic on the network a bit more. We don't use it in any nefarious way or to monetize, it's just informational to help us scale.

Here's a small list of problems found from a quick test.

1. It's monolingual.

2. It's mono-currency.

3. It has a hidden schedule of fees like ripoff domain name registration with unwanted extra features, support for requisite features like SSL support (duh!) and shipping calculations.

4. It's not clear for which jurisdictions/product types you support tax calculations, or whether multi-party split revenue models are supported (eg. for dropship scenarios, digital product retailing eg. online content). Dynamic pricing also looks like it's not supported .. common digital retailing operations might use this, eg. for Hollywood content.

5. It's unclear to me based in China whether or not I can receive payments through your system.

6. It has no support for communities (eg. hosted forums) which despite not being Web2.0 are actually pretty cool for building customers for ecommerce operations.

7. The actual build bit seems almost completely disconnected from the plan bit, which mostly talks in gross generalities about the build bit without making you do it. The link between the two could be improved.

8. Dogecoin support?

Congrats on getting rich.

David, great work on the new landing page!

I'd love to know what's your take on third party integrations with Weebly - are you guys working on an App Store or this is only doable through partnerships? If only partnerships, what's the best way reach out?

We're a platform offering customisable widgets, currently rebranding as Widgetic. I played with some widgets here: http://vuzum.weebly.com. Oana Calugar (at Weebly) has reached out to us a while ago and I agree with her, we do fit as a glove. :-)

UPDATE: Should point out that these same widgets work on any other platform too: http://blogvio.yolasite.com.

Hm. I probably shouldn't say this, since I am hoping to take advantage of it, but I am curious how you would stay relevant if a completely open source platform build around drag-and-drop Polymer/web components managed to become popular? Or even any kind of open source composable widget-based platform.

Or maybe that just isn't a concern because so far nothing like that exists?

I like the idea of Weebly, I think building web software should be based on components for the programmers and usability for users. But I don't see how a closed platform stays relevant.

I think its just that most web developers still don't understand widgets.

It's interesting how some internet startup concepts seem to keep coming back. Website building tools have gone through a number of generations, but are still relevant now. Similarly Facebook was the second wave of social networking sites. I recently saw a "pets.com" clone launching in South Africa (they got funding from Google's local seed fund)!

Marc Andreessen's aggressive stance is that the dot.com bubble was basically a "mistake". If that's correct, how would one decide that an "old" idea's time has come?

http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2012/11/01/marc-andreess...

Seems like the startup economy 'blue-screened', and has returned after a hard reset.

From the same article:

“All the dot-com ideas were correct,” he said. “They were all too early. They are happening now.”

The article's title is clickbait.

The concepts might have merit, but the challenge is many failed as sustainable and profitable businesses. Have that many underlying assumptions changed in 14 years? Probably not

There were and are a lot of web building sites besides Weebly, but weebly is the cleanest for its price by far. When I talk with small business owners I always recommend Weebly (unless I think they can do a lot of e-Commerce, in which case I recommend shopify). Weebly is the least frustrating and out of the box prettiest of the free web options.

I created a Weebly site for the first time this week. The website quality per unit-time invested has trumped any other source I've used. After a couple of hours of designing and tweaking, it's beyond minimum-viable status, and will probably persist almost unchanged for months.

Thanks Weebly!

> will probably persist almost unchanged for months

The real test of the service will be sites that require constant changing (due to SEO rewards for timely updates as much as upgrades or general content management). When I hear "probably persist almost unchanged for months" I assume you are not in a position to benefit from marketing communication.

I update mine on a weekly basis and it works pretty well for that.

I switched to Weebly after trying out Shopify. My problem with Shopify is that they nickel and dime you for every little thing you might need and Weebly was a lot easier to get going with I thought. My perspective might change as I grow but to start out it was pretty much a no brainier.

drusenko was the first speaker during my YC batch. He had one of the more profound startup slides I've seen: an exponential growth curve with minor "blips" that correlated to tech crunch articles, but never affected Weebly's trajectory.

I didn't necessarily "get it" at first, but after 2 years of watching startups of my batch mates and friends succeed or fail, I see any focus on press as a negative signal.

A good team builds a good product. A good product begets success. Success begets news coverage. These things don't work in reverse.

And Weebly is a great product. A few years ago after coding a web app for a non-profit, I considered building a service to do that for small orgs. But then I chanced upon 1 year old weebly, and was like never mind.

Anyway, congrats, and hope to see even more!

It's refreshing to see a company like Weebly that is able to be successful and profitable without having to go down the "MULTI-BILLION DOLLAR UNICORN OR BUST" path that seems to be almost mandated by VCs nowadays.

It's something the guys at 37Signals preach as well - Better to be a "lifestyle business" that's profitable, makes millions of dollars in profit per year, and may take a decade or two to reach a $1 billion valuation, than to have a multi-billion dollar valuation a few years in (via large growth funding rounds) but not make a cent of profit for the first decade of your existence, all the while having your ownership of the business reduced down to 5% or whatever.

I've never used a site like Weebly, Wix, or Shopify, though I have seen Squarespace's interface when someone was building a site one time and my dad used Weebly after I recommended it to him (seemed easy to use).

I'm curious their main sources of customer acquisition. I assume a lot of its word-of-mouth and organic, but I'm curious how much marketing they do. Squarespace has been huge in the podcast space doing advertising and did that big Super Bowl ad splash. Wix seems to have been around for a while so I see many of their out-dated designed sites.

Edit: I did just get retargeted via Facebook ads exchange after visiting Weebly's site, so they are doing at least some advertising :)

I run a small web shop and have dealt with Wix. Big warning to those considering it or recommending it to friends. Wix uses AJAX extensively and doesn't support 301 redirects. If you are moving a site to Wix there's no way to file 301 redirects (kiss your search engine placement goodbye). If you're moving from a Wix site, the hashbangs used in the file URL's make it almost impossible to create redirects to your new site's pages.

Haven't checked out Weebly yet but I hope they took a "standards approach" to their sites/code and allow for proper redirects.

Update: Very pleased to see this: http://kb.weebly.com/301-redirects.html

Wix comes from a flash site only background where SEO/Standards are hard to make work.

That explains it! I was shocked when my client called me in a panic because their site dropped off a cliff in regards to their rankings. Cost them in the neighborhood of tens-of-thousands of dollars in ad revenue and member goodwill.

I have a small, niche website business so I know a little about this (we aren't on the scale of these guys but do low 7-figures).

Wix and Squarespace at least are spending a ton on PPC customer acquisition. One analysis we saw put their AdWords spend at $10-25K per day (though, I'm not sure how accurate that is).

Also, both Wix and Squarespace advertise on terrestrial radio and television. Squarespace had a Super Bowl ad and I regularly see their ads on Shark Tank (ABC). I hear Wix ads quite often on AM radio.

Squarespace was on Inc's 5000 list in 2011 with 2010 revenues of 11.7M.

Wix went public recently. They had 2012 revenues of $43.68M with a loss of $15M [1].

In the "general purpose business website" space, I think all 3 (Wix, SS, Weebly) see it as a "winner take all / own the market" play (it probably is). So, they are all spending as much as possible to acquire customers.

Wix clearly isn't profitable. I doubt SqaureSpace is. I think it's admirable that Weebly is ... but I almost wonder if they need to spend more to compete.

Won't you include Godaddy in the "general purpose business website" space?

If you do, you need to also throw in Godaddy competitors like 1&1 etc. Many have website builders of their own.

afaik SS is claiming it is profitable and it was always breaking even. There was an interview somewhere where the owner said until recent the only outside money was $30K loan from his dad (I think it was one with Alexis Ohanian).

Got a link? Wikipedia confirms the $30K loan from dad, but can't find the interview on google.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GGPj5SOUrn8 I think thats the one. Anyways - imo its extremely interesting and worth watching.

They raised $40M last week [1] ... $78M in total [2]

Almost 300 employees, spending a ton on ad/marketing, and raising that much money–I can't see how they're profitable. I could be way wrong though.

[1] http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2014/04/15/squarespace-r...

[2] http://www.crunchbase.com/company/squarespace

...now hosts more than 20 million sites that are seen by 175 million visitors every month.

With all the caveats about average numbers, it seems that on average each site is visited by only 8 visitors per month. Are those numbers correct?

It's dangerous to assume an even spread. Numbers are reported like this because the distribution of site visits is usually confidential information. From experience, I'd guess it's something like 1 million sites holding ~70% of the visitors, with the rest spread along the tail.

The distribution of links pointing to a Web site follows a power-law distribution (few sites get most of the links) [1].

It is very likely that the number of visits follow a similar power-law distribution.

[1] http://www.sciencemag.org/content/287/5461/2115.full

I'm pretty sure this is exactly what I just said.

Thanks. I didn't assume they were evenly spread but even if we make it 175M x 70% / 1M we still have only ~120 visitors per month.

Remember that probably majority of those sites are either dead, not public and made when some people were learning how to make sites. You can put that number probably down to 10% active/public sites. If visitor number is 175m this might be unique visitors to the platform = one visitor might visit multiple sites.

Yes but in this case it would be much better to cite the number of "active sites" and not an almost meaningless 20M figure. Still, it's hard to define "active sites".

Then the number would be lower... Its all about marketing. "Unlimited", "hundreds of millions", "probably most of" sounds better than "5% of resources", "20 million active", "there is no data but we think a lot".

This

You're still assuming an even spread amongst the ones that are in that 1M. My point is it's usually hard to tell, and you should assume very few sites hold most visitors. Just keep re-applying the concept (of the 1m, 1000 account for 70% etc).

I would imagine the majority of the sites are not truly in use anyways: test sites, etc.

True. Out of the six or so I've made, only one actually gets used and updated regularly.

These are small business sites, not content oriented sites (blogs, news sites, etc). If even 8 new people see your site per month and half turn into customers - that's not bad. Talking about a daycare, a tutor, a hardware shop, etc.

I built my first website with Weebly, way back in 2010. They are one of the only ones doing it right. The clean templates, drag-and-drop features, and no-nonsense hosting is amazing. When you don't want to code a website and want to build it quick, Weebly is somewhat better than even WordPress, as long as you don't need to use a lot of plugins.

We made a basic weebly site for our small home daycare provider. Then she took it over, it was really easy for her and the site looks great. I'm very impressed with weebly.

What Weebly understands (that many website builders don't) is that a "blank canvas" is not the correct metaphor for building a website.

Instead a website needs structured sections (such as navigation, logo, footer etc.) as well as "blank canvas" areas (such as the body of the content).

They always seem to nail this tension.

Congratulations to David and Weebly- they consistently ship amazing features!

PS - My background: I've written in-depth reviews of 40+ website builders.

Weebly is the best marketing website builder on the planet for non-technical users, not surprised to see it's also growing quickly. I still use Wordpress (WPEngine) for my company, but it's really overkill for your average small or local business, unless the owner is into computers and the internet.

I sometimes do pro bono websites for local businesses I run into. I used to do Google AppEngine sites, but then I switched to Weebly for the last one I did (for my daycare lady). It was super-easy both for me to set up, and then when I handed it off to her, she was able to edit it and make it really what she wanted. Between a Weebly site, and getting the existing customers to leave Yelp reviews, she ended up getting a lot of new kids from the online presence.

Awesome story. I did a similar pro-bono job for this sweet old couple that run a music school together, even with their very limited understanding of technology they were able to figure out weebly. If technologically-illiterate people can figure out how to use their interface, there is really no limit to the markets that they can target.

I really love using Weebly for helping friends and family who are non-technical.

Getting a basic website up is simple. To contrast I tried other website builders and weebly was the most functional and intuitive for me.

Great job David and team!

Does anyone know if there's a way to hire a person or company to build a custom weebly template?

I think weebly offered this service themselves a few years ago but now I can't seem to find the option.

Kris from Red Door Designs does this.

http://www.reddoordesigns.com/

It's amazing to realize that even a monster success like Weebly (which among other things has made each of its founders vastly wealthy) is basically a roundoff error on Dropbox + Airbnb ($455m/($10b + $10b) = 0.02275).

Some things grow (relatively) slow, some things grow faster. The important thing is to keep growing and not die.

> The important thing is to keep growing and not die.

This statement only applies to the founders, employees, and customers of the company. My point is that it doesn't apply to the investors: from an investor perspective, it doesn't matter if almost every company dies as long as the Droboxes and Airbnbs survive and grow. Almost all the returns come from a tiny number of outrageous successes, to the point where even a big hit like Weebly is a drop in the bucket.

I am trying to build a CMS which focuses on data architecture and powerful page generation using javascript on the server http://getsimplesite.com/ . It's still in beta though.

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