callmevlad

I absolutely don't think this is the case, and paradoxically something like Webflow actually creates more demand for coders and software engineers. Today, only 0.25% of the world knows how to write code, meaning the amount of software being created is limited to that subset of the population. No-code tools potentially will raise that percentage to 25% or even higher, meaning 2 orders of magnitude more people are potentially starting new software projects – however small initially.

Inevitably, those projects will need more functionality than visual or declarative abstractions currently allow, which raises demand for code-based developers. Code will always outpace higher-order tools in flexibility and power, and coders will always be in demand.

Think of it like what happened with spreadsheets... initially there was a lot of fear that moving e.g. financial modeling workflows from e.g. Pascal, etc to visual spreadsheets might make developers less relevant. But that's the opposite of what happened.

Sure, there might be some developers who only do very basic tasks like converting a PSD file to HTML/CSS, but that started fading out as a highly sought out skill even before Webflow was prevalent. But there will always be a need for devs, and there's a massive shortage of them in the world still, so I'm honestly a lot less worried about this.

Yes, she is now, thank you for asking!

(continued from OP)

Now came the time to get users. We were targeting mostly designers and non-technical folks – so we posted it on Digg (heh, remember those days?), Reddit, and several designer-centric forums. But none of those posts got any meaningful traction. We were at a loss.

Then, with tempered expectations about how a visual development tool for designers would be received in the hacker community, we posted here to HN. The title was “Show HN: Webflow – design responsive websites visually” [1] and we crossed our fingers really hard at this last-ditch effort.

What happened next was nothing short of life-changing. The post took off like wildfire, staying at #1 for the entire day. Incredible words of encouragement were all over the comments. Over 25,000 people signed up for our beta list. VentureBeat wrote a story about us that same day. Tons of people started talking about Webflow on Twitter, Reddit, etc as a result. This led to a ton of word of mouth and even more signups.

This amazing traction helped us get into YC several months later, gave us momentum to raise some funding from some angel investors, and most importantly gave us the confidence that we were truly on to something that can be really valuable for the world.

Since then, Webflow has grown to millions of users, over a hundred thousand customers, and over 200 team members. I still have to pinch myself when I see that Webflow has somehow become one of the top YC companies of all time. Out of our customers, tens of thousands use Webflow exclusively to make a living – to run an agency, build websites and light applications, create websites for clients, or for their own startups. Tons of YC startups (e.g. lattice.com, hellosign.com, many many more) now use Webflow to run their marketing.

I’m 1000% convinced that if that HN post did not take off, we would have gone back to our jobs and that early Webflow demo would have been a mere mention on our resumes somewhere. Thousands of people wouldn’t be empowered to build for the web the way they can now. I can’t imagine what that alternate future would be like, and it hinged seemingly on just one submission to this community.

So this is a very belated, but very huge THANK YOU to HN for being kind to a trio of co-founders who wanted to make something valuable for the world, and were at the end of their rope in many ways. You gave us confidence, hope, encouragement, and a lifeline that got us through the lows of building a startup.

Thank you, thank you, thank you!!!

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5407499

Bingo :)

Thank you so much for the kind words, and so happy to see that you've found Webflow to be so useful! Go Blanka!

I honestly don't think it was a mistake the first time. We had almost nothing to show for what we wanted to build, it must have looked like a toy at the time. Our first application was more of a "fancier web inspector plugin" with no validation that there was a market for such a thing – I probably would have made the same exact call if I was sitting on the admissions/evaluation side.

Thank you, Glen!

Thanks Brandon!

Yes, you can! https://university.webflow.com/article/embed

One thing to note is that we're also creating visual abstractions over common things that are hand-coded with JS. For example, see our declarative GUI for interactions and animations [1] – it allows designers to get the same exact effects that you'd build out manually, but without the need to learn how to write that JS from scratch.

[1] https://webflow.com/interactions-animations

That is, in fact, our main differentiator – and the main reason people choose Webflow. Check out this very diverse set of sites [1] that can be built with Webflow, this ability to visually develop any kind of custom layout/experience really does go a long way to distance us from any competitors.

[1] https://webflow.com/discover/popular

Hey HN! I'm Vlad, CEO and one of the co-founders of Webflow.

It was over 6 years ago now, a just several months a rejection email from YC and a few weeks from being essentially bankrupt (my daughter had an unexpected surgery while we had only catastrophic health insurance), we posted a Show HN about Webflow (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5407499). It was our last "hail mary" to show something tangible to the world before promising our partners to go back to our old jobs to actually get some income again.

Luckily, the Show HN took off like wildfire and we stuck to the #1 spot nearly all day. Tens of thousands of people signed up for our beta. This really helped us reapply to YC with tons more traction (and boundless confidence this time), and we were lucky enough to get in to the next batch.

We're now a team of over 120 people across 20 countries, serving billions of requests for tens of thousands of paying customers. I'm very confident that we wouldn't have been able to achieve this had the HN post not taken off here, and we're so thankful for the positive reception. Luckily, we didn't get those funny "I can build this in a day with some bash scripts!" kinds of comments :)

Even though it's been many years since then, we're still on the same mission to empower millions more people to build powerful websites (and increasingly, more powerful software!) without code. We believe that in the end, democratizing software creation will multiply the potential of the internet, likely by at least an order of magnitude.

A HUGE and humble thank you to the community here, and for your support way back when!

A quick clarification - the output of Webflow actually works across all modern browsers, but the design tool itself has more limited browser support.

One of the biggest challenges with Firefox has been the inability to style native scrollbars to become dark with CSS – theres a decade+ long issue/conversation around making that happen: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=77790. Eventually, we gave up waiting on native support, and now working towards converting scrollbars to be JavaScript-driven to support Firefox (otherwise the white scrollbars stick out like a sore thumb in a dark UI).

Here's a direct link to the playground that skips the landing page: https://webflow.com/css-grid-playground :)

Hello again, HN!

Almost 6 years ago to the day, I received an email from YC about our application being rejected – I still remember that feeling of almost wanting to give up, but also weirdly motivated to keep going and try again. Despite the setback, my brother Sergie and close friend Bryant and I kept working on creating a prototype that people could actually play with – and a few months later we posted our first Show HN about Webflow (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5407499).

What we showed was very limited and barely worked (you can still see it by following the link above), but thankfully the post took off and over 25,000 people signed up to see our beta in just a few days. We were in awe of the power of HN, and I can honestly say our company wouldn't be here today had it not been for the warm reception and encouragement of this community in that original Show HN post.

Today, we're releasing a brand new CSS playground similar to our first one, this time showing off the amazing power of CSS Grid, which brings a whole new level of power and creativity to the web – especially to those people who struggle with learning to code. It's one small step on our bigger vision to democratize software creation beyond the 0.25% of the world that knows how to code - by offering a visual abstraction over things like CSS Grid, we can actually get more people to understand the principles behind CSS, box model, responsive layout, inheritance, etc. We've also found that tools like this are super useful to backend-focused engineers that don't have much experience in frontend work, at least as a way to ease into frontend.

We'd love to hear any and all feedback! Support for grid autoflow as well as grid template areas is coming in the next few months, but currently manual placement, FR units, and minmax are all supported.

The CSS Grid playground currently works in desktop Chrome/Safari/Brave/Vivaldi, but we're still working on Firefox and tablet support – our apologies if you're seeing an unsupported browser message :\

What we posted got shared in various other places (Designer News, Twitter, Reddit, etc), which might we why it was higher. But Hacker News was definitely the catalyst of it all.

Thanks for sharing this, Sam!

It’s rendered on the server with React + Apollo + GraphQL, just like all the other Webflow-powered websites out there! ;)

Yeah, the first year even after YC funding was very tough. Long story short: sold a car, borrowed a ton on those credit card write-yourself-a-check 2% balance transfer deals (thankfully had good credit to be able to do that), and withdrew early from an IRA (those penalties hurt!) - wouldn’t recommend :)

Thanks! And sorry for the FF snag - we’re working on supporting Firefox later this year!

Nearly 5 years ago, a few months after being rejected from YC and a few weeks from being essentially bankrupt (my daughter had an unexpected surgery while we had only catastrophic health insurance), my brother and I posted a Show HN about Webflow (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5407499). It was our last-ditch attempt to show a proof-of-concept to the world before going back to our old bosses to ask for our jobs back.

Thankfully, the post took off - we were #1 for most of the day, and over 25,000 people signed up for our beta list in the several days after that post. This helped us reapply to YC with a lot more confidence and traction, and we were able to get into the next batch.

Webflow (https://webflow.com/) has since grown into a profitable business with close to 1,000,000 users all over the world, billions of website requests served, and close to 60 team members in over 14 countries. I'm pretty sure none (or very little) of this would be possible without HN and the community here, and the super positive reception our post had.

Today, we're on a mission to enable more people to create powerful software without having to learn how to code - we probably have decades to make that vision a reality, but we're on a decent start in large part thanks to our launch on HN.

A HUGE thank you to the community here!

It seems like you've posted in the wrong thread. Companies hiring should post here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15384262

> "But at the end of the day, you have to know CSS anyway"

If you string-replace "CSS" with "assembly", most of Bret Victor's "The Future of Programming" [1] still seems to apply. People used to argue this passionately that knowing how to write assembly by hand was critical to being a good programmer.

> "Love it or loathe it, you must at least learn it."

This might be true today, but it would be a shame if tooling didn't level up to a degree where CSS becomes mostly a compile target (just like assembly is today).

At the end of the day, CSS provides styling tools for a massive medium, one that should be accessible much further beyond the 0.25% of the world that knows how to code. The main way we can unlock that is with better tools and better abstractions. It's wholly unrealistic to get everyone to be as good at hand-crafting CSS as the author, nor should it be the goal.

CSS is getting more and more powerful and more complex, and it's unrealistic for folks to continue hand-crafting in perpetuity. Even today, with some of the world's best software engineers, I routinely see this:

* Most devs don't know how to create a radial gradient from memory

* Most devs don't know how to hand code shape-outside code, especially polygon

* Most devs guess-and-check repeatedly as they work with Flexbox props and use cheatsheets even after years of practice (while designers are running circles around them using visual abstractions like [2])

* CSS Grid minmax formats, don't get me started...

I personally love crafting CSS by hand, there's a certain satisfaction to it. But if that's the primary way that folks are styling stuff on the web 5 years from now, to me that would imply that we did a bad job of exposing this wonderful technology to orders of magnitude more people.

---

[1] http://worrydream.com/dbx/

[2] https://www.flexboxgame.com/

Webflow | Frontend & Backend Engineers | San Francisco | ONSITE or REMOTE | Full Time | $100k-$160k + equity

Heya HN! We launched here almost 5 years ago [0], and now we're looking to add a few more engineers across the stack to round out our team.

On the frontend, we really push the boundaries of what's possible in the browser. Here are some examples of the types of visual tools we build here: [1] [2] [3] [4] - and that's just scratching the surface. Our frontend stack is based on React, Flux, Redux, Flow, Immutable.js, GraphQL, Apollo, CSS-in-JS, etc.

On the backend, we run an entire hosting platform that scales to millions of requests across hundreds of thousands of websites and applications. There's a healthy mix of Node.js, GraphQL, MongoDB, Redis, Rancher, Terraform, Docker - and whole slew of AWS services (we love Lambda!).

Most of us work remotely (across 10 countries, primarily US and EU timezones), and we have a strong design-and-engineering-driven culture. We all care deeply about building powerful tools for the open web platform to empower millions more people to create for the web, because learning to code is so hard that only 0.25% of the world knows how to to do it. If you've ever seen Bret Victor's "Inventing on Principle" talk (google it!) and really resonated with it, this is the team for you!

We're stable, cash flow positive (so no need ask VCs for $$$), and building a product which truly changes people's lives (there are thousands of people across the world now making a living using Webflow to build professional sites [6] for others).

We're looking for senior-level engineers that have had significant experience building production SaaS applications, but we also consider more junior-level engineers who have a track record of learning quickly.

If you are interested, send me a personal note (email in my profile) - I'd love to chat more!

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5407499

[1] http://3d-transforms.webflow.com/

[2] https://webflow.com/feature/interactions-v2

[3] https://webflow.com/designer

[4] https://www.flexboxgame.com/

[5] https://webflow.com/hosting

[6] https://webflow.com/discover/popular

As far back as 4 years ago, it was standard practice to have revenue/growth/traction info published in TC - e.g. https://techcrunch.com/2013/08/20/y-combinator-demo-day-summ...

Yep, I posted about Webflow's submission in a similar thread a while back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12032849

Status update from Google: https://twitter.com/GoogleforWork/status/776079823773044736

Congrats Steve, Scott, and Danny!

Wow, that is wonderful to hear! :) Definitely a huge thanks to the HN community, which was so supportive when we first launched (and ever since)!

Wix is targeted directly at small businesses who create their own web presence by using a template and filling in some details (text, images, etc).

Webflow is a much more professional tool targeted at web designers, freelancers, and agencies who create custom responsive websites, usually from scratch (or from a professional template as a starting point). That is, people who create websites for others. To be successful with Webflow, our users need to think somewhat like a developer (e.g. understand the box model, understand how CSS works in principle, etc), so the learning curve is a bit steeper.

For example, everything you see on https://webflow.com/ is built visually in Webflow and deployed to staging and production by non-engineers. There's a full database there with over 20 tables representing different content types, with a complex schema (e.g. blog posts, case studies, testimonials, job posts, templates, tags, etc), all the pages are custom responsive layouts - and all this was created without writing code.

None of this would be possible with Wix, Squarespace, Weebly, etc - since those are limited to their available templates. Most of the sites created in Webflow (see https://webflow.com/discover/popular for some examples) can only be recreated in Webflow or by writing code by hand, no other visual "WYSIWYG" builder comes even close.

You can think of Webflow as a much more evolved Dreamweaver, or a purely visual next-generation WordPress - minus all the code :)

Thank you, that truly means a lot!

At first (in late 2012), we tried every single frontend framework available - including Backbone, Angular, Spine, and SproutCore (which ended up becoming Ember) - but they were all too slow for what we were doing. React wasn't yet a thing, and the only library that we found that worked fast enough was Knockout.js, so we went with that in the early days.

Since then, we've refactored 90%+ of the app (which is now approaching a million lines of code) to React/Flux/Immutable.js, with the remaining 10% not far behind.

The rest of the stack is nearly 99.9% JavaScript - including Node/Express/Mongo/Mongoose/Redis/nginx+more on the backend side of things.

We're hoping to post a lot more about our full stack in the future, especially since we're rolling out our dynamic website hosting stack worldwide (there's a lot of interesting S3/Lambda/CloudFront/Fastly goodies in there).

The biggest challenge is probably dealing with the huge array of different sites that people build, which range from small one-page marketing sites to huge 1000+ page dynamic web apps. Since Webflow is not template-based (like Weebly, Wix, Squarespace, etc) but rather allows designers to build up a site from scratch (including defining their own DOM nodes and CSS classes), we have to create JSON-based abstractions that need to work in a backwards-compatible way even as we add new features to Webflow.