Putting People First as a Founder with Vlad Magdalin of Webflow

Courtland Allen: 7s

What’s up everybody? This is Courtland from IndieHackers.com, and you are listening to the Indie Hackers podcast. On this show, I talk to the founders of profitable internet businesses and I try to get a sense of what it’s like to be in their shoes. How did they get to where they are today? How do they make decisions at their companies and in their personal lives, and what, exactly, makes their businesses tick?

And the goal here, as always, is so that the rest of us can learn from their example and go on to build our own successful online businesses. Today, I’m talking to Vlad Magdalin, the CEO of Webflow. Vlad, welcome to the show.

Vlad Magdalin: 37s

Thank you. It’s great to be here.

Courtland Allen: 38s

It’s great to have you. Can you tell us a little bit about what Webflow is, how big the company is, how well it’s doing? Because I think you’ve been able to build something pretty remarkable.

Vlad Magdalin: 48s

Thanks, yes. Webflow is a new category. We call it a visual software development platform. It’s a way to build software. You can think of that as websites and applications visually, without writing code.

We started out as a website builder, almost a web design and web publishing platform but are graduating more and more into more complicated types of software. We’re at 155 people as of this morning, which has been growing gradually over the last seven years. We started with just my brother and I.

But doubling our customer base almost every year, we have close to 70,000 customers. People are building some awesome things on it, have a great team all over the world. We’re about 70% remote across 20 countries, 30-plus different states. I’m having fun doing that.

Courtland Allen: 1m 37s

I think I remember reading an article from you from a year and a half ago where you were already making, I think, $10 million a year in revenue, projecting to more than double that. Is there a point at which you look at yourself in the mirror and you’re like, “I’ve made it. I’ve done it.”?

Vlad Magdalin: 1m 52s

That definitely hasn’t happened yet, and I absolutely don’t look at revenue as that metric. It’s a nice lagging indicator, but honestly that’s just helpful in helping us reach our full mission, which is to empower a lot more people to build software. Right now it’s a tiny percentage of the world that’s able to build software, people who know how to code. So it feels like we’re maybe 5% there.

People are just starting to see the potential of this. So it definitely doesn’t feel like we’ve made it yet, although I could say maybe seven years ago when we were first starting out, it felt as certain points that we made it just by surviving, being able to be ramen profitable and not worrying about running out of money. That felt a milestone in making it. But right now it feels like we still have a lot more to do.

Courtland Allen: 2m 40s

Well we’ve got a lot to talk about. I want to talk about what you alluded to, which is the no-code movement and the fact that right now we live in a world where primarily the people creating things online are developers, but we’re moving towards a world where lots more people who aren’t developers are going to be building interactive, cool websites and applications.

I want to talk a little bit about fund raising, because on this show I don’t exactly feature that many businesses who’ve raised a ton of money. I’ve been accused by some of being a VC basher, but now I’ve got you on the podcast.

Vlad Magdalin: 3m 8s

Me too, by the way.

Courtland Allen: 3m 11s

Well you’ve got an interesting perspective because you hit profitability before raising money. I think you guys have raised $75 million, an insane amount. It will be cool to get your perspective on whether or not the things said on this show about venture capitalists are true.

But I first want to start by talking about ideas and choosing what to work on, because I’ve noticed this pattern with lots of companies that I’ve spoken to, that although intuitively it seems that to start a successful business you need to invent something that’s brand new, you need to solve some unsolved problem. A lot of the most successful companies that I’ve talked to solve a boring, straightforward problem that’s been around forever.

Webflow is enabling people to create websites and applications. People have been doing that for ages. Our mutual friend, Lynne Tye, she has a company called Key Values, she helps developers find jobs at software companies. People have been doing that before. I just talked to John O’Nolan. He’s helping bloggers publish content online. People have been doing that before.

But I think there’s something to solving one of these perennial problems that people find a need to solve, and then bringing a more creative solution than what exists already in the market. Why don’t we start at the beginning? How did you come up with the idea for Webflow, and why weren’t you dissuaded by the fact that people were already building websites?

Vlad Magdalin: 4m 24s

Yes, it’s a good question. By the way, small little aside, Lynne that you mentioned, she built her business, Key Values, on Webflow. So it helped her bootstrap her company, which always makes me happy in seeing success cases like that.

The original idea, you know a lot of people had the same idea around, “How do we make making website easier?” Just like a lot of people thought search was a solved problem in the ‘90s and then Google came along and did it slightly better. I think we’re in the same boat where we just saw this.

Because I was a web developer, I was working with a lot of designers, taking Photoshop files, turning them into DCMSs. I just kept repeating over and over. And at some point I was doing this so much that it became more and more obvious that there has to be a better way.

But I won’t claim credit that it was some magical insight that I had. It was a specific video that I saw that I think every maker and every creator should see called “Inventing on Principal” by Bret Victor. Seeing that talk, it’s a maybe 50-minute talk around creating games and doing animation and this broader concept of direct manipulation, but more importantly the principal behind why you do the work you do, what drives you.

Seeing that video and being a designer and a 3D animator and a developer all at once, it just sparked that idea of, “holy crap.” The kinds of tools that we can have in animation land, the kind of tools we already have for game design and level design, the tools we have in digital publishing, all those things can be married together to front end and back end development and make it a much more human type of interface. That’s when it was boom, this has to be a product and a thing.

But I didn’t even think that there was a huge market opportunity. It was more like how do I solve this problem for myself and for my brother who I partnered with to build websites for clients. So it was like, “How do I make our life easier?” Not how do we make billions of dollars or create this world-changing product. It was much more meager ambitions at that point.

Courtland Allen: 6m 27s

So what was your plan if you were to build this tool and make your life easier? Would you just continue doing agency work?

Vlad Magdalin: 6m 34s

Yes. It was just us two. We were working mostly with businesses in Sacramento, mostly dentists, sometimes orthodontists. Started with my dad’s boss who was a dentist and went out from there.

We thought, “I could make more money for my family.” I had kids at the time already. I could make a better living, put a little bit more money away for college or whatever and just be more efficient with creating these websites. So it was only thinking of that, how do we save ourselves a little bit of time?

Courtland Allen: 7m 4s

At what point did you start thinking that this could be something that you could turn into a fully-fledged business that other people would want to use and wouldn’t just be for you and your brother?

Vlad Magdalin: 7m 13s

I think that was more gradual, seeing a lot of the success cases around that time. This was late 2011, early 2012, where more and more businesses like Weebly, like Squarespace, like WordPress, etc., started becoming prominent and started to see that as like, “Hey, maybe there’s a product opportunity here and not just a tool that we create for ourselves.”

At some point, somebody encouraged us to apply to Y Combinator. The questions that they ask there led us to think more around the opportunity. They ask, “What are you inventing? What are you creating that doesn’t exist? What problem does it solve?” Later on in the application it asks, “How are you going to make money?”

Some of the earliest times we were like, oh, we have to think about this is going to be productized and what value it brings to people and to businesses, and that led us to think more strategically around, is there a business here?

But even then, during that process, the first time we applied with thought it was just going to be us. We didn’t know the need to scale, add more people as you build a complex product. We just thought that we could build everything ourselves. We were a little bit naïve in that sense. But it gradually started becoming more clear that we’re going to have to turn this into a bigger company in order to deliver the initial product that we wanted.

Courtland Allen: 8m 39s

I want to dwell on this point for a little bit, where you looked out on the ecosystem and you saw there was Weebly, there was Wix, there’s Squarespace. These are all website building tools, so if you don’t know how to code you can use one of those to create a website.

I think the vast majority of people, if they look out and see a bunch of other companies doing a great job at something they think, “Oh, I’m too late. If only we had done this a little earlier. We’re too late. These companies are huge. There’s no reason for our thing to exist.” Why didn’t you think that?

Vlad Magdalin: 9m 5s

I actually did think that and believe it or not, I started Webflow three different times before 2012, starting all the way back in 2005. And at different times I saw these products come out and I got discouraged. I was like, “OK. So Weebly got into these accelerators and they raised money from Sequoia,” and it was game over for me.

I think the key insight in 2012 when I saw this video from Bret Victor was one very specific new technology that came around into browsers called responsive design that none of these tools had. And that’s the part that I was doing a lot.

My brother would do the photoshop design of a new website and I would translate into code with HTML and CSS. But mostly in CSS there’s something called breakpoints that none of these other template-based website builders even had.

Adobe didn’t really have a product that let you do cross breakpoint stuff where you would design one thing for desktop and go down to tablet, go down to mobile, cause all that stuff was relatively new. So that was our little hedge into the market to say, “Hey, nothing exists like this,” to do responsive design where you have one design that automatically flows down to the next version and you can make some design tweaks.

All other services forced you to have one design for all environments and you just have to zoom out or write custom code. We wanted to create something that specifically solved that problem. So we were lucky in that sense in that those companies were big enough at that point that they couldn’t move quickly to add something like that.

And everyone else was discouraged in that website builders was a solved problem. The added thing that we naively still believed that it was a huge opportunity. But a lot of people in 2012, especially investors and other startup founders were thinking about mobile.

Anybody we talked to about web at the time were like, “What are you doing? This whole medium is dying. Everyone’s working on apps and that’s the next big opportunity.” So it was as combination of having that small feature set that we could be unique in and most of the people not paying attention to the space and thinking that it is solved problem. And for us, honestly, it just seemed like a fun thing to work on.

Courtland Allen: 11m 22s

Yes. It’s crazy how some of these bigger problems that seem solved will never truly be solved because the world keeps changing. It’s like, “OK, well now there’s responsive design. Now there’s mobile. We need better website building tools” It’s not something that ever can be solved, and I think that’s one of the reasons why there’s always an entry point if you’re solving one of these previously-solved problems, one of these boring, straightforward problems.

Another thing that comes to mind is competition. Because even though you might have an edge on the features, how do you find customers? How do you compete where you have all these other companies buying out all the ad space and they have all the word of mouth and they have all the attention? How did you find your very first users for Webflow?

Vlad Magdalin: 12m 1s

This was a saving thing for us. We would be dead right now if this didn’t happen. We created a small little prototype. Sergei and I, my brother, we started the company in September 2012, and we had three months of runway.

I talked me my wife and we took all of our savings, even borrowed some against credit cards to say, “OK, we’re going to really live without income for three months. In the meantime we’re making a Kickstarter video and that’s going to get us a bunch of money.” We’re targeting 300k or something and Sergei and I would be able to live on that runway for a year or two and then build the product, get to revenue.

Courtland Allen: 12m 44s

And your wife was OK with that plan?

Vlad Magdalin: 12m 46s

With the three months. Then when three months rolled around and we were nowhere close and Kickstarter shut us down because they don’t support SaaS products and we had already invested $20k into making this video, that was our bad for not reading the terms of service, which by the way read the terms of service, before you bank your company’s future on a platform.

We ran out of money and then had to start borrowing. Three months later my daughter needed to have surgery so we were selling our car and we were planning already to move back to Sacramento and get my old job back. And we said, “OK. We have only one more month.”

My brother also wanted to move back to San Diego because he was out of money. So we said we’re just going to put together a rough prototype. It’s not even going to be a working product. It’s just an idea for what we want to build. We’ll put together this five week plan of the bare bones of what we need to ship.

We ship that, and we put it up on Product Hunt. It was a read-only thing. You can still see it. It’s playground.webflow.com. And that took off like gangbusters. It just went viral. It was the number one thing on, not Product Hunt, Hacker News. Product Hunt didn’t exist yet, so on Hacker News which was full of developers.

Here we were showing this design tool that was an abstraction over HTML and CSS, which I think is why it resonated so much because we had this side-by-side mode where you could make a change with visual UI tools and it would show exactly what code is changing in the CSS.

I think that resonated with a lot of developers, thinking, “Oh, this is like DevTools but a little more sophisticated.” That got really popular and that gave us a bunch of people on a waiting list. I think it was close to 25,000 people over just a week.

Courtland Allen: 14m 31s

Crazy.

Vlad Magdalin: 14m 32s

And then people were sharing it and saying a lot of good things about it, a lot of bad things about it too, a lot of discouraging things.

Courtland Allen: 14m 40s

Of course. It’s Hacker News, of course.

Vlad Magdalin: 14m 41s

Yes, especially thought leaders and CSS-based. You can never replace CSS, that kind of thing. But that created a pretty large list of people, that when we ended up launching an actual working product a year later, that was how long it took us to build it out, then we had a list to try to convert.

We had all these ambitions around, OK, 30,000 people, even if we convert 5% we’re going to have a really good business. But the product was so limited at the time, I think we converted 100 people. It was really discouraging, and that started going up very slowly.

That’s honestly one of the reasons why we decided to take an investment at that point, because it was just survival mode. If we didn’t do that, we literally didn’t have any other options to finance being able to invest in creating the product, because the product couldn’t sell itself yet.

Courtland Allen: 15m 37s

Yes. Seems like you were floating from lifeline to lifeline.

Vlad Magdalin: 15m 41s

At that time, yes.

Courtland Allen: 15m 43s

How did it feel to see our prototype project blow up on Hacker News and get all these subscribers after you’d been taking out credit cards and not succeeding to build what you tried for five or six months?

Vlad Magdalin: 15m 52s

We were already looking for homes back in Sacramento and my wife was discouraged. My kids were 3 and 1 at the time. We already made plans to move out, thinking that there’s no way that this is going to be - we just wanted to show the world. What happened on Hacker News was way beyond our wildest expectations. That was the biggest roller coaster of being discouraged to seeing, holy cow, this is really, really resonating.

And for once, Hacker News if you go back to that thread, people were saying positive things. I don't know what was on people’s minds then but it was an uncharacteristic day for Hacker News to be supportive for what we were building, especially with something that potentially has this air of replacing programmers potentially, even though that’s not what no-code does. We were very lucky that it took off that day.

Courtland Allen: 16m 49s

How did you support yourself for the next year when you were building this prototype and you were trying to capitalize on this thing that had taken off on Hacker News?

Vlad Magdalin: 16m 57s

I can show you my credit card statements. It was a lot of those. Thankfully I had the privilege of having good credit so I could keep borrowing, but I had a lot of credit cards that had 2% checks type of things.

It was that for a while, and then we got into YC. There was a small investment there so we were able to start paying ourselves minimum wage. Then only about six months later when we were able to raise a seed round did we start to have any sort of salaries where you could even break even on a personal level and pay for rent.

I think the promise of, “Hey, it’s working, people are signing up. People are excited about this. People are talking about this on our forum or on Twitter,” that gave enough of blind optimism that this is going to work, that I could keep everybody excited that this thing is going to come through.

Courtland Allen: 17m 49s

You had almost the exact story and path that I tell founders not to go down, not take out the credit card.

Vlad Magdalin: 17m 53s

Oh yes. I would absolutely not advise anyone to do this. It’s a paradoxical thing. We wouldn’t be here if I hadn’t done that, but I would not recommend that to a friend, to be honest. The roller coaster and the financial decisions we had to make were not prudent ones.

Courtland Allen: 18m 11s

But I think on the flip side there’s something about being under that kind of pressure of knowing you only have a month left, of knowing that you’re running out of money, that I think forces a certain level of creativity or a certain level of action.

You decided to build that protype, and maybe if you had had two years of runway you never would have done that. You would have built something much bigger, never really proved the concept.

Vlad Magdalin: 18m 30s

Yes. It was definitely all or nothing. I definitely don’t recommend this now. It was a season that we had to go through of survival mode. Right now I would never recommend especially a growing company to work those kinds of hours.

Thankfully it was super enjoyable because we got into flow state. We were building this beautiful thing that we wanted the world to see and to experience, and it was one of the bet years of my life in terms of creativity, but also one of the worst years of my life in terms of stability and uncertainty and risk.

But thankfully I was privileged enough that I knew that if everything fell through, sure I would be still in debt or whatever but at least I could go get a job back at my previous company. My old boss was hinting, like, “Hey, it would be nice to have you back,” kind of thing. Not nearly everyone has that privilege.

Courtland Allen: 19m 30s

So when you joined YC, I think they gave you $80,000.00 to fund your company, which is enough for you and your brother to pay yourselves a salary for a year, year and a half if you’re living super frugally. You had a family at the time to so probably not that long.

Vlad Magdalin: 19m 43s

At that point we had another cofounder join, Bryant. He joined a few months after we started before we got into YC. YC was like, “You have to pay yourselves a minimum wage,” so whatever that was, $12.50 an hour at that point. That was not at all sustainable. So until we were able to raise our seed round, maybe six months later, that investment was more for if we have to pay for AWS or if we have to hire a developer, maybe.

We weren’t thinking of that as, how do we divvy up $80 grand into three founders’ pockets. We were still operating in that really lean, everybody individually figures out how to cover their personal expenses, waiting for more income to come in through revenue and things like that.

Courtland Allen: 20m 29s

How did you decide that the path forward would be to raise more and more money? This is something I want to talk to you about because you have such a different perspective than others I’ve had on the podcast. I think for most people, the caution around raising money is the cost to your potential freedom. You might lock yourself in a path where essentially you’re answering to investors.

Vlad Magdalin: 20m 47s

Right, right.

Courtland Allen: 20m 48s

Your company, even if it would be successful at a smaller size now has to go way further and do way more in order to succeed. Were you weighing those questions when you decided to raise your seed round? How did you decide to make that decision rather than bootstrapping?

Vlad Magdalin: 21m 1s

Absolutely. For us, we didn’t have a choice. There was no bootstrapping option. We were maybe 20% of the way through building the product. We just needed more time. The only other option for all of us was to go back to work and moonlight again in building the product.

But I think that would have taken the market opportunity at the time. There was already a company called Easel that had launched a preview and they were already in YC. We had to think, what happens if they operate well. They ended up being sold to GitHub and then became Atom, the editor. The same team was working on it.

But it felt like we either have to raise a seed round just to be able to sustain operations, literally pay rent, not even for the company, for ourselves individually. Otherwise we’d just have to shut the company down.

It didn’t feel like a conscious choice at that point. It was like, do you want to keep surviving or do you not? Do we want to keep building? That seemed like the only avenue. Thankfully the seed environment at that time was like, you don’t have to give up any control. People are taking a flyer on you. Investors don’t meddle in operations.

Courtland Allen: 22m 11s

There’s no board seats that investors are getting.

Vlad Magdalin: 22m 12s

Absolutely. Exactly. And then, thankfully, this is where it gets tough for startups is where they raise that and they don’t get to profitability, and all of their options go out the window except to raise more.

That’s when you get more dilution, more control that starts to seep out away from founders and from the company into people that might not be aligned to your mission. You’re doing that out of desperation rather than strategically.

So for us, thankfully we had amazing early seed investors, because nobody wanted to invest in web tools at the time except people who believed in you as a person and wanted to support you as a person.

It was philosophically aligned people who just wanted to support this scrappy and passionate team. They didn’t have outside expectations for this becoming a rocket ship or whatever.

In fact one of our investors early on, this guy named Ron from Rainfall Ventures, we would do breakfasts and walks around San Francisco. He’d be like, “Why don’t you be more like the Patagonia founder who takes off six months a year to get inspired,” which is not something you expect to hear from an investor if he’s thinking long term.

We were talking about culture and how do you build teams that are kind, not things you expect from investors. And then we thankfully got to profitability or to break even. At that point the sky’s the limit because you’re in control of your own destiny.

You’re what I call or what PG calls, Paul Graham who’s the founder of Y Combinator, “default alive,” which means that if you don’t bring in outside capital, you’re still going to survive. You might grow slower, but you’re in control of your own destiny.

The other more common option is your default debt. If that next Series A or Series B or Series C doesn’t come through, you have to go out and raise again and have more people to be accountable to. We were operating like that for five years.

The calculation that we made recently, around the beginning of this year with raising this very large Series A, was thinking through the strategic opportunity of what we wanted to do. It honestly came down to finding another person that was so philosophically aligned with what we want to build long term and wants to help us do that much faster.

And we wanted to do that much faster. We knew that we wanted to go from well beyond websites to web applications, because we saw what kinds of things people were building on Webflow, and tens of thousands of people were making a living.

We had this fire in our bellies of like, “Look, our product is helping people make a living. People are begging us for more functionality, because they are putting food on the table. They’re buying houses. They’re creating jobs because our product is enabling them to do that.”

It feels suboptimal for us to take our time and treat our comfort, like we’re going to keep our team the same size it is and keep growing very slowly. We just had this drive, like “How do we get this into a lot more hands?

How do we get not one out of 400 people to build software? How do we get 40 out of 400 people, if not 200 out of 400 people building software?” So it was finding somebody, and we didn’t even go out looking. It was hundreds of conversations and breakfasts and relationships that sort of developed with potential investors over the years.

Because people hear things, that we’re making a lot in revenue and we’re profitable, and that attracts investor conversations. I’ll tell you this. The vast majority of them were exactly what you hear about investors.

“How do we make more money? How do we turn this business into something that is going enterprise and makes these massive deals?” Thinking through the classical model of what I call, “just build shareholder value.”

It wasn’t until we met Arun from Accel that was like, “Forget about all that.” That stuff was interesting in that a company can do that right now, doubling down on what’s already working. But seeing the opportunity of shifting the landscape of software development and how do we get it into as many hands as possible, even if it means growing revenue slower, even if it means having to forego some of the classical VC-type tactics of growth at all costs.

That’s what it became for us, finding a partner that really cares about us as people. We’re friends. We hang out with families and kids. The way I think about it is, we knew we wanted to climb this mountain. We’ve only done so much in climbing mountains before. We know about it conceptually. We know we want to climb it.

And here’s somebody that’s a Sherpa that’s done it a hundred times before and is able to give us gear and resources to do that faster and better and more safely. For us, it was that feeling of a true partnership and we were lucky to be in a position where we didn’t have to give up any control. It’s a true partnership.

It’s not somebody that we report to or a new boss or whatever. It’s adding a new cofounder. It’s adding somebody who believes in the mission and has something to bring to the table. They’re in our Slack, interviewing people, solving problems, diving into specific challenges on the team, dreaming big about what we can do together. It feels like a collaboration rather than somebody to fear.

The cool thing about Accel is they don’t have these short term time horizons. The funds that they work with that are downstream are things like the California Pension Fund, the Canadian Pension Fund. They have hundred year time horizons. They’re looking for the global maximum, just like what we’re trying to optimize for.

We’re trying to make this new way for people to create software. The faster we get to that, the more of a dent we can make in the universe. That’s what it came down to, cause we weren’t able to move that fast with the resources that we had.

We weren’t growing revenue fast enough to be able to say, “OK. We’re going to do an event, like No Code Conf, and we’ll really kick off the industry and inspire a lot more people.” We just didn’t have that money to invest.

It was a question between, OK, do we wait two years until we’re in that position, or make more of a spark now and try to do a lot more now? So far, that calculation has been an amazing return.

We still stay true to our values. We still stay true to the way that the company operates. We have these things called core behaviors in our mission and our vision that truly drives the company.

It’s not things like a revenue number. It’s not things like how do we get into every company or sell to every company in the world. It’s how do we make it our mission happen? How do we empower more people to create software and build companies, create services, make a living? That avenue helped us do that faster.

Courtland Allen: 28m 55s

It sounds like there’s three big things that have made your experience with fundraising positive. The first one is working with the right investors, people who are aligned for what you want to do and aren’t just investing in any company so long as it increases shareholder value.

Vlad Magdalin: 29m 9s

Those investors are very few and far between. I understand when people have a negative view of investors, cause I have a negative view of the vast majority of investors.

Courtland Allen: 29m 17s

Yes. The second point was that you got to this default alive state where you were making enough money to be break-even, which meant that you had the power and the time to find these good investors. You weren’t rushed into having to accept any deal you could take.

Vlad Magdalin: 29m 32s

Exactly.

Courtland Allen: 29m 32s

I think the third thing that’s interesting is your values as a person. You are someone who, and you said it several times so far in this conversation, that the revenue number is not what excites you. It’s more so the opportunity to change the way that people are creating things online.

I think that’s not a common trait. I think for the vast majority of people, if you say, “Hey, would you rather have $20 million or would you rather change the way people build websites,” they’d be like, “$20 million.” Where does that come from inside of you, and have you always prioritized things that way?

Vlad Magdalin: 30m 1s

I haven’t thought a ton about that, but I think a lot of it has to do with my life experience. I grew up in Russia, super poor. We were on our own farm with no electricity. We had a well and an outhouse and that kind of thing.

We lived in a country where my family’s religion was persecuted against, so we had to be isolated, under the radar, trying to make ends meet. My grandparents and their grandparents were also persecuted, went through multiple wars.

So having that chance to come to America, honestly by the goodness of people, there was a law that allowed refugees to enter the country. Especially at a time when there was anti-Russian sentiment, there was enough people in Congress who were able to have a totally different view on immigration and amnesty than what’s currently happening, unfortunately, and seeing that somebody was able to give my family the chance at a better life.

I already have a much better life than I would have been having back there. So it almost seems like I want to help as many people as possible provide that. Money might be an avenue to do that, but helping other people make a living seems a lot more powerful, especially if we can do that through our product.

I think when I’ve had experiences that felt very morally wrong to me at other companies, it made me want to create a company where other people don’t have to make that tradeoff of doing everything in the service of capitalism or shareholder value or whatever. That just doesn’t feel inspiring.

Sure, it could be an outcome or a reward, but what people really want is a strong sense of purpose, like, “Why are you doing the work that you’re doing?” That’s the Inventing on Principle video that I mentioned that inspired me toward that. It’s not the what that you do but the why.

People want a lot more autonomy. People want a lot more ownership. People want to master crafts that they’ve practiced to give meaning and purpose to their life. All those things feel so much better. It just feels better to operate in an environment that’s values driven.

Some of our core behaviors are things like, “Practice extraordinary kindness. Be radically candid. Dream big. Lead by serving others.” Our entire leadership model is not direct, “I know everything and go do this, do my vision.”

It’s hiring awesome people and serving them in meeting their objectives and bringing their new ideas to our product and to our team and to processes, so much so that we baked it into the mission of the company. A lot of times companies will have missions that are whatever Google’s is.

Courtland Allen: 32m 58s

“Organize the world’s information.”

Vlad Magdalin: 32m 59s

Exactly. We have one like that that we defined very early on, which is to empower people to build software without code. That’s the big long term vision. But we created one that’s side-by-side and equally important if not more so, which is to create the kind of company where each individual team member can live an impactful and fulfilling life, whatever that means to them.

That’s a much higher thing to shoot for. It’s much harder than, like, “Here’s a product that you want built.” That creates this glue and this foundation of staying accountable to doing the right thing. People have different definitions of what the right thing is a lot of times, but most times you just know when you’re doing something because you want to make more money versus because you want to do the right thing by people.

To me, that’s just the kind of company I want work in. Whether I’m the CEO or not, that’s the thing that I see sustaining the company over decades, rather than chasing a revenue number or a market share number or whatever. For whatever reason, that’s not inspiring to me.

Courtland Allen: 34m 0s

It’s interesting and I think a lot of first-time founders don’t think about this when they’re building their first company. But you’re not just creating something for customers, and you’re not just creating something for yourself, but you’re probably going to create something that has employees, and it’s going to be its own community.

It’s almost its own country, and you’re the head of state and you get to determine what kind of country it’s going to be. Is it going to be a brutal dictatorship? Is it going to be something where your employees can grow and flourish?

Putting a lot of thought into that is crucial, but also the other side of the equation. How do you sustain all these people’s livelihoods? How do you generate enough revenue to make your company work and grow?

That basically means making your customers happy, building something that works. What goes into building a company like Webflow that somebody from the outside looking in who’s never built any tool like this might not appreciate? How do you grow and build a successful product?

Vlad Magdalin: 34m 48s

Honestly, it’s a chicken and egg. You could say that you need to serve customers really well for them to give us revenue so that we can treat employees better. But you could also argue that you're not going to build a good product if you’re not taking great care of your team.

So which comes first? I tend to believe that the team comes first, the team that we have. We can tackle other problems, and we could probably tackle them equally well. We happen to be really excited about this vision and mission.

I think that wasn’t obvious to me from the very beginning is that I wasn’t thinking about team and structure and the values and core behaviors of the company as a system or even as a thing to be thoughtful around at all times. I was more thinking about architecture and features and code base and are we writing enough tests or whatever.

That stuff figures itself out. But it’s much, much, much, much harder to build an organism of people that are rolling in the same direction and have a common mission, treating each other well and collaborating well, have a common sense of purpose.

Much harder than creating a set of servers that are following –, even as hard as software development is. I would encourage founders and people who are building companies to start on that much earlier.

Even if you're running a very small, independent company, even a company of one, the way that you treat your vendors or your subcontractors that you’re collaborating with, all that stuff has compounding effects by treating relationships as people first rather than outcomes first or revenue first or what can this do for me in a financial sense.

I think over time, maybe I’m too much of an optimist, but I think that that reaps much bigger rewards over time, both emotionally and psychologically, but also in a monetary sense. Over time I think it pays dividends to treat people as people.

Courtland Allen: 36m 46s

At what point did you have that transition, because you said you weren’t necessarily thinking that way right up front. Webflow’s now, I believe you said 155 people? At what point did you switch over and think, “This is the real challenge?”

Vlad Magdalin: 36m 58s

It wasn’t a snap of the fingers type of transition, but I’d say it took place around when I realized that I have to shift my mindset from thinking about the code as the product to the company as the main thing that I’m designing. That was probably around 40 people or so, when it started emerging that it was much easier for me as a developer and as a designer, to focus on code problems. That’s where I could add value.

Courtland Allen: 37m 27s

And that’s your natural skill set. That’s what you try to do.

Vlad Magdalin: 37m 29s

Exactly. But seeing things start to crack, like two people not getting along, or it’s hard to give somebody feedback, or you see somebody struggling but you're afraid to give them tougher expectations or more clear expectations.

Or you saw somebody say something that is potentially harmful for somebody else and you’re afraid to lean into that. You’d rather go into your code base where you can put on headphones and solve a problem and have other people celebrate that.

It took seeing more and more of those things manifesting and people thankfully being kind enough to flag those to me and be brave enough to come to me with radical feedback of like, “Hey, this is what’s happening. People are going to leave if this isn’t fixed or this is going to start falling apart, or we have somebody that’s steamrolling over other people just because they’ve been there longer.”

That’s when I realized that I have to step away from the thing that I associated my self-worth with, which was this code base, the thing that I created from scratch and understood better than anybody else at the company and started to disassociate from that. I always thought that that was going to be a super painful thing and that I would always try to come back to writing code in one way or another.

But surprisingly, three years later, I haven’t written a line of code in the last two years in the Webflow code base. I’ve gotten a lot more personal satisfaction and fulfillment from seeing the amount of autonomy the team has and what they were able to build. So it was a surprising thing that I was fearful of but looking back I’m thankful that I was able to go through that transition.

Courtland Allen: 39m 4s

Is there something you can do to make that switch more palatable, to make it more enjoyable? Cause I know a lot of founders who are technical who are developers or designers and they love working on the product. They have the same fear. “I don't know if I’m going to like transitioning to more of a leadership, managerial role and having other people do the thing that I love to do.”

Vlad Magdalin: 39m 22s

By the way, I think it would be a shame to completely step out of the things that you love doing. I’m still deeply involved in the product vision and direction and a lot of the high-level decisions around that. What I found was that that was the most satisfying thing for me.

Not necessarily you push this pull request and then our customers have a new feature, but more the, “This is my vision for what the product is and how it will solve these big problems for our customers.” Getting rid of that would be painful, I think. And I think it would a disservice to the company.

I think creators, especially developers, I would just explore. Leadership becomes its own challenge and reward. It feels like you're developing yourself as a code base, because as you get stronger in having tougher conversations, you get stronger in motivating people and inspiring people, that starts to have its own endorphin-type of rewards.

You’d be surprised how much satisfaction there are in those, even though emotionally you do carry a lot more. It is a more tough thing you can’t turn off the way you can turn off thinking about a feature. I would say explore. Start adding, especially as you grow, even if you’re working independently.

It doesn’t matter if you’re 150 people or 15 people. You’re going to have to focus on people leadership. You’re going to have to focus on motivating your team, inspiring your team. You’re going to have to focus on how to get a group of people to dream in the same direction and execute in the same direction.

That’s inevitable. It’s a question of not if but when. So it’s better to start leaning into that earlier. You’d be surprised how much satisfaction you can develop there. But it’s still reasonable to hold onto areas that give you energy and that you’re passionate about. I would never let go of that stuff.

Courtland Allen: 41m 21s

It’s such a good point that as you get better at doing this, you’re going to enjoy it more. That’s true for so many other things. I’ve taught a few people how to code. I taught Lynn how to code. I taught my brother how to code.

It’s so frustrating for them in the early days when they just can’t get it right. They don’t know and they’re just learning. But once they start figuring out how to do it, it’s suddenly a fun thing to do. The thing that they struggled with and they were frustrated by, they suddenly enjoyed doing. I think it’s hard when you’re managing people because the stakes are a lot higher if you don’t know how to code.

Vlad Magdalin: 41m 21s

Yes, but then the rewards are a lot higher. Let’s say you’re managing somebody for a year and they’re struggling or they want to level up as a leader or a manager. Sure, it takes a year later but then they post some blog post or some tweet around, “Here’s all the progress that I made as a leader, how excited I am in the team that I built or the product I shipped.” And you’re like, “Ding, ding, ding.”

It’s such a huge reward for the investment that you made into that person, and into yourself in that same journey. You start to see, sure, the stakes are higher but the reward is also higher. I would say that the stakes are more forgiving because people, when you develop a leadership type of relationship with more people, we’re all people. We’re all going to make mistakes. We’re all going to have conversations and say hurtful things and then realize what impact that it has and apologize.

You get to deepen your relationships there, which is satisfying in its own right. We all crave connection and meaning. I think I found more, even though the lows are lower, the highs are higher, too, when you switch to a more people-driven impact mode, especially as the company scales.

Courtland Allen: 43m 2s

Let’s talk about the effect that Webflow is having on people outside the company, because your mission is to get more people creating things and empowering more people to do what developers are already doing today.

I think I read quite a lot about the best way to grow a company, the things that are the most impactful. You have people like Peter Thiel, who wrote Zero to One. He’s like, what you need is a monopoly. You need to figure out some niche that you can target that nobody else is targeting, and that’s the only way to build something big and impactful.

Vlad Magdalin: 43m 30s

Totally disagree.

Courtland Allen: 43m 32s

OK. There’s a line of thinking ten or so years ago that what you need is the best product. What you need is to build a product that’s at least 10 times better than your competitor’s, and that’s the way to stand out. What do you think contributes to Webflow’s growth?

Vlad Magdalin: 43m 45s

The pie is so big. This is why I’m so excited about the potential of Webflow. So many problems that can be solved with software, especially, could be super hyper targeted at a small population of people that only you care about.

Let’s say you’re in a community that immigrated into Sacramento that has a large community of Russian refugees. There are 200,000 people there. Let’s say I wanted to create some sort of mini social network for a meet-up kind of thing that’s very specific to Russian culture and the way that we do events.

That’s not a scalable multi-billion dollar company, but it’s so meaningful to me to be able to build community there empowered by software, that why not? There’s this huge whitespace right now between people that might have ideas that are like that that might not be billion-dollar companies, and what essentially is the benchmark for venture capital type of investment companies where they’re like, “Oh, how is this going to become a billion dollar company?”

In order to go the venture route, you’re usually building things that have to have a lot more customers. They need a lot more developers. They need a lot more designers, product managers, etc. The stakes are much higher.

But that whitespace of being able to build smaller products and services that serve a more niche type of customer or solve problems that you know exist but might not be massive opportunities, they’re going to be global or million-plus user bases, there’s a huge, huge opportunity there. The way I think about it is, when magazines were done on paper and you went to a typesetter to translate that to postscript or whatever, and then you had this big printer thing, and only certain cities were able to afford a newspaper or whatever.

Then digital publishing made that barrier to entry a lot lower and a lot more people were willing to do that in much more niche situations because the investment required was much lower. Same thing with YouTube. You’d need to have a movie studio before to make any sort of entertainment. Now, you just need a camera.

You can say the same thing about podcasting. There’s significantly democratized access to that medium. That’s what the huge potential behind Webflow and other no-code tools is. It gives people a clear pathway to having access to the power of the internet with fewer roadblocks.

The big theory is that a lot of these ideas already exist, and once they understand that they have the right building blocks to be able to build for that, magical things will happen. They’re already starting to happen.

In the same way, if developers are listening, Rails did the same thing, but in a smaller way, for programming in general. When Rails came out, a lot of developers, early-stage developers, junior developers, even designers, were able to use that as an abstraction layer of things that they no longer needed to understand.

They didn’t have to understand SQL. They didn’t have to understand how to build out these UIs. They would just scaffold out an object and it would create UIs and maybe tweak some CSS. Now we’ve got Airbnb and GitHub and all these other companies based on that. It was as step function in empowering people to do more, even though it still required code.

That’s our big theory and it’s already being proven that by making the barrier to entry a lot lower, even though you can’t build the most complicated things with no-code tools, it just opens up the playing field for many more makers and creators that have this idea that they want to monetize. They don’t have to rely on, like, “OK. How does this become so profitable or so revenue-generating that I can hire two developers and a designer to do that?”

That one person can actually develop that business idea or that product or service directly if they put in the time to learn these tools and learn how to hook them up together. And of course, the tools are immature right now, so you have to put in quite a lot of effort, but they’re getting better and better, and drastically so.

I think that will open up such a huge opportunity for people once they have an idea to be able to prove whether it’s a viable business much sooner with much higher margins, because you don’t need to put in as much in terms of labor and time and outsourcing to be able to even bring that to market to even test whether it works or not, in the same way that Shopify made it so much easier for people to test out a product.

Courtland Allen: 48m 10s

Yes.

Vlad Magdalin: 48m 11s

You no longer have to hire a development team to say, “OK, build out this whole ecommerce experience.” All you really need to innovate on right now is the product and to a certain degree not even fulfillment anymore cause they’re starting to automate that more and more.

So you have to focus more on the market opportunity and finding something that you think people need and marketing it. So it’s all about bringing down the barrier to entry and all about making the journey from idea to launching a lot shorter. I think by removing code from that equation, it means that a hundred times as many people can even give it a shot.

Courtland Allen: 48m 44s

Yes. It's exciting for developers, too. I just put together a Shopify store for Indie Hackers earlier this week. It took two hours. It’s beautifully skinned. It looks just like the Indie Hackers website and that frees me up to write more code in other places.

Vlad Magdalin: 48m 57s

And that’s the deceiving thing about even the title or the name of this movement. Unfortunately I didn’t have input into naming it no-code. But even just hearing it, the branding, you can think, “Oh, OK. We’re trying to get rid of coders,” or, “There’s no code.”

But the truth is, this is all an abstraction layer over code that is only going to increase the need for coders. Because as you start to build more things with software, inevitably you’re going to have use cases and ways to scale and expand your initial thing that you create with more custom things.

So it’s a rising tide lifts all boats type of philosophy, the same way that 50 years ago people were fearful when spreadsheets started becoming a reality because the way that you did financial modeling and doing a chart of financial performance, you had to use COBOL, Pascal and Fortran. Programmers were doing this stuff generating reports.

Then spreadsheets came out. First they were kind of a toy, and now over a billion people use spreadsheets to get access to computing power. Developers are doing more complex development work, and no-code tools are the same, where you’re going to have a lot more things started and a lot more need for developers, for which by the way we already have a massive shortage in the world. There’s a million-developer shortage today and that’s expanding. That skill is not going anywhere. It’s only going to be more and more valued over time.

Courtland Allen: 50m 18s

That’s such a great way to make that point. Excel’s here. You don’t have fewer developers; in fact we have more developers than we’ve ever had.

Vlad Magdalin: 50m 23s

Yes, exactly.

Courtland Allen: 50m 23s

And with the advent of no-code tools I’m sure the same thing will happen. Sort of the underlying current that we’re talking about here is that Webflow is at the middle of this no-code movement. You allow people to build apps and websites without code. You’ve recently hosted the No Code Conference in San Francisco, which I unfortunately missed. I don't know how I missed it.

Vlad Magdalin: 50m 44s

Bummer.

Courtland Allen: 50m 44s

Next year I’ll be there. What are some of the things you saw happening there that got you excited that others who didn’t attend maybe missed out on?

Vlad Magdalin: 50m 53s

The most exciting thing for me was just hearing how people felt, honestly. These approaches of automation through computing power, whether it’s Excel, whether it’s Zapier, whether it’s even ten years ago “if this, then that”, people felt some of the productivity gains from that.

But at No-code Conf it was the first time I heard a lot of conversations like, “Oh, I’ve been doing a lot of these.” It was like, “I knew I wanted to create. I knew I wanted to build for the internet and for software, and finally I can see that there are other people that are just like me.

I can’t quite get myself to understand how all this code stuff works, but I want to create. I want to build these things. And now, I see 300 other people that are in my same position.”

You have people from marketing teams that are frustrated with having to wait a month for engineering to turn around their marketing experiment and then being able to discover, “Holy crap, I can do this entire thing myself, hit publish, and it goes live, and it’s the real thing.”

You have people are who building entire products, like IDEO U. They have a whole design thinking course where a designer completely created the entire front end experience of that without waiting for a front end developer who knows React or View. That made the entire product happen.

So you start to see a community that’s forming, a spark that formed, so that this is an identity now. This is a thing. I can see other people are calling themselves visual developers. I can see other people are saying, “I’m part of the no-code community,” which I think is super powerful.

For me that was a 10X more powerful thing than, “Here’s some skill that I learned or some trick with 2X.”

Courtland Allen: 52m 40s

Right. “I belong to this community.”

Vlad Magdalin: 52m 41s

Exactly. We didn’t even make the event about Webflow. I talked from Webflow and we said it was sponsored by Webflow or presented by Webflow. But we had people from a bunch of other companies, even companies that we considered to be competitive. It was more around like, “How do we kickstart this industry? How do we work together to empower a lot more people?”

The opportunity here is so massive. Even if you have a thousand competitors, it’s like Greenfield. It’s almost like the gold rush where there’s 50 mountains with a ton of gold, and you’re cutting yourself short from laying claim to all the mountains because it’s just going to be harder for you.

We have right now the kinds of relationships we formed from that conference, more companies that we’re working with and partnering with and creating integrations with. To me, that’s the most exciting thing, just the spark of this movement that got legitimized there.

Courtland Allen: 53m 38s

This is one of the cool things, I think, going back to what we were talking about earlier, bringing a creative solution to a boring, commonplace problem. I don’t want to call Webflow boring or what you’re doing boring at all, but it’s something that’s been around.

It gives you that longevity, where there’s millions of people who care about creating these experiences and if you stick around long enough, different things happen. The industry changes, and you can be there to ride those waves and capture them.

For example, there’s John O’Nolan with Ghost, who’s helping with journalism and publishing. The amount of crises in journalism that have happened since he started Ghost. He’s been there for every single one of them to say, “Hey, move to Ghost. This is an independent publishing platform.”

Or with Webflow, where you started Webflow years ago and no-code wasn’t a thing. Nobody had that term. There was no no-code community. But because you’d been pushing this direction and solving this quote/unquote boring problem, you’re there when these big trends hit.

I think one of the challenges that a lot of founders in your position might have is that you’re building a tool that has a lot of leverage that allows people to create pretty much anything. But sometimes with that lack of specificity comes difficulties in marketing.

Vlad Magdalin: 54m 43s

Oh, absolutely.

Courtland Allen: 54m 44s

How do you describe what Webflow is? How do you describe what you can do with it when you have so many different people who use it for different reasons?

Vlad Magdalin: 54m 48s

Yes, it’s like how do you market Excel?

Courtland Allen: 54m 50s

Right.

Vlad Magdalin: 54m 51s

It’s like, I can manage my chores or there are entire billion dollar companies that run their entire model on Excel.

Courtland Allen: 54m 58s

Yes. So what do you say?

Vlad Magdalin: 55m 0s

That’s where you have to find specific verticals, or what we say is we define personas. We have web design freelancers. They have a bunch of jobs to be done. They want to make a living. They don’t know how to code.

They have clients that expect a certain level of custom work from them. They need to move fast. They need to deliver a project and move on to the next client to make a living. So we developed that as a persona. We have different messaging for them.

It’s more around, “How do you manage your client? How do you lower your costs for developing these things? How do you make sure that you’re customer moves to hosting?” And you can add a markup there. We call it managed billing, where they can say, “I’m going to charge you $200.00,” even though Webflow costs twenty bucks. That solves their needs.

Then you might have a marketing team where what they really care about is speed. They don’t have clients. They have the company where they work. HelloSign uses Webflow for marketing. A bunch of other YC startups use Webflow for marketing. What they care about is speed, iteration, and not having to file a ticket with engineering to make a CSS change.

So for them it’s a totally different value add. Then we have ecommerce, which is people selling products and digital goods. In the future it’s going to be creating entire SaaS products. That’s a hard thing. You have to pick four or five and really focus on them.

Even that’s hard, because each one of those you need an expert in and it’s like an exercise in company building, because you can’t just ask one person on your team, “Will you own research and development and all the marketing and feature preference work for large companies and small companies and freelancers?” It’s an overwhelming thing to split focus on.

So we have to pick and choose and prioritize which of those are the easiest sell and hope that word of mouth and things like that spread more broadly while other people find other ways to apply Webflow to their use case.

We have many examples where people build entire products with Webflow, but we don’t yet have that as a selling point on our website. “Hey, build something that you’re going to put up on Product Hunt,” even though we’ve had over 50 companies that are launched on Product Hunt and we’re in the first position.

And nobody even knows it was built in Webflow. It was something that they developed and got out there. But that’s not big enough that we can go and say a bunch of our effort is dedicated to that.

But the cool thing about some of these personas, like freelancers and designers that work for companies on marketing teams, is that by virtue of using the product, they now have a sense of what else it can do.

It’s almost like if somebody asks you to edit a family video on iMovie or After Effects, you get more ideas of, “Oh, now that I understand this tool chain, I can do so much more. I can go develop my portfolio or I can develop this idea for a friend that wants that wants to start a business, or I can develops some toy product that tracks a bunch of spreadsheets of public data that people can use to slice and dice and feed into design tools. Not monetizable.

Courtland Allen: 58m 16s

A cool product for the world.

Vlad Magdalin: 58m 18s

Yes, a cool product. Recently, something launched on Product Hunt around color palates, where I’m starting a new product. I want to go and get inspired by a bunch of nice looking color palates.

It’s not a super monetizable thing, but thing got over 100,000 views and a lot of people use it now. It’s getting some integrations into design tools. That’s something that exists that wouldn’t have existed if a product like Webflow didn’t exist. So I forgot what the original question was.

Courtland Allen: 58m 44s

I like where you’re going with this cause it’s exciting that you're able to build something, and you’re able to work on your company with your creating and your team, but that’s empowering so many other people to build things that you’ve never conceived of, wouldn’t have time to think of, and you can know that you’re at least somewhat indirectly responsible for those things coming into the world.

Vlad Magdalin: 58m 59s

That’s really satisfying. We have what we call our showcase, if you go to Webflow.com/discover and seeing what people have built. It just blows my mind. We’ve had a 3D x wing something experience that looks like it should be built in Maya or something like that but it was built in DIBs and stuff.

We’ve had people rebuild the AirPod’s landing planning page completely visually, where Apple probably had a team of 10 developers working on this thing, and a lot of other creative experience. We’re like, holy cow, when you put these tools into other people’s hands, this is nothing like what we imagined before, and they would stretch it beyond its limitations.

You can think of it as building a game engine. A lot of these companies build game engines, like Unreal. But it’s other team that figure out what kind of games to build. You have a wide range of things that end up being developed there, or 3D animation software or even YouTube.

You create the platform and the foundation but what people do with it is so unique and so multifaceted. You have entire brands doing things on YouTube and you have individuals, kids reviewing, unboxing things. And then you have all sorts of the society-defining entertainment.

Courtland Allen: 1h 0m 15s

Makerpad was built on Webflow.

Vlad Magdalin: 1h 0m 16s

Yup.

Courtland Allen: 1h 0m 17s

Makerpad is itself a platform that’s inspiring other people to build things. So it’s many levels down of platforms inspiring platforms.

Vlad Magdalin: 1h 0m 23s

Yes, exactly.

Courtland Allen: 1h 0m 24s

I think a lot about founder/company fit. How do you start a company that you as a founder will enjoy running? If you’re someone who wants to have an impact on what others do, and if that’s super important to you, I think building some tool that other can create with and some platform others can build on is the perfect company choice, because you get to see exactly what you’re talking about.

Vlad Magdalin: 1h 0m 41s

Yes, exactly. And I think what’s most important for me as a founder, and I think it’s very important to a lot of other founders, is to be able to build a company that you’re proud of that you can say “I didn’t have to compromise my personal values in order to make decisions around some aspect of the business.”

If you can do that, if you can create something that gives value to others and makes their life easier, and you feel good about the way that you did it, that’s magical. That’s the kind of company I want keep building so that I feel proud of this. Not to fast forward to my death bed or whatever, but to be proud of not the money that I made, which I’m sure will manifest over time, but the impact that I’ve been able to have on other people’s lives, especially my team’s, but our customers and the world at large.

That keeps me super excited. I’m more excited now than I even was seven years ago or six years ago or five years ago or whatever, cause the potential is multiplying cause you get to see more of these stories out in the world of what people create, how they make a living, how they impact other people.

Because we’ve had people create products that impact millions of lives, that it’s like this hub and spoke thing and butterfly effect. If they weren’t able to create that, that wouldn’t have happened. If we didn’t create Webflow, they wouldn’t have happened. It’s this multistage effect that makes you feel proud of what you can build as a team.

Courtland Allen: 1h 2m 17s

I feel pity for historians of the future who are going to have to look back on the 20-teens and try to make sense of all the different things that are changing and all the different apps and websites that are completely upending how society works.

Vlad Magdalin: 1h 2m 30s

But if you think about it, it’s like historians looking back at the time of the printing press right now and the Renaissance, where very few people had the ability to write or even read. We didn’t have the ability to put thought on paper and distribute it to the world. That was a relatively new invention with the printing press.

How much more creativity, how many more ideas, what kind of change has happened in the world now that we are able to share ideas, write things down, share them with other people? I think what we’re going through now with the internet revolution is a similar type of magnitude as when people got this new medium of being able to write.

Courtland Allen: 1h 3m 12s

Yes. This show is listened to by a great many aspiring founders, people who want to start businesses, people who want to start businesses that are not just cool and helpful but that also generate revenue and can sustain themselves and who ideally want to keep to the values that you just laid out, where you don’t have to sacrifice your personal morals and values in order to make your company a success. What have you learned that you think it would be helpful for these other founders to know?

Vlad Magdalin: 1h 3m 35s

If I was going to sum it up, always trust your gut. All these things that we discussed, whether it’s venture capital or whatever, all those things are a tool in the same way that if you’re running a business and need to go take out a loan in order to be able to make an investment that you know is going to pay back, at the end of the day they’re just tools.

But the most important thing that I think I feel the most proud of is that when it came to making hard decisions, I leaned more on my morality rather than business sense. And that’s the thing I regret the least. Because I’ve made some decisions that were bad for the business or would cost us a lot more money but were better for people and kinder to people and kinder to our customers.

Of course, there’s tradeoffs and fairness when you don’t want to give your product away. You want to charge for the value that you offer. But at the end of the day, that’s the thing that I feel the most proud of.

I think that’s the thing that got us into the situation of being in control of our own destiny, building a product that we all really care about, and really investing in the relationships and the people on the team that helped build this product, which ultimately is the thing that you need to sustain the longest.

We have a team where I think it’s 155 people over the last four years, at most one person has left per year. I think that speaks to how much we care about providing avenues for people to grow, to have impact, to work on the things that they really want to work on and be honest and transparent about their experience there so we can better improve.

So I would, above all, focus on people. A lot of founders have this mindset, and I have it had it at certain points, of losing control at all costs, not even to investors, but losing control even to your team. Not having that final dictatorial, say, of “This is exactly what we’re going to do.” A lot of times you hear it manifested as like, “I don’t want a boss.”

Believe it or not, even if you don’t have VCs, even if you build a profitable business, if you are creating a team and a product that’s driven by people, if your team is a hundred people, you’re going to have 99 bosses if you really are serving your team. Because now you’re accountable to 99 people, you being the hundredth. You’re responsible for 99 people’s paychecks and livelihood and families.

That is not something that you’re in control of at all times. That team is now delivering the vast majority of the value that the company is getting revenue from. So you can’t even claim that “I started the business, or this all because of my ideas.” That starts to fade away. You can’t claim a moral high ground there.

I would say prioritize team. Prioritize people. Prioritize relationships, because ultimately it just feels better, and I honestly believe it leads to stronger businesses over time that treat their customers better and customers respect a lot more because they see it from the outside or how people talk about the company.

Courtland Allen: 1h 6m 40s

Word gets around.

Vlad Magdalin: 1h 6m 41s

Exactly. Exactly. It takes a long time to build trust, and it’s pretty easy to destroy it. But if you really are thoughtful around how you treat people you also get a lot more grace from people when you make a mistake.

Courtland Allen: 1h 6m 58s

Trust your gut and prioritize relationships. Vlad Magdalin, it’s been such a pleasure having you.

Vlad Magdalin: 1h 7m 3s

Thank you, Courtland.

Courtland Allen: 1h 7m 3s

Thanks for coming on the show. Can you let listeners know where they can go to learn more about what you're up to and about Webflow?

Vlad Magdalin: 1h 7m 10s

Just Webflow.com. We have a bunch of stuff there. I’m sure there’s a lot more news on our website but check out the product. Feel free to reach out to me. I’m vlad@webflow.com, or find me on Twitter or on the Webflow discover section.

Courtland Allen: 1h 7m 28s

Thanks again, Vlad.

Vlad Magdalin: 1h 7m 29s

Thank you.

Courtland Allen: 1h 7m 30s

Listeners, if you enjoyed this episode you should reach out to Vlad on Twitter and let him know. You can find him @callmevlad. Also, if you want my thoughts and takeaways from each episode of the podcast, you can find the Indie Hackers podcast newsletter at www.indiehackers.com/podcast. Thank you so much for listening, and I will see you next time.