Breakout Companies MEMO #7- Webflow

The company that heralded the No-Code Revolution

“If you join a company, my general advice is to join a company on a breakout trajectory.” — Sam Altman, President at Y Combinator

In this third edition of Breakout Jobs Memos, we are profiling Webflow, a company which eliminated the barrier for anyone to build on the Internet.

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What is a Breakout Job?

A Breakout Job is that one role that helps you get discovered. The best examples which hit my mind are Andrew Chen at Uber and Erik Torenberg at Product Hunt.

What is Webflow?

Webflow is a design tool, CMS, and hosting platform. It gives designers and developers the power to design, build, and launch responsive websites visually, while writing clean, semantic code for you.

Here’s what Accel said in their announcement about the company in their investment announcement

We first met the Webflow team four years ago, and were immediately struck by their sincere dedication to a dual mission: to enable web creation for anyone, and to promote fulfilling, impactful lives for their employees while doing it. Co-Founders Vlad, Bryant and Sergie have created a truly special company that cares about its employees and customers above all else. In the years since, the effusive love we’ve heard from both employees and customers is overwhelming. And they’ve gotten to this point having only raised a small seed round, which has instilled a level of financial and operational discipline that’s increasingly rare to find in companies today. In the years and decades to come, the web will continue to proliferate. So far, it has largely been built by developers armed with technical knowledge and experience to support them. We believe Webflow and its no-code foundation are changing the entire software development paradigm, enabling the next generation of creators to maximize their creativity like never before.[Source]

Origin Story

Vlad Magdalin’s attempt at starting up Webflow in 2012 was his third attempt at same. He first came up with the concept in his college senior paper talking about how tools that could translate drag-and-drop design into clean back-end code could lower the barrier of entry for entrepreneurs to bring their ideas to life.

This time, he got his colleague Bryant Chou and his brother Sergie to join the project alongside him.

For funding, they tried Kickstarter at first which failed badly. After 7 months of bootstrapping and building out an MVP, they posted to Hacker News, where the product went viral and received 10k signups in less than 24 hours. After , they spent six more months developing a simple first version of their tools.

Sometime later, the tool took off first among freelance Web designers and the startup was accepted in Y Combinator in 2013.

After this, Webflow raised its $2.9 million seed round from the investors such as Khosla Ventures and Y Combinator’s own fund after finishing the program, though many VCs were skeptical that its target market was too niche and facing too many competitors.