[callmevlad]

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!

[shrumm]

Vlad, thanks for building Webflow! My team and I love it. Building a company these days requires a website that looks and works great - but as a founder I'd rather spend my time working on the product and talking to customers. Webflow is perfect for it. Our designer Blanka knew nothing about web design, she used to do photoshop / illutrator mockups and rely on me or another person on the team to make it into a website. We switched to Webflow, and I spent an hour on a Skype call with her showing her the basics. Now she does everything herself. This is the website -> https://datacue.co - was all done by someone who knew 0 about web dev.

The best thing about webflow for me is how it makes advanced features like CSS animations accessible to people. If you resize the website width till you see the mobile version, a hamburger menu pops up. Click on it and you'll see a little animation. I can't tell you how proud Blanka was that she did it herself, was really great to see.

Sorry this sounds like such an advert for you guys - but I'm a very happy customer.

[callmevlad]

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

[rsweeney21]

Hey Vlad,

I'm one of the users that signed up when you first posted to HN years ago. I've been a happy customer for several years now. It's the perfect tool for me. Thank you for saving me from Wordpress!

[ignoramous]

This is great perseverance on your part. I feel overwhelming joy for you all. Congratulations.

Btw, your story made this news.yc thread one of my favourites of all time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16409768

I wonder how yathletics is doing...

[mxstbr]

Congratulations Vlad, it's been very exciting to see Webflow succeed!

[YeahSureWhyNot]

just shows how much YC applicant evaluation sucks. Thanks to the community comprised mostly of other rejects YC was able to realize their mistake and fund this awesome company.

[callmevlad]

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.

[420codebro]

Congratulations on your success! I have never heard of Webflow, but after checking out your site it seems pretty slick. I will consider it for future projects.

Again congratulations!