Thanks HN: You helped save a company that now helps thousands make a living

[callmevlad]

Dear HN,

I’m feeling a deep sense of gratitude this morning, and wanted to share it with you all.

On this day in 2013, the Webflow co-founders were huddled around our usual desk that we claimed every early morning at the Hacker Dojo (a co-working space) in Mountain View, working like hell into the evenings to get something off the ground.

We had quit our jobs about 6 months prior, and totally underestimated how long it would take to build even a beta. I had personally convinced my wife that we’d only have to be income-less for 3 months – the amount of savings we had in the bank – but that time had now doubled, and those savings were long gone.

The Kickstarter campaign we had poured all of our savings into producing had fallen through, never even making it live because we hadn’t read the Terms of Service to learn that they didn’t allow SaaS subscriptions to be funded. We had high hopes about getting into YC for the winter batch, but were rejected since we only had a non-functional demo of a product and zero traction.

On top of all that, my oldest daughter (3yo then) was diagnosed with a life-threatening condition, requiring expensive surgery that didn’t get much help from our cheap “catastrophic” health insurance plan with an ultra-high deductible. Credit card cash advances became the way we were paying for rent and food.

So with all this, we started contingency planning to try to get our old jobs back. As a last ditch effort, we sold two of our cars and pulled out what equity we had in them to buy a little more runway. Then we had to come to terms that we couldn’t actually build a full product in the time we had left, and decided that the best we could do was to create a demo or playground that could hint at what the future product could be – and hope for the best.

In March of 2013, we finally finished that demo and put it up live. It’s still there: http://playground.webflow.com/

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

[kitcar]

Congrats!

Just a heads up, as a semi-happy webflow customer: your customer service chat bot / the way you hide methods to contact customer service is very frustrating. The first time I ran into a technical issue I almost considered just cancelling my account and moving elsewhere because I couldn't figure out how to speak/chat with a human. There are many services I spend less money on monthly that have infinitely better customer service. Ultimately a friend provided me with your support email and I got a response there, but was shocked that wasn't listed anywhere on your website that I could easily find..

[ddri]

A gentle reminder for anyone reading that "support@[company_name].com" is a pretty safe bet for anyone frustrated with the pattern of using bots or self-service funnels. If you're not sure if that's a valid address, a websearch will help confirmed that. Doing this for webflow results in the first result being:

"We provide email support Monday through Friday. ... We also might need the read-only link to your project and the email associated with your account. To contact our team, please reach out to us directly at [e-mail]."

I've hit up Webflow support a few times this way (as a SaaS founder I actively avoid chatbots or delayed service funnels) and have found them to be amazingly fast and super detailed in their replies. It's partly what tipped me over to be a customer. In any case, I hope you get a quick reply to your query. And it did make me smile in a "very Hackernews" way that the first reply I saw to this wonderful post was a complaint :P

[gigatexal]

surprised nobody from webflow has commented on this yet

[Akcium]

This is indeed incredible.

When I read such posts I have so many different feelings mixed up.

1. I'm envious, I won't hide this :)

2. I think that I shouldn't give up with my own product

3. I think that I don't work hard enough

4. I feel pleasure, I'm glad that it was success for you. Yep, I don't only envy but also can be happy for someone

5. Your name is Vlad, are you by the way from Russia? If so, Поздравляю от всей души! =)

These posts should be in golden collection.

Especially if someone says: "Hey, who needs another tool like this?" and you show him posts from dropbox, webflow and others

[BossingAround]

> I think that I shouldn't give up with my own product

I would certainly not want to discourage anyone from building their own product. That said, for me personally, knowing when to quit/admit a mistake and pivot is a sign of maturity.

[tarask]

This is exactly what I thought, especially 2 & 3. his LinkedIn does mention that he speaks Russian, so you're guess is correct :)

[pembrook]

After spending 7+ years in the static site generator world, I recently started using Webflow exclusively for all marketing sites and landing pages and have been blown away with how much better it is than dealing with the complexities of the Static site + Headless CMS ecosystem. It seems you've actually delivered on the vision that dreamweaver was originally trying to create all those years ago.

I wouldn't be surprised if one day Webflow's market share on the Web gets to be Wordpress-sized.

With the recent funding raised, I'd love to hear what your vision is for the next 5 years of Webflow as a product?

[ivve]

Why is webflow better for that use case? Genuinely interested, have avoided using it until now.

[steve_taylor]

Lean startup dogma dictates that if you’re not embarrassed by v1, you took too long to build it. Had you followed that advice and posted it to HN, you’d have been torn to shreds and wouldn’t be telling this story. Congrats on building a product so good that met and exceeded the standards of the HN community and went on to be a successful business.

[psychstudio]

Worse than being torn to shreds. Ignored.

[nearmint]

Exactly. Sometimes I wonder if there's any good advice at all.

[Scramblejams]

Amazing story, glad you made it.

Potential customer here, and I have a question. I'm a programmer, very happy making backends, setting up the infra, maintaining it, and so on. I often want to make web pages, but I just hate dealing the web front-end stack.

Is this product a good fit for me? I could visually design the website, avoid getting my hands dirty with HTML/CSS/JS, then have an easy way to connect it with a backend I'd make?

If this isn't a good fit, any suggestions?

[ativzzz]

From my experience with a different but similar tool, it follows the pareto principle. It will do 80% of the work very effectively, but as your business grows and you need more niche functionality, you will need a developer to figure out a way to make the platform behave in a way which it doesn't expect, which can be time consuming.

So great for MVPs or getting a business bootstrapped quickly and cheaply, but once you have enough money to afford developers without breaking the bank, your money may be better spent elsewhere.

[pcthrowaway]

(Not OP) I know replying "seconded" is out of line with Hacker News guidelines, so I'll add that in addition to the above, I'm also curious about whether it can cooperate with any front-end frameworks

[czbond]

OP Wow - nicely done. Amazing persistence that needs to be shared more.

The founder's story is not uncommon of most actual successful startups I personally have observed.

To those who have cush jobs, dream of startups - this is the real world life. In startups, it is not all funding and glory moments; it is your world imploding on you in numerous directions, and you have to pull yourself through sheer will; or fail.

[staunch]

Congrats on the startup success and (more importantly) I hope your daughter is well.

There's a really valuable lesson here for would-be YC founders:

> We had high hopes about getting into YC for the winter batch, but were rejected since we only had a non-functional demo of a product and zero traction.

...

> This amazing traction helped us get into YC several months later...

Same founders - traction = YC rejected

Same founders + traction = YC accepted

The same thing happened with Dropbox. So don't trust what YC says about how they evaluate founders themselves, trust what they actually do. Which is evaluating startup quality largely based on traction, just like every other investor does.

[dang]

Plenty of YC startups have been funded without traction. Thousands, surely. Many haven't even launched yet.

I don't know what the difference was in this particular case, but you're overgeneralizing from it, and underestimating how much emphasis YC places on founders (a lot).

YC funded Dropbox before it launched, because they believed in Drew—so that's a counterexample, no?

[dvt]

> So don't trust what YC says...

I'm pretty sure they've said multiple times that traction is the best indicator of future success. Very rarely do they fund startups without traction (if they do, it's usually someone from within their network).

[xwdv]

While I will say congratulations, I hope you also appreciate how lucky you are. I cringe at some of the decisions that were made and how close you may have came to absolute ruin not just for yourself but your family as well. I hope the lesson people take from this isn’t “Never give up” but rather that startups are harder than you think and posting on forums is more of a crap shoot than a guarantee of any useful traction. Calculate that risk carefully to yourself and dependents and see if it’s really worth it.

Imagine if you were trying to launch right around the beginning of 2020. The HN of the 2020s is becoming a much less forgiving crowd than that of 2013.

[breck]

Aloha Vlad!

Thank you for sharing that story! I think the first word I would use to describe, before inspiring, is "terrifying" :), but happy to hear it all worked out.

I was a little surprised to read this because I worked in the low code Web IDE space in 2013 as well, and don't remember webflow back then, but then when I go back through my old emails I see we exchanged ideas and motivation! Very cool. So so happy you all ended up making this a reality. We ended up taking an early exit, which was great too, but I felt guilty we didn't solve the problem we set out to solve. Thank you for doing that!

[nomadtwin]

Been using Webflow for years almost daily. Still a big fan but seeing round after round of VC money and little improvement on the actual tool (Webflow Designer) something feels off...

[sub7]

You can't see the admin dashboards or the cac/ltv numbers, round after round doesn't show up unless there's real growth happening.

[iso1631]

> my oldest daughter (3yo then) was diagnosed with a life-threatening condition, requiring expensive surgery

That sounds awful. Is she OK now?

[callmevlad]

Yes, she is now, thank you for asking!

[egorfine]

Absolutely thank you for sharing this. It is very encouraging!

> helped us get into YC several months later

what happened with your life and finances between posting to HN and getting the angel funding? How did you bridge the gap?

[artur_makly]

Any other startup founders here who were on the brink of death and then got their asses saved by HN? Would love to hear your story too.

@Vlad & Bro..keep up the great work man. You are a light to all hard-working immigrant founders and who remind us all that American dream still exists! Nasdrovia Tavarish!

[lbj]

Having just killed SabreCMS (something in the same vein as Webflow) before reaching the break-through point you guys did I can fully understand how it must have felt when you broke the ice and saw your baby turn into a success story. Wishing you guys all the best and lots of future success!

[zenbryo]

Great to hear about your success story! However the number one ingredient must have been a good idea to start with. I hope to get the same viral success sometime for one of my projects, but its near impossible to foresee. Just work hard, keep afloat and hope for the best.

[berkes]

The usual warning against 'good idea' as most important ingredient, is apt here.

In fact, I read the story as a shout out to perseverence. More than 'an idea'. (Belief in) A good idea can help you persevere, sure. But execution is king. And for that, you need hard work, ability to push through, and perseverance.

[DoreenMichele]

It's nice to get a little insider scoop on how things happen. If you are reading this looking for inspiration, keep in mind that no single post contains all the details of several years of experience. Several of the points made above in a line or two could be expanded into an entire book, like the story behind this: my oldest daughter (3yo then) was diagnosed with a life-threatening condition, requiring expensive surgery.

I'm glad to see the news that this is providing employment opportunities for a lot of people. That's very much something we need to hear more of in a world that has long harped on how automation is taking away jobs and high unemployment is the wave of the future.

This was a good read. Thanks for posting it.

[azifali]

Vlad - Congratulations. I used to see you and Sergie at Hackerdojo in 2012-13 when it was very early days of Webflow. It is great to see what what you've accomplished despite the challenging circumstances.

[shafyy]

Thanks for making Webflow and pulling through. Even though I'm software engineer and could have built a ecommerce store myself, we decided to use Webflow and it's just been a delight.

[WheelsAtLarge]

HN is a community of people that want to do what you did, develop an idea to a successful business. One thing that differentiates this community over others is that many here are willing to learn and do the work.

I ask that you put together a video, document, book that gives a general idea on how you did it and what it takes to continue to have a successful business. Everyone will thank you and it will makes this community that has helped to get you off the ground become better.

[erulabs]

Awesome! Thank you for this post - as someone currently in the "convincing my wife it wont be much longer now" phase, this is nice to read :)

[type0]

Thank you for the heart wrecking description of hardship in a startup life. I actually learned about Webflow in a workplace through the word of mouth. I'm probably not your target audience but what intrigued me was that I recently learned that it was possible to integrate it with Git, what would such a workflow be like? Do you plan to implement a visual diffing screenshots or is it already present?

[LyalinDotCom]

Really needed a story like this, something positive to end the week! thank you for sharing and wishing you all the success in the future.

[naskwo]

I love Webflow and have used it >20 hours per week since 2014. It's been a game-changer to let me quickly and visually work out ideas, and has allowed us to iterate more quickly than having to mess around with css and Bootstrap templates (2014...).

That said, I sorely miss proper i18n support.

Currently, we use Transifex to i18n our marketing website, but this means that our SEO is hurt, as Google does not index strings in JS.

Vlad, if you're reading this, please have a look here for a feature suggestion: https://wishlist.webflow.com/ideas/WEBFLOW-I-2218

[dvt]

Congratulations! The Webflow co-founders personify the perfect combination of persistence, grit, and a bit of luck. I know nay-sayers will start parroting "survivorship bias," but these kinds of stories motivate me :)

Cheers, and thanks for the inspiring words!

[vladmk]

You mean survivorship bias? Interesting to think how many web flows does that were so close. The difference was 1 mere hacker news post. Crazy to think how big of a factor luck plays

[ZephyrBlu]

Survivorship bias isn't a negative, it's just a fact.

People bringing it up aren't naysayers, they're just being realistic.

[nathanyz]

Congrats, this story is a good reminder to founders that it's not just having the right idea, and execution. It's about the persistence and willpower to get to that right idea & execution.

[yayr]

Great tool. You do have your happy user group now, congratulations and cudos for persevering!

For a 202* stack that I would want to use however, I'd like to see more flexible integration with other tech stacks. It would be THE perfect frontend for e.g. NextJS, if it would support React exports and an integration to other state management mechanisms like MOBX to drive dynamic sites.

[mooreds]

How fun is this!

It's nice to have a reminder and to realize the impact that comments, sharing and encouragement can have in the greater world.

[ryoshu]

Had the pleasure of using Webflow for a COVID related project early last year that had an incredibly tight timeline. It was the only way we saw to do what needed to be done and it went very well. Thank you so much for creating such an amazing platform.

[ilovetux]

Congratulations! I'm just playing around with it this morning and it seems really cool so far.

Just a note, the link to report issues for experimental browsers (which was in the warning I received when opening the editor in Firefox) results in a 404.

[sergiotapia]

This very inspiring, great job! This place has that effect. One of my open source projects got a lot of popularity just because I posted it here on HN and people found it useful (or at least the tech keywords were baity enough).

[HomebrewCC]

Well, thank you! I still remember seeing the Webflow CSS Playground for the first time. I am a happy customer ever since. It really helped kickstarting my career as a digital strategist.

[gabereiser]

wipes tear... I love these stories. Kudos to you all for sticking with it and thanks for sharing the troubles you went through to get your first user base, a critical first step.

[ketanmaheshwari]

Great! Congratulations that all worked out well.

It is an inspiring story but fair warning to others that there is a strong survivors' bias here and not all risky ventures work out this well.

[theseagin]

That was a very heart-warming story. I really love your story and your product (both amazing). Webflow helped me get back into coding. I will always be grateful for that. :)

[ilovefood]

What a wonderful story and I'm very happy for you! Congratulations! I am a happy customer and love the product you all built and are still improving. Keep it up!! :)

[tima101]

Sincere congrats!

I hope, though, people learn that your experience is one of many ways. And "zero to one" and "all or nothing" are not the only ways.

[gadders]

I love a happy ending. Congratulations! I hope your success long continues (and that your daughter is fully recovered).

[rsp1984]

This is so well deserved and I feel sincerely happy for you. Webflow is an amazing tool. Keep the good stuff coming!

[nickthemagicman]

Just for the record this is the first I'm hearing about it so I had nothing to do with this.

Congrats though!

[abinaya_rl]

Woah, That’s an inspiring story. Congrats on your recent funding round!

[ATS22]

this story is a happy end one and it makes you feel that you can also succeed in your dreams. bravo for your perseverance and for not quitting at the first obstacle.

[PEOPLEgetoff]

Congratulations on your success! This is really amazing!

[jacquesm]

How is your daughter?

[akotlar]

That’s amazing, congratulations on all of your success.

[amelius]

Do you support collaborative editing?

[Reedx]

Congrats, and thanks for sharing!

[dumbfounder]

I have mixed feelings about this story. I applaud your resolve, and you have certainly had a tremendous amount of success that should be celebrated!

But I can't help but think about the 9 founders of other companies that had the same resolve in the same situation, but things did not work out so well.

All you other people thinking about going for broke need to be ready to hit bottom and build yourself back up afterwards, because 9 times out of 10 that's what will happen. Or, even better, first put yourself into a situation where you don't need to go for broke to give yourself an excellent chance at success.

I think this is why a lot of crazy big startups come from younger people, they can afford to go for broke before they have a family and other obligations, because the worst that can happen is they are left with nothing, then they settle for a high-paying job at a big tech company and 2 months later they can afford a new car.

[munificent]

I agree with your point that we shouldn't idolize people who make very risky personal sacrifices without framing it in the truth that most who do fail.

At the same time, I read this particular post as much less about "look how hard I hustled and because of that I'm a winner" and much more about gratitude towards the HN community and the appreciating the luck that enabled them to be one of the rare winners. It's more "even though we hustled we were still on track to lose until we got lucky and supported from others." I think that's an excellent sentiment to share.

[dvt]

> But I can't help but think about the 9 founders of other companies that had the same resolve in the same situation, but things did not work out so well.

Everyone on HN knows that the startup life is, in many ways, a lottery. But that doesn't mean it's not still one of the most reliable ways of exercising self-determination, working on something you're truly passionate about, taking full responsibility for your fate, and becoming financially independent (if not outright wealthy). Which is why most of us do it.

And, yeah, failing sucks, but saying "don't forget you'll most likely fail!" is just not particularly insightful in this kind of context. We already know that.

[blizkreeg]

What is it with every post on HN having an almost 50/50 split along the cynical line.

Of course 9/10 founders are going to fail, some people have more privilege to take risks, and people with families have to take measured risks.

What's the point? Should people not try, keep crying about it, keep complaining that it's easy to say this when you have privilege, keep looking at the negative side? We all recognize life's a lottery and the odds are stacked in favor of some and not others. So?

[austinl]

I agree in the sense that the HN community cannot save a bad product. And sometimes it wouldn't even save a good product.

But I think the thanks here is for the community that was willing to give a new product a try, provide feedback, and help the founders build momentum towards what it ultimately became — especially when it was clear there was no traction on other sites. I think that's something to be thankful for, and shows that HN can be different from other communities in meaningful ways.

[baby]

There’s actually no “going back up” or digging yourself of your own grave once you hit a large medical expense. Lots of people become homeless and bankrupt for life due to these issues.

Personally, my plan is to go back to Europe if I want to launch an American startup because there is no way I would do this without a good health insurance and good social safety nets.

Interestingly, we see much more startups in the US even though the downsides of creating your startup in the US are insane. I guess we are really optimistic individuals (or start up founders tend to be crazy individuals).

[warent]

I think a large portion of entrepreneurs and founders don't do it because it's a get-rich-quick scheme or a normal path to retirement. It's because it's in their (our?) nature.

My stakes are much, much smaller, so maybe this experience is very particular to me, but I'm fortunate to have bootstrapped a growing SaaS business that is now closing in on USD$2000 MRR. Before this, I have a trail of hair-brained failures.

The sense of accomplishment hasn't changed with the (modest) business success. I've felt accomplished the first day I started trying and failing. This is just our nature. Seeing material success from it only icing on the cake.

[TAForObvReasons]

*younger people with family wealth. Some of my friends were unable to take risks because they needed to support their parents as well, and that puts a huge pressure to go with the safe money

[nojito]

>I think this is why a lot of crazy big startups come from younger people, they can afford to go for broke before they have a family and other obligations, because the worst that can happen is they are left with nothing, then they settle for a high-paying job at a big tech company and 2 months later they can afford a new car.

This really isn't true. The average age of a successful entrepreneur is 45.

[PopeDotNinja]

Not only did I run out of money, I ended up homeless!

TL;DR -- don't run out of money.

[ATS22]

totally agree with you. young people don't have to worry about stuff like managing their money because they are backed up. it's a shame grown ups with families can't find this backup in the community. once more capitalism shows it's ugly side.

[brryant]

Thank you HN.

[johnghanks]

this is an ad

[anishjain2000]

Seems great

[callmevlad]

(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

[dang]

I've copied this into the post above.

[dang]

"Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

We've had to warn you about this kind of thing before, especially the nationalistic aspect. Please don't post flamebait and especially please don't take HN threads into entirely off-topic, entirely generic classic flamewar topics. That path leads to the hell we're trying to avoid here.

[jldugger]

Because we _let_ people choose cheap plans, and don't use federal taxation to shift the costs to the wealthy. And we tie health insurance to employment, so all those fringe benefits you were unaware of suddenly cost real money when you start your own biz.

If OP had been required to carry a stronger insurance policy, their runway would have been even shorter. And if the tax regime gifted Americans universal health care, it would likely mean OP would have a smaller savings, if any at all.

Perhaps it's a testament to how healthy the jobs market is in SV that 'I'll just get a job' as a fall back plan if you run out of cash is plausible.

[darepublic]

On an ironic note, your company is part of a trend that threatens the livelihood of devs everywhere

[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.

[tornato7]

To me it's ironic to say that greater automation is threatening the livelihood of devs. That's what good devs should do, automate themselves out of their job and move up one tier of abstraction. Maybe those devs who feel threatened should start writing webflow extensions

[pembrook]

Fighting to keep the world complicated and inefficient, so that you can keep the same job forever and never have to learn anything new, is not looked upon favorably by history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite

When we automate the boring stuff, we are free to work on harder and more important problems. This is the arc of progress, and it's in the interest of the greater good.

[exolymph]

This is like thinking that WordPress is bad for developers. No, it just helps people get to the point where they need + can afford a developer.