Startup Field Guide Episode 12

In this episode of the Startup Field Guide podcast, Sandhya Hegde chats with Webflow’s co-founder and CTO, Bryant Chou. Before Webflow, creating a website required both a designer and a coder. Now, designers can build websites without code or sacrificing their artistic vision. Bryant discusses the company’s early days and how Webflow eventually turned into a $4 billion company. 

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Be sure to check out more Startup Field Guide Podcast episodes on Spotify, Apple, and Youtube. Hosted by Unusual Ventures General Partner Sandhya Hegde (former EVP at Amplitude), the SFG podcast uncovers how the top unicorn founders of today really found product-market fit.

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Interested in learning more about Webflow? Check out our complete case study on the company’s beginnings, including how Bryant worked with co-founders Vlad and Sergei Magdalin to turn Webflow into a vanguard of the no-code movement. 

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TL;DR

• Webflow’s initial core persona was that of a freelance web designer building websites for businesses and really struggling with the fact that they have to hand over 50% of the project to a web developer to implement those designs. 
• The Webflow team went to great lengths to ensure that the platform would output the same code as a developer “down to last CSS line, HTML line, Javascript.” Bryant explains that this meticulous approach to code allowed Webflow to “cross the chasm” for the technical audience.
• Bryant implemented a “growth engineering” strategy when the company’s organic growth started to level off, including designing flexboxgame.com to drive awareness. 
• The Webflow team also successfully used virality to drive growth by experimenting with content marketing, affiliates, and influencers.
• Early feedback suggested that customers wanted a WordPress integration in Webflow, but the founders decided to assess what the overall CMS market looked like and how Webflow could disrupt that space. Webflow eventually created a visual CMS experience that did not require additional coding or reliance on plug-ins and other add-ons.
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If you are looking to learn more about the product-led growth strategies that propelled Webflow to a $4 billion valuation, check out our Field Guides on product-let growth, self-serve product strategies, and free plans versus trial plans. Alternatively, you can also check out the recent PLG masterclass episode of our podcast. 

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Episode transcript

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Sandhya Hedge  

Our guest today is the CTO and Co-Founder of Webflow, Bryant Chou. Last valued at over $4 billion, Webflow has become synonymous with the no-code movement, as well as the PLG revolution. Over 3.5 million creators use Webflow to build beautiful websites and a completely visual canvas. We at Unusual Ventures are also extremely happy Webflow customers, so thank you so much for joining us, Bryant.

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So, let's go all the way back to 2012 when you started Webflow. How did the team come together and what was your original idea?

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Bryant Chou  

So, I actually met Vlad, my Co-Founder and CEO, while we were both working at Intuit back in 2008. And, I don't know if you remember, but this is peak Web 2.0, lean-startup-movement era. Eric Ries, all these companies were trying to reignite innovation. Vlad and I started working on an internal tool together at Intuit, where it would essentially just be this innovation software. So, it was software that we built internally to just track all the different ideas at Intuit. And eventually, we productized it and then turned it, actually, into Intuit’s first enterprise SAAS product. It was just me and Vlad. And in that experience, I just realized how archaic building for the web was. And of course, this is back in 2009/2010, so we've come a long way since then. But the tools that I was used to when I was developing mobile apps, either Android or iOS, just didn't exist for the web. 

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So, I went off and left Intuit and I started my last company. Vlad and I still stayed in touch but Vlad came to me in late 2012, early 2013, and was like, “Hey, I'm starting up Webflow. And what we're going to do is try and solve the exact pain points that we struggled with when we were building at Intuit.” Which was going from design to production. And initially, honestly, I was like, “For someone like me and you, that know how to code, this could be helpful.” But I didn't see this becoming a billion-dollar idea, I suppose. And it honestly wasn't until I met our third Co-Founder, Sergie, who is Vlad’s brother, hearing him talk about what he wanted Webflow to become was ultimately what really made the light bulb go off. 

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So, for context, Sergie is a designer and he has always lived in Photoshop Illustrator. Again, this is back in 2010, when these tools were the only thing that you could use. And he talked about how, essentially, he has been disenfranchised entirely from the creation process, from his designs. He can design it pixel-perfect, but he still had to hand it off to a developer to get it built. So, that's when I was like, “Oh, okay, so this is the vector at which we want to solve this problem. That's something that I can throw my weight and time and energy and calories behind.” So, that's how we started. My story's a little bit different than Sergie and Vlad’s but, at least from my perspective, it always came from a place of, okay, this is something that needs to exist in the world because I felt this deep pain.

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Sandhya Hedge  

Now, the big focus of our show is the idea of finding Product-Market Fit. And it always starts with that very empathetic idea of someone who has felt the pain, or knows someone who has felt it, but we typically divide that journey into rough two stages. First, how strong and differentiated is this idea? Is it a good enough hypothesis? And then second, who is that right, desperate customer who will be our early adopter, or our evangelist, who will be our loudspeaker for the message to the whole world? How did the three of you approach that path to finding product-market fit for Webflow?

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Bryant Chou

So, it was not an easy journey, obviously. When we started out everyone around us was telling us that either it was a solved problem or the way that we wanted to go and solve the problem was going to be not good enough. I'll give you a few examples. So, back in 2013, Dreamweaver was still a thing, Wix and Squarespace were still out. Wix was already a public company, Squarespace was already off to the races, and developers were front and center in everyone's collective mindshare. Everyone was talking about how important it was to write code. This is peak GitHub years. This is peak coding bootcamp, years. But we had this premise that it was not going to be a world of black and white where only designers design and only coders code. 

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We essentially built the entire company on the premise that there is this middle ground where designers can code and developers can participate in the design, but the thing that is missing, the fabric that is missing, is tooling. Specifically a visual development environment where we take the foundational primitives of the web, such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and we build that UI layer on top of it to make it much more accessible. Everyone around us told us this is going to be too complicated for designers to learn and it is going to be not powerful enough for developers to actually adopt. 

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And it's not like when we first came out of beta in August 2013, and we proved everyone wrong. It was a gradual period, I would say over the first five years of the company, for people to actually understand that you can do things visually, to the same degree of performance, responsiveness, and professionalism as the actual developer building it. And honestly, it wasn't until Ryan Hoover republished the ‘Rise of No-Code’ medium article that no-code became a thing. And all of a sudden, we became bucketed into this massive movement that is no-code. Where, now, it's well understood that there is no-code software to do exactly that, which has filled this gray area between something that is very black-and-white, something that is only designed, something that is only developers.

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‍Sandhya Hedge 

That's such an amazing story because it's not like you started the company in 2012 saying, “We are going to start this flagship movement called the no-code revolution.” But that was the great narrative headline for what you were driving, at the grassroots level. I love the clarity of the sequence in which those things happened and hearing that from you.

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Bryant Chou  

So, the one thing that we were extremely intentional about making sure that people understood was where we were coming from. So, something that we did, that I don't think other companies did at the time, was we went to great lengths to show that the code that Webflow would output is super clean. It's the exact same code that a developer would write. It's like, “Oh, wow, this is exactly the way I would build this type of website or web page.” It's down to the last CSS line, HTML line, JavaScript. So, we went to great lengths to prove to people that visual tooling, such as Workflow, can cross the chasm for the very technical audience.

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Sandhya Hedge 

Going back to your private beta, you had a lot of people saying no. Who was saying yes? Who did you do the building with? Who are the people who are trying out your very, very first versions of your product, and were part of your private beta? And how did you think about who the right people to get feedback from at that stage was? Whose feedback was the most poignant and helpful?

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Bryant Chou  

So, I think there's two things that we did right in the early days. we were very selective about the market that we were going to enter and also the use cases that we were going to solve. So, the market that we were going to enter was the professional website market, not the one website builder cookie cutter template like something my mom can use, but a professionally designed and professionally built website that typically requires a professional freelance web designer and a professional web developer to go and put together. And that's a big market, actually. That's essentially most of the WordPress markets, the mid-market CMS was big at the time, a lot of these products were big at the time, and the use case that we were solving for was very specific. It was actually the use case of, specifically, a freelance web designer, which is someone that, at the time, we were brainstorming what this person would look like. This would be a freelance web designer, making $40,000 a year, working out of a coffee shop building websites for businesses of all kinds, and really struggling with the fact that they have to fork over 50% of the entire project to a web developer so that they can implement those designs. So, that use case grounded us for the first, let's say, five or six years of the company where our entire go-to-market motion, as well as our community building, as in most definitely our product roadmap, was very centered around that particular persona. We gave that person to name, we had a poster of this person in our office. And that's how we routed all of our priorities in the very beginning.

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Sandhya Hedge

What was the first ‘aha’ moment for your product, that made people's eyes light up and have them go. “Oh, my God, this is so different from everything else I have used so far?”

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Bryant Chou  

Well, I'll give you my first ‘aha’ moment, which I believe was also Vlad’s first ‘aha’ moment. So, late July 2013 we're in the thick of Y Combinator, Paul Graham's telling us, “Hey, you guys got to launch your products by demo day and get some traction, otherwise, you won't be able to raise any money.” And we're like, “Oh, shoot, that's exactly what we have to do.” So, long nights, many weekends, and Vlad and I essentially were just coding non-stop. Sergie was coding and designing non-stop, and I remember it was like Thursday afternoon. We had just ordered Indian food from DoorDash, which Andy Fang, one of the Co-Founders of DoorDash, dropped off the food because he was the driver at the time for DoorDash. We just finished lunch and we just merged some code to production. Now we're all sitting and hovering around Sergie’s laptop, we're watching Sergie design a website for the very first time in Webflow, and we saw him drag a div container onto the page. We saw him style that element, we saw him put some text on it, we saw him publish it. Literally in a matter of seconds, if not a minute, he had built a website and published it. And that was the very first time that I ever saw the circle completed with Webflow. That's when I knew that we've created something that was really extremely powerful because someone like Sergie, with no coding background, went and built a bespoke professional website that was hosted on really robust infrastructure on AWS, that was performant. I remember having goosebumps, and just talking about it right now, I still have goosebumps because that's when I knew that what we were building was special.

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Sandhya Hedge 

What kind of early customer feedback — any surprises, anything that either helped you gain more conviction or changed how you were thinking about the product roadmap positioning?

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Bryant Chou 

The only feedback in the first two years of the company was, “We want more: We want more functionality. We want more support for widgets and elements. We want maps, we want social widgets, we want light boxes, carousels,” and essentially the first year/two years was a sprint. We designed and built features in days. We shipped them — sometimes in hours — everything from some hosting feature to handle 404 redirects, or some new widget that a customer asked for, or forms. Now, these things were lightning-fast delivery because, at the time, shipping product was our only way to grow. We didn't have money to spend on marketing so we viewed our product-development velocity as the best option for organic growth. And I think that's true for a lot of early-stage companies out there looking for Product-Market Fit, but in particular, Webflow needed to essentially unlock more of these capabilities because it just unlocked more and more visual use cases for Webflow. And by that I mean, it just gave people who didn't have that ability to code this custom light box, the ability to now critically box. So, that was a constant sprint, and it was fine because we were just shipping product nonstop.

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The one thing that was also a surprise, not really a surprise, but one thing that we heard all the time was everyone asking for a WordPress integration. And they wanted dynamic content, they wanted a blog. At the time, Webflow didn't have a CMS. So this is an instance where we deliberately ignored our customers, we ignored the feedback, we're like, “Yeah, we could go and integrate with the WordPress CMS. But we actually have ambitions for something even greater.” So, this is an instance where  —  Karen Peacock at Intercom has talked about this — where customer feedback is almost superficial. You have to really engage and understand exactly what the customer needs, and really go down to their root pain points before you go into action. Because there are millions of data points for customer feedback. But it's often that if you really spend the time learning about your customer, you'll actually extract these themes. And these themes will lead you to create innovative products. 

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So, to go back to this WordPress integration example, the theme that we saw in all this feedback about customers asking for a WordPress plugin is that they wanted to render dynamic content on a Webflow page, and we could have gone out and built it. But what we did was, we really tried to understand, what did the overall market look like for the CMS? What is Webflow's right to win, in the overall CMS market? What we did was we took bold steps forward. And we created, essentially, the world's first visual CMS back in 2015. This was a CMS that was completely revolutionary at the time, you have the ability to create custom fields and describe relationships to data, but then, most importantly, you had the ability to bind dynamic content to the UI on your Webflow site. None of this existed at the time. And, we're still the market leaders in that space. So, effectively, we took that piece of customer feedback, and we saw how loud it was and how fervent it was. And we've essentially birthed an entirely new CMS category out of it, which is the visual CMS category, that now Webflow owns. So, that was a really interesting takeaway, just seeing all that customer sentiment and feedback pop up over the years.

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Sandhya Hedge  

Thank you so much for sharing that. I think it's a very, very easy thing to say, “We are customer-centric, we always listen to our customers,” versus actually asking why and heeding the need behind the ask. So, I think that’s an amazing example. Thank you so much for sharing that. Maybe switching a little bit to go-to-market, you talked a little bit about like the first beachhead persona being this freelance designer. Did that evolve at all? Looking at 2015, now you have shipped the CMS, are content marketers also a target persona? How did you guys think about, “Okay, who's our customer, three years into starting the company?”

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Bryant Chou  

So, I think I talked about how this freelance web designer was our initial beachhead persona, and it worked really well because the company needed focus. Soon after that, let's say three or four years in, we suddenly realize that they're just one stakeholder in the entire website creation process. Ultimately, these freelancers, web designers, they're building websites for end businesses, firms like Unusual Ventures or restaurants down the street, and we probably ignored that segment of the market for a little bit too long because we started to realize that Webflow, the tool, was really, really good at going from zero to one, going from idea and design to launching it. But that's just a fraction, or a tiny fraction, of the overall lifecycle of a website. After you launch the website, you’ve got to maintain it, you’ve got to update content, you’ve got to write your blog posts, you have to work on your SEO, you have to drive traffic to it. So, as our initial beachhead persona was really solidified, that's when we really had to invest go-to-market, product marketing energy specifically, into understanding all the different stakeholders in a web project. So now, I could probably name seven different persona types that we use on a day-to-day basis at the company. And sure we have our top ones, and we are still very cognizant of the fact that our space is very multifaceted. We have to talk to all these different personas now, especially as the company has grown, as the products have grown, we have to take all of them into account.

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Sandhya Hedge  

So, shifting gears a little bit to your role in the company. You've been the CTO, but also focused on growth, and played the role of growth leader at Webflow. So I'm curious, how did your role evolve as the company grew? And what did some of the early days of building that very bottom-up growth motion at Webflow look like?

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Bryant Chou  

I would say all the founders were growth-oriented. We struggled to raise money for our seed round, we knew that what we were building needed to attract the attention of very discerning eyes, specifically, developers’ eyes. So, every single one of us, Vlad, Sergie, and myself, obsessed over the copy of our website, not just the design, we obsessed over the marketing of our website, we obsessed over which sections of the website should be displayed over others. We obsessed over everything. Down to the first blog post. I remember it taking eight months for us to write our first company blog post because we just didn't really know exactly where to really drive that narrative. 

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I would say that is probably a healthy dynamic when you're resource-constrained. And for a very long time, Webflow was bootstrapped. It wasn't until Accel led our Series A, that we had serious cash to use. So essentially, for six years of the company, we were just growing the company off of revenue. What that meant was when I was the head of growth at the time, it was all about being extremely scrappy with where to find that top-of-funnel, where to find the retention, and where to optimize monetization. The natural decision for us at the time, when I started to focus on growth was hey, we know, at a certain point organic is going to trail off. No companies just grow completely off of organic unless you're like a pure B2C product, something like a notion or something like that with a massive TAM. 

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So, that's when I start to think about growth engineering, specifically, what are some of the products that we can release that can help with top-of-funnel awareness? That's when we started to think about how marketing could be an extension of product, so we created things like Flexboxgame.com, which was essentially a game of Froggy but it was implemented in the Webflow designer, and you have to use Webflow Flexbox in order to progress through the game. 

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So, we had to just be extremely creative, we had to think about how to use organics and virality to help drive the company. And that's also when we started to experiment with performance marketing, as well. Content marketing, affiliates, influencers. Fun fact, there is an influencer out there and he's responsible for probably 10s of 1000s of Webflow customers. And not only that, but he's probably also responsible for really solidifying with those brands in the design world as well. So, all of these things were started as experiments and, essentially, when I was running growth at the time, I would think of it as an engineering pot. I would think of it as, “Alright, what is the impact, confidence, and effort out of all this backlog of growth ideas?” We'd meet weekly, we'd score them, we’d throw new ideas out there, and we would just find really scrappy ways of working through that backlog. And some of them hit, some of them didn’t. But for the ones that hit, they became extremely impactful.

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Sandhya Hedge  

One of the complaints I often hear from early-stage founders as well is we don't have enough, quote-unquote, traffic, or audience to really run a well-defined experiment. So, obviously, the size of the potential impact, and the size of the ideas, have to be really big so that you can quickly get a yes or no. How did you think about that, at the very early stage? What does a good experiment idea look like? And how quickly did you move on it?

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Bryant Chou  

Probably as a former exec at Amplitude, you won't like this answer, but we did an experiment and what we did was we built and refined our conviction around certain things and we just swung hard. We didn't wait for stat sick, we didn't define a very clean A/B or multivariant experiment, simply because we're not a product or company that has that type of traffic. Airbnb can experiment with 1000 different variables simultaneously. For a company like Webflow, we have to be very selective about when we choose to experiment. And when we do, we are very deliberate about how we run them. At least in the early days, when we were looking for Product-Market Fit, it started with deep conviction about the problem that we were solving. And it started with our belief that we were the users that we were primarily building this product for, Sergie is the primary user of this product. So, whenever there was a product or feature that needed to be built, it was like, “Does Sergie need this? Does our target persona need this? Out of all these things that they need? Where does it rank? How do we get it out there?” Because it's not just once you build it they'll come, but you have to think about ways of distribution at the same time. 

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So, you have to think about the entire lifecycle of the product, not just the innovation stage, but also the distribution stage, when you're pre-product-market fit because you really, really want to invest those limited resources in a way that's just going to have the most impact when you don't have the benefit of the law of large numbers to help you incrementally experiment towards it. That was one thing, that was the only way that we could actually progress in the early years.

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Sandhya Hedge  

I actually love that answer, even as a former Amplitude executive, because we spent a lot of our time educating people on when or how to think about the right type of experiment for the stage and business model they have. And this was, by far, the easiest mistake to make, which is when you are a very early-stage startup, even when you're a B2C early-stage startup, and you don't really have a lot of traffic, your ideas have to be big swings so that you can get a clear signal. Five people who are crazy about something you just did—it's a clear signal. If the idea is big enough, a swing has to be big, as opposed to this button having square edges instead of round. And I'm curious, how did you build the team? What was the talent you looked for as you continued to grow a growth-focused team?

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Bryant Chou  

That’s a great question. There are two dimensions that I use to evaluate people, especially in the early stage. The first one is the ability to discern what is important to work on and what is not. That, by far, is the number one quality to look for. If you are hiring someone in a decision-making role, whether it's your first product manager, your first engineering leader, your first leaders, or even your first lead engineers, you want to be able to start thinking about how you layer in organizational hierarchy where the founders are not going to be a bottleneck for decision. In order for that to happen you need to look for people that ultimately just know what's important and know what’s not. 

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So, that is by far the biggest factor when thinking about growing a growth team, which is if you have leaders in the company that have the inability to create that distinction and clarity for the rest of the team, you're just going to be focusing on the wrong things. And it's just so important to have focus in the early days. The other dimension, and it doesn't have to exist in the same person, is simply just raw agility and execution power. When you are cash-strapped, when you're ticking against time, when you're going against big incumbents, your true angle here is speed. And speed typically comes off with certain trade-offs. So, it’ll come off with a trade-off in quality, maybe, or trade-off in performance. And if you're building a product like Webflow, you need it to be performant, you need it to be extremely high quality. So, that has been something that's been really difficult to find, that workflow, because we want to find people with the right craft but we also need to find people with the right amount of urgency. Especially in the early days, we sought to bring on people with that sense of urgency in areas that we knew where we could move faster. 

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So, areas like content marketing, and performance marketing, these are things that should already have a good degree of agility built in. But for certain things that needed to be done really well, such as designing the Webflow designer, really thinking about how a product or a feature should work, especially when there's no historical precedent for building something like Webflow before. That's where we took our time. So, it was always a delicate trade-off there. And generally, I think, when founders are thinking about building out those layers of organizational hierarchy, the one thing that I always tell people is, ”Make sure you screen for people that really understand your customers, really understand the product, really understand the problem that you're solving,” because those are the ingredients that give those people the context needed to discern what is important and what is not.

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Sandhya Hedge  

Very well said. And as the head of growth, how did you think about CAC LTV for Webflow? You had a lot of smaller customers that were lower ACV compared to, especially, traditional enterprise software, which has sales teams trying to get minimum 30k ACV, so you had a very different model. How did you think about customer acquisition and what to spend money on? 

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Bryant Chou 

Great question because back in 2015/2016, we were operating the company, probably the way you should operate it in 2022 and 2023, which is very cash efficient. I think a lot of the companies back in 2014/2015 had terrible unit economics. I heard that Instacart was burning $14 per order, that was simply not us since we just never had the fundraising profile to go out and deploy irrational amounts of cash for the sake of market expansion or customer acquisition. So, to be honest with you, we didn't use LTV CAC. What we used was, essentially, a payback period. And then we, essentially, would always have a fine eye towards, literally, our net income because our net income was our growth bucket. Our net income is where we would pull resources from when we went to go do customer acquisition, let's say, in the performance market or something like that. So, the kind of way we're running the company back in 2015 and 2016, probably the way that a lot of SaaS companies shouldn't be thinking about their financials and their unit economics today, but it's probably going to be really, really hard for companies to do that, especially when we've had a decade of opulence and just free cash. So LTV CAC for us was always extremely healthy because we always had a very, very organic lead business, word-of-mouth was always very strong for us. Not only that, but because of our business model of going after freelance web designers, they were effectively our sales channel, they essentially operated as our extension of Webflow’s marketing and sales. So, every single freelance web designer that we converted as a customer would have to go and find businesses for themselves to go build websites on top of. So, that was an economically efficient way for us to grow at scale, especially in the early days.

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Sandhya Hedge  

And how do you think Webflow’s future looks different from its past? At this point, every company like yours eventually goes upmarket. What does that conversation and those trade-offs sound like, within Webflow?

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Bryant Chou  

So, we have two core focus areas. The first one is that we want to be the de facto standard for the way professionals build for the web. And I use the word professionals because we're not going up against Wix and Squarespace, where they're just selling to mom-and-pop shops. We want to be the standard for the way professionals design and build, and launch professional websites. So, these are websites that generate leads for businesses, these are websites that distinguish brands from one another, these are websites that are multinational and multilingual, these are websites that sell goods and services. So, we want to essentially continue to be the market leader in that particular segment of the website category. That means that we have to invest in the product in certain ways to continue to be the market leader there.

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And then, obviously, we started a sales motion about two years ago at Webflow, that's also going to be extremely important. And the size of that market is massive. We still run up with enterprise customers that are spending millions of dollars a year on some very antiquated Adobe technology that they don't even have the ability to build and support anymore. Webflow really is a completely different type of offering. It's a modern technology stack. It has the flexibility, it has the customizability. And we're just getting started there. So, what that means is that we also have to invest in our product, and ways of servicing larger companies. And thankfully, a lot of the products and features that we do need to build, they’re for the larger audience. Our SMBs and freelancers also need those, because they need collaboration, they need multi-language things like that. So thankfully, the product roadmap has a high degree of overlap when we're thinking about these disparate segments of the market. And wherever possible, we're thinking about ways of beefing up our products to really excel at both. It's a trade-off because it almost feels like you're driving a car with two accelerator pedals at the same time. But I think we're getting really good at modulating how we're thinking about our investments now.

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Sandhya Hedge  

How have you invested in your own evolution, especially as you have played different roles, and different hats within that? How have you learned and grown as a founder? What’s something that stands out for you in the past few years as being super formative?

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Bryant Chou  

I think the biggest difference between myself six years ago and today is I have a family now, two young kids, and they give me a tremendous amount of perspective. And, honestly, they're by far the most important aspects of my life. So, thinking with that perspective in mind, I approach myself as a leader as like, hey, going to work every day, having the ability to work with incredible people that are super talented, so smart, and so bought into Webflow’s mission, that in and of itself is a tremendous gift. And maybe in the past, when I'd be anxious, or antsy, or defeatist about certain things that would happen at work, having that sense of balance now is very important because maybe in times where I was super anxious about something that would happen, whether it'd be a delay, or competitor, or something like that, I suppose I'm reminded that there are more things to life than just work. And I think having that healthy balance has been a big part of my growth, as a leader, and as a founder here. 

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I have to say that I've also introduced a good amount of personal time, in my schedule, somehow, where my wife allows me to go pursue new hobbies, new things, and cultivate friendships that maybe four or five years ago, I didn't have the time for because I was working all the time. So, I think there's a time and place for people to really just focus on what they're trying to do at work but, I think, in the grand scheme of things, you have to ask yourself, “Hey, if you're 70 years old, 80 years old, and you don't have the physical, mental, or familial relationships that you used to have, what do you really have? What were you really spending all that time on at work?” So, I've always operated with this subtle fear of death and I think the past few years have given me just a lot more perspective that work is extremely important, this deal that we're working on, this product that we're trying to ship. But ultimately, I think I don't let it come in conflict with my personal and emotional health and I think that's something that I think is easy to forget when you're younger, but especially as you get older you realize how utterly short your time is on earth.

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Sandhya Hedge 

Yeah, definitely makes you more patient, pretty much immediately. What would be your advice for seed-stage founders getting started right now? If you look back to 2012, what do you remember doing well, that you feel like people might have lost a little bit of today, or things that you would have done differently? I would love to hear some.

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Bryant Chou  

I think the biggest difference between, let's say 2012 and 2022, is it feels like there are way more problems to solve and a lot more variety, in terms of how you would solve them. The rise of AI, the importance of climate, the importance of sustainability, and the rise of automation. There are so many things now that are so big. I still feel like websites are a massive market and there are so many problems to solve in the web space. But for people that are thinking about starting a company, there's just so much more surface area, so many more interesting problems to solve, so many interesting investors, like yourself, that are interested in funding those entrepreneurs. 

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So, given that, if I was 27 again, I would be really thinking about how to surround myself with people that can give me as much inspiration and knowledge to help me understand, what is the number one problem for me to go out and solve. Because there are so many now. And I think that's a very luxurious time to be an entrepreneur because so many things have been opened up with software. I think software has really eaten the world and I think there's still so many industries that need to be optimized. There are so many big problems that need to be solved across climate across sustainability, across AG tech, FinTech. I think the best thing that I would tell my kids, if they were thinking about exploring entrepreneurship, or just in general, is just finding those five people that you want to be super close to in life, and make sure that they are the people that are opening up your eyes to the world and perking up your ears. Because, at least for me, I'm not someone that just goes and locks myself away and reads 100 books a year. I'm someone that draws inspiration from others and a lot of that comes from the friends that I have, it's conversations that I have with them. And I think that's something that anyone should be thinking about.

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Sandhya Hedge 

Very well said. Well, thank you so much for joining us on the show, Brian. This is incredible. I can't wait to release this interview. And you know, very, very happy to be investors in Webflow and be able to, you know, share all of your learnings and wisdom from building such an amazing company with all of our listeners. 

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