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.
Additionally, I think that tools like Webflow empower devs as well. Why spend hours writing a custom piece of code when it can be done in Webflow in a fraction of the time, and potentially even handed off to a non-dev to manage/maintain.
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.
One thing to note is that we're also creating visual abstractions over common things that are hand-coded with JS. For example, see our declarative GUI for interactions and animations [1] – it allows designers to get the same exact effects that you'd build out manually, but without the need to learn how to write that JS from scratch.
That is, in fact, our main differentiator – and the main reason people choose Webflow. Check out this very diverse set of sites [1] that can be built with Webflow, this ability to visually develop any kind of custom layout/experience really does go a long way to distance us from any competitors.
These sites are quite varied, I do agree. One small thing I noticed. Some sites could have improved tab navigation, for example https://www.memberstack.io/. The site, without any interaction, is buttery smooth 60fps. When I start tabbing through the "What others are saying..." carousel, though, it destroys the animation frame rate (Chrome, Mac OS, 32 GB RAM).
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!
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.
I own a large web design agency, do you have options for partnership? We are always interested in new tools and better ways of doing things for our clients.
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!
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.
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.
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.
A quick clarification - the output of Webflow actually works across all modern browsers, but the design tool itself has more limited browser support.
One of the biggest challenges with Firefox has been the inability to style native scrollbars to become dark with CSS – theres a decade+ long issue/conversation around making that happen: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=77790. Eventually, we gave up waiting on native support, and now working towards converting scrollbars to be JavaScript-driven to support Firefox (otherwise the white scrollbars stick out like a sore thumb in a dark UI).
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.