No More Hustleporn: Vlad Magdalin tried to start Webflow three previous times before it stuck
We pulled out the best insights from Vlad Magdalin's recent podcast interview with Alexa von Tobel at Inc. Transcription and light editing by Anthropic's Claude, curation by Yiren Lu :-)
Highlights
Alexa von Tobel: You had a really interesting, wild start, taking a huge risk, not only professionally, but also you were the sole breadwinner of your family with two little kids. Where did that conviction come from? What was the voice in your head that got you comfortable to go take this risk, especially when, again, you're responsible for your family.
Vlad Magdalin: I think that the two words that I would describe that is some sort of exuberant optimism or raw determination to try to make something happen. By the way, that time when I already had two kids - my first daughter was three years old and my second daughter had just turned one - that was the fourth time that I tried to start Webflow. There were three other attempts that all failed to a certain degree somewhere before I was even married, where we ran out of money or I ran out of money. Second time, I was sort of moonlighting working into it, which was my first real job out of college. And a third time was a little bit later.
And the thing that made it really happen in 2012 was the fact that the web was starting to really break through and people started to see it as an entire platform. So things like Google Maps, things like even Gmail had shown people that in a browser, it's not just presentational, but you could actually build an entire application in the browser and have it be interactive. And that's what gave me the motivation and the courage to say, actually, the web is now ready to build something like Webflow within the browser.
It's the combination of that and a series of I would just describe as lucky events that gave me this push that I just have to work on this, otherwise I'm going to regret it. One of those things was just a random letter that we got in the mail that gave me the trademark for the word Webflow. In one of the previous attempts where Webflow had failed five years earlier, we actually applied for a trademark and got denied because another company had the trademark for Web and hosting services. And then randomly, I guess that company had gone out of business and something was cleared in the mail. I had now moved cities twice, received this trademark certificate, basically saying, like, hey, now you own the trademark for Webflow. So that was like, okay, something is meant to be here. And then I saw this video called Inventing on Principle, which is a conference talk that was all about visual development. Like, how do you take the concepts of direct manipulation and things that artists and designers understand and map that to code level complexity? And that talk was so inspiring that literally the next day, I was talking to my wife and my boss about like, okay, I need to drop out, or at least go start working part-time on trying to make Webflow happen again. And it was like that kind of exuberant optimism that we just have to make this real in the world, that gave me both the energy and I think allowed me to convince my wife to take this big risk. With two young kids not really knowing where income was going to come from, it's not something I always recommend to people because most often these things don't work out. So it's a lot of survivorship bias. Or it worked for me. It just happened to work for me. I just needed to make it happen. And the fact that I actually had two kids was more of a motivation.
Vlad Magdalin: It felt like it took us a while to get product market fit because initially, we thought that we had struck gold. When we showed a demo of Webflow and created a signup list, we got over 30,000 people to sign up saying they wanted access. We were talking to many of them, and they said they would pay for something like it.
But when we actually launched a few months later and allowed people to sign up and pay, I was shocked by how low the conversion rate was. I thought maybe 10% of those 30,000 people would sign up and be paying users, and suddenly, we'd have a working business. Instead, it was around 50 people out of the 30,000 because the product was so limited. You could only build one page with no CMS or blog. The only people it worked for were those who worked with coders building small client websites.
Vlad Magdalin: It has been a journey for us because building websites is something so many people need, but it's really difficult to create a product for all people. The closest equivalent is if iMovie was something like Squarespace or Wix, we're like Final Cut Pro or After Effects. You use it to make awesome wedding videos as a wedding photographer, but you can also create entire movies. That's the power of our core designer.
Our core user base has not been every person that needs a website, every individual or every designer. Our bread and butter has been people building professional experiences. Our sweet spot has been everyone in the professional bucket building for their company or as a service provider like a freelancer or agency. We help companies from founders to growth stage companies to large enterprises do more through visual development and no code than they would with code or a coding platform.
Alexa von Tobel: I'd love your predictions of the intersection of no code and generative AI.
Alexa von Tobel: Here's the funny thing about no code. No code is kind of just generating code, right? It's a visual abstraction to code generation. So in a sense, no code tools themselves are generative. They are generating code behind the scenes. Because they don't replace code. They're essentially like a higher-level abstraction to recreating code. And generative AI is just that on steroids, where if you can teach NoCode tools to both translate from code and back, which they already do, which is essentially what webflow does and other tools like webflow do, you can now start to create, even, like I said earlier, even simpler interfaces to describing whether it's websites or software applications.
Full Transcript
Alexa Von Tobel: Hi everybody, I'm your host, Alexa Von Tobel. And this week, I'm excited for you to meet Vlad Magdalin, co-founder and CEO of Webflow, a company that is leading the no-code movement and empowering millions to create for the web without having to code.
Vlad was born in the USSR and immigrated to the United States as a refugee when he was nine years old. Vlad studied computer science at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo, as well as 3D animation and special effects at the Academy of Art in San Francisco. This mix of technical and creative disciplines helped him create Webflow, which brings the power of software engineering to designers. Through an intuitive visual interface, Webflow has grown to over three and a half million users with a valuation of over $4 billion.
And with that, let's welcome Vlad. Let's start with the basics. What's Webflow? In your own words, and for everybody out there who maybe hasn't come across Webflow, talk about the origin story, where'd you guys start?
Vlad Magdalin: Thank you, Alexa. First of all, it's really great to be here. I'm honored to be here. Webflow is a professional website builder, so it allows people to create things with no code that typically software engineers have to create — the kinds of websites that are like Apple, Stripe, Webflow.com, like really, really sophisticated websites that in the past might have taken months to create. Webflow can do it visually and allows designers to, using their imagination and creativity, build things that are on par with something that used to be done with code.
And the origin story is actually kind of just that the combination of my brother being a designer and myself being an early designer, and then learning how to code and seeing how difficult that translation layer was of having a vision for something, and then seeing how much designers struggled with working with either learning how to code or working with developers. Having that whole back and forth and handoff where there was a lot of frustration, like, this is what I imagine, this is what I want to happen, but this is how hard it actually is to build for the web.
And having that insight of, wouldn't be awesome if designers directly could use a piece of software like a design tool and have that directly go live to the world and have everyone benefit from without this translation layer. And that was the original inspiration. Like, how do you create something that is accessible to many, many more people without requiring them to learn how to code?
And actually had some inspiration from 3D animation tools. I wanted to be a 3D animator and work for Pixar, and I used and learned some of those tools which are really rich and powerful. Then coming into web design and seeing that it was basically just Photoshop and a text editor and thinking, why can't the web design world be just as simple and just as powerful as these visual tools that animators use to create these incredible movies for like, Pixar, DreamWorks, et cetera.
So just wanted to create something very similar for the web. And here we are ten years later with so many people using it.
Alexa von Tobel: You had a really interesting, wild start, taking a huge risk, not only professionally, but also you were the sole breadwinner of your family with two little kids. Where did that conviction come from? Talk through. What was the voice in your head that got you comfortable to go take this risk, especially when, again, you're responsible for your family.
Vlad Magdalin: I think that the two words that I would describe that is some sort of exuberant optimism or raw determination to try to make something happen. By the way, that time when I already had two kids - my first daughter was three years old and my second daughter had just turned one - that was the fourth time that I tried to start Webflow. There were three other attempts that all failed to a certain degree somewhere before I was even married, where we ran out of money or I ran out of money. Second time, I was sort of moonlighting working into it, which was my first real job out of college. And a third time was a little bit later. Also while I had a full-time job where there were so many competitors coming out this is around 2007, 2008 that I just kind of gave up and also ran out of money or ran out of like, motivation to keep going.
And the thing that made it really happen in 2012 was the fact that the web was starting to really break through and people started to see it as an entire platform. Like, people are starting to build apps on the web. So things like Google Maps, things like even Gmail had shown people that in a browser, it's not just presentational, but you could actually build an entire application in the browser and have it be interactive. And that's what gave me the motivation and the courage to say, actually, the web is now ready to build something like Webflow within the browser, which is a tool like Webflow requires access to because in the past, if you had to build something similar to it. It would have been like previous tools like Dreamweaver, which were really big industry tools in the early 2000s, but then sort of like faded out because the problem was so hard. Technically, you kind of had to build your own browser or some emulation of the browser.
It's the combination of that and a series of I would just describe them as lucky events that gave me this push that I just have to work on this, otherwise I'm going to regret it. One of those things was just a random letter that we got in the mail that gave me the trademark for the word Webflow. In one of the previous attempts where Webflow had failed five years earlier, we actually applied for a trademark and got denied because another company had the trademark for Web and hosting services. And then randomly, through some, I guess that company had gone out of business and something was cleared in the mail. I now moved cities twice, received this trademark certificate, basically saying, like, hey, now you own the trademark for Webflow. So that was like, okay, something is meant to be here. And then I saw this video called Inventing on Principle, which is a conference talk that was all about visual development. Like, how do you take the concepts of direct manipulation and things that artists and designers understand and map that to code level complexity? And that talk was so inspiring that literally the next day, I was talking to my wife and my boss about like, okay, I need to drop out, or at least go start working part-time on trying to make Webflow happen again. And it was like that kind of exuberant optimism that we just have to make this real in the world, that gave me both the energy and I think allowed me to convince my wife to take this big risk. With two young kids not really knowing where income was going to come from, it's not something I always recommend to people because most often these things don't work out. So it's a lot of survivorship bias. Or it worked for me. It just happened to work for me. I just needed to make it happen. And the fact that I actually had two kids was more of a motivation.
Alexa von Tobel: I want to go back to those early signs of product market fit. You were building something really complicated. Give us the core lesson that you learned that other people could use in their companies and lives.
Vlad Magdalin: It felt like it took us a while to get product market fit because initially, we thought that we had struck gold. When we showed a demo of Webflow and created a signup list, we got over 30,000 people to sign up saying they wanted access. We were talking to many of them, and they said they would pay for something like it.
But when we actually launched a few months later and allowed people to sign up and pay, I was shocked by how low the conversion rate was. I thought maybe 10% of those 30,000 people would sign up and be paying users, and suddenly, we'd have a working business. Instead, it was around 50 people out of the 30,000 because the product was so limited. You could only build one page with no CMS or blog. The only people it worked for were those who worked with coders building small client websites.
The folks who latched on and started paying, for them, it was life-changing. They could now do it themselves without relying on someone else. They started building mini-businesses because they could pitch themselves as solo freelancers building entire landing pages without huge budgets.
The thing we did right was go really deep serving those first users well. Instead of getting as many as possible from the 30,000 and seeing many drop off quickly, we went deep with each of the initial 50, then 100, then 200 users. We understood what they really needed since some were using us 8 hours a day. That early community supported each other and pushed us to build things WordPress, Squarespace, and Wix didn't have. They gave us insights into what to build next.
Alexa von Tobel: Give us one or two things that you should always do and maybe one thing you should never do as you're managing and building a community.
Vlad Magdalin: For us, community is our superpower. It is literally part of the product. The way that people onboard onto Webflow or even discover it is usually through word of mouth. There's a pretty high learning curve because you're essentially learning web development. You're becoming a web developer, and there's a lot of complexity and a lot of things that you might need to do on a website.
So community became the secondary product where you would use the product itself, but then you would actually rely on the community:
- To get inspired,
- To get support,
- To see how other people did things.
So I think the thing that we did really well is to empower the community to share and remix things that can be created in the product. Essentially make it really frictionless and easy to show off what you're building to then inspire other people by example of what's possible and how to recreate certain complex things.
We had people rebuilding Apple.com and showing other people how they did animations and interactions and certain layouts. And that worked way better than trying to create educational materials ourselves because the community could then be really interactive. Somebody could go to that community member and ask questions, and that person would then selflessly make another video to follow up and say, "This is how I thought about my process or how I solved a certain problem."
The thing I would definitely never do with a community is to think of them as purely like a growth channel or some monetization. The second a community feels like they are there to be farmed or monetized, then it no longer becomes a community. Then it's a set of users, and that doesn't feel like a genuine community.
So really looking at making the community successful and engaged and how do you create human connections between those real actual people?
Alexa von Tobel: You've talked a little bit about your ideal user profile and literally you serve everyone from individuals to enterprise. How did that growth happen? Give us the one or two hacks to that super growth that you've had.
Vlad Magdalin: It has been a journey for us because building websites is something so many people need, but it's really difficult to create a product for all people. The closest equivalent is if iMovie was something like Squarespace or Wix, we're like Final Cut Pro or After Effects. You use it to make awesome wedding videos as a wedding photographer, but you can also create entire movies. That's the power of our core designer.
Our core user base has not been every person that needs a website, every individual or every designer. Our bread and butter has been people building professional experiences. Our sweet spot has been everyone in the professional bucket building for their company or as a service provider like a freelancer or agency. We help companies from founders to growth stage companies to large enterprises do more through visual development and no code than they would with code or a coding platform.
There's an awesome virtual cycle. The more we empower freelancers and agencies to learn this new skill and build for themselves or smaller clients, the more they develop a client base that graduates to larger and larger enterprises. Large enterprises come from really expensive tools and can move ten times faster with webflow, using fewer people and putting designers and marketing teams in control. They benefit because they need to hire new talent familiar with webflow, and it's easier to bring in freelancers building for smaller businesses.
We don't have one perfect target customer. Anyone who needs powerful professional websites, from brand designers to marketers to CMOs to CTOs. The shared goal is creating a powerful, non-cookie cutter website without constraints.
Growth didn't come overnight. It was a slow build. There's no place to instantly convince freelancers or agencies to switch. People start as students, build for smaller clients, become freelancers, build agencies. Marketing teams notice agencies moving faster, ask why, and adopt the platform. A lot is word of mouth and convincing people there's a better way. We've really just started. We're less than 1% of active websites.
Alexa von Tobel: I'd love to get a sense of how you think about the future of no code and what that looks like. What's obvious to you about where we're headed? Any predictions there?
Alexa von Tobel: Code is still such a mysterious force. The best analogy I can think of is mapping it to literacy. 400 years ago, more people were learning to read. Literacy was becoming more democratized. To distribute knowledge or publish anything, you had to be wealthy or have access to a printing press. It was imbalanced in terms of who could read, consume information, and leverage the power of the written word.
In software, we have a similar deep divide. Much of the world still lacks internet access. Of those with access, most only consume. A small minority leverage code to create solutions that benefit others. Only 1% harness software's power.
Over the next 5-10 years, software will become more democratized. No-code tools and AI will empower more people to describe what they want to build and generate working software. They can then tweak the code directly or use no-code tools like Webflow without years of training.
Demand will increase for building websites, apps, and software solutions. How software is built will change. Vastly more people will access the ability to create what we now call software.
Alexa von Tobel: I'd love your predictions of the intersection of no code and generative AI.
Alexa von Tobel: Here's the funny thing about no code. No code is kind of just generating code, right? It's a visual abstraction to code generation. So in a sense, no code tools themselves are generative. They are generating code behind the scenes. Because they don't replace code. They're essentially like a higher-level abstraction to recreating code. And generative AI is just that on steroids, where if you can teach NoCode tools to both translate from code and back, which they already do, which is essentially what webflow does and other tools like webflow do, you can now start to create, even, like I said earlier, even simpler interfaces to describing whether it's websites or software applications.
And having more and more of those tedious parts of building out a layout or configuring a database or connecting certain parts of an app to another application. In terms of integrations, more and more of that glue work will start to become more conversational. A lot of the tedious parts, a lot of the repetitive parts are going to be delegated to generative. AI can just generate them or tweak them.
Our mission is to bring development superpowers to everyone. That doesn't mean that you have to become a coder. Now you're developing software through either dragging and dropping or talking to an interface to create another interface. And that is a much more human-like approach.
Alexa von Tobel: Vlad, I'm going to transition a little bit to you. You were born in the USSR and you immigrated to the United States as a refugee. You were nine years old. Talk a little bit about what being a refugee to the United States, what that gave you. You've clearly harnessed it. Tell us how you process that.
Vlad Magdalin: I got a new lease on life, essentially to come from a place where our family wasn't wanted and the future really seemed bleak. To come to a country where by default people believe in you, by default people want to invest in you. Even though we came from the USSR, where the vast majority of movies in the late 80s are like the Russians are the bad guys, people who invested in us, who really believed in us, was so that was eye-opening in that it made me want to be that for other people.
Alexa von Tobel: Is there one thing that your parents did that you are obviously going to do again for your own children to pay it forward?
Vlad Magdalin: They really taught me the value of hard work. We would, every night through my high school years, get into our family van at 8:00 PM and go clean a bunch of dentist offices because that was my parents' way of making more income. And at first we grumbled and complained, but then it sort of became like this "we are all contributing to helping the family stay afloat." It taught me that even when there are things that you don't want to do, there's so much value in being helpful for others. Nothing comes for free.
I never want my kids to feel like something is being handed to them or that they know that somehow they can skip a lot of hard work to not only make a living, but build character and be responsible. My wife and I have been making sure that our kids feel a sense of responsibility and not just chores, but things that they are on the hook for.
Alexa von Tobel: There's this amazing quote that you have. You said, when it comes to making hard decisions, I've leaned more on my morality than on my business sense. Tell me about what that means to you.
Vlad Magdalin: Honestly, it means sticking to my integrity. It means doing the right thing by people. It means being proud not just of what I can change or accomplish, but how I do that. And I think that really comes from having experiences where I've seen some decisions made that are more callous based on what might be good for a business. There's balance, but deep down, I always think of what I'd be proud of on my deathbed. And it comes down to how you treat people, form relationships, and what you value rather than financial metrics.
Alexa von Tobel: One of your co-founders is also your brother. One tip on how to have and maintain a great co-founder relationship.
Vlad Magdalin: So I have two co-founders. One is my younger brother Sergi and Brian, who I worked with at Intuit. And it was really initially kind of scary to start a business with my brother. I actually had to convince him to initially he was sort of like contracting. He kind of wasn't sure.
The best advice I have there is to share everything. To us and the fact that we had such complementary skills. He was like the best designer I've ever worked with and I think he would say the same thing about me as an engineer. And we had so much respect and have so much respect for each other's skills that the other one doesn't have. It was like the perfect complement.
And we had built-in trust where you have a lifetime of, you know, you have each other's backs. And over time, our third co-founder, Brian, became more like a brother and Sergi became more like a business partner. That the three of us kind of started to feel the same, where there wasn't like a distinction between, oh, well, because Sergey is my brother, I operate with him differently, or because Brian is a co-founder that was a previous coworker, it feels different.
So everything kind of turned into this. Bryant is a quasi-brother and Sergi is quasi co founder. Only dynamic where the three of us have felt equal. Everyone has a different experience working with family. I have five other siblings or four other siblings, six of us total, and some of them I am very close to but I can't imagine working with, whereas Sergei, it just was a natural fit from the very start because of the complementary skills and how much we had worked together in the past.
Alexa von Tobel: How do you manage your stress right? You've been running this company for a decade. Give us the one or two things that you do to just actually get through the hard moments.
Vlad Magdalin: They're almost all relational. I have two best friends that I spend every Friday morning with. We sometimes call it a coaching session, but it's really a way to just share what's going on and how we can support each other. I cannot imagine going through the last three years without that kind of support. My wife is amazing. It's something where I have a partner that we went through a lot of ups and downs where Webflow is all consuming and through a lot of conversation and partnership, it turned into a partnership rather than Webflow feeling like a third stepchild that is vying for all this attention.
I do some rituals like writing in a gratitude journal every morning that just resets my brain or sets it up for the day and at the end of the night, that has really helped me stay more grounded and just keeps reminding me that even when there's downs, to keep perspective.
Absolutely recommend a peer group of other leaders or founders, a friend group that is there to support you through everything thick and thin.
Alexa von Tobel: I'm going to move to asking you just questions, and I want the first thing that comes to mind. Don't think twice. A book that has changed your life of any kind.
Vlad Magdalin: The Infinite Game by Simon Sinek.
Alexa von Tobel: Why?
Alexa von Tobel: It kind of reframes the purpose of a business from just growing shareholder value to advancing what the book calls adjusted missions. A mission that brings ten times more value to the world than it does to you. And in our case, we hit that in space. We are enabling people to make a living, most times to learn a new skill. And that is like, deeply empowering. And then it outlines the second responsibility, which is to prioritize people in your business decisions and only last to generate revenue in order to do the first two things for as long as possible.
Alexa von Tobel: Quote that you live by
Vlad Magdalin: Theodore Roosevelt quote, but it's really long. It's the man in the arena quote. You have to Google it. So just Google.
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
Alexa von Tobel: We all know it.
B: I have it. I recreated it in my office. And it just always reminds me that it's not the critic who counts. It's like you just have to get in the arena and sometimes solve really hard problems and go through the thick of criticism. It's just a quote that keeps me going, especially in the tough times.
Alexa von Tobel: Your biggest pinch me moment to date at Webflow.
Vlad Magdalin: This was a few years ago, so the last all-team retreat we did right before the pandemic started, we were 200 ish people at the time, and we all flew to Mexico and had this entire resort all to ourselves. And I remember kind of feeling inspired before to write a handwritten note to every single person that arrived there. And that was just something that I did every year. But a few days into this retreat, I think it was the second to last day, I woke up in my hotel room. There were like 200 personal notes written back to me. And I literally, I remember, like, bawling. I got so emotional starting to read these cards that I couldn't even believe that it was real life. And I still keep those in my home office and I go back to them quite a lot to get reinspired around why I'm doing what I'm doing, what my purpose is as a founder and as a leader. And I think it's going to take a lot to relive that.
Alexa von Tobel: Vlad last question. If you were to think about one category of innovation outside of anything that touches your business that you're just really fascinated by or excited by, what is it?
Vlad Magdalin: It has to be AI, artificial intelligence, and like large language models right now are this spark of creativity and innovation that kind of forces us to rethink everything. Not just rethink everything, but think about how we can apply this amazing power to so many more things to make our lives easier. And to me, I think it's going to be a category of innovation. I'm a very optimistic person. I know there are a lot of scary stories about robots taking over the world. I think it's going to give so many more people superpowers that are going to create many more ways of working.