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Thanks HN: You helped save a company that now helps thousands make a living
1364 points by callmevlad on Jan 15, 2021 | hide | past | favorite | 182 comments
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




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..


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 support@webflow.com."

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


surprised nobody from webflow has commented on this yet


Product idea: chatbot plugin that automatically replies to HN comments about your service.


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


> 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.


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


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?


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


I, like most developers, got swept up in the gatsby/Netlify/contentful hype and have been building marketing sites that way for a few years now (mostly for Saas and startups).

The problems with this approach are many. First, getting set up is a giant pain in the ass. And not just the fact that you have to code everything from scratch, it’s the build process headaches, fixing the shitty SEO defaults of the static site generator, fighting over whatever hot CSS framework to use(its 2021 so tailwind now!!), etc. Then hooking the site up to a headless CMS is another big nightmare—-and then training your team how to use it is another.

And that’s just the beginning. Guess what happens when your team(or you) wants to update the marketing site (happens all the time)? You have to go through the nightmare all over again, fix some inevitable build process errors, re-learn how everything works, re-hook up contentful to the new content models, retrain the team again, etc.

Contrast this to the Webflow approach. I built the entire site in a day and haven’t had to touch the marketing site since. Our designer owns it completely now and has already done 2 complete redesigns in the time it would take me to do a small update the old way.

Our copywriter logs directly into Webflow when he wants to change the copy, the designer builds new landing pages for marketing initiatives in a day, and I never get bugged by the marketing team to “update this small thing” since they own it now.

Honestly, I now think the entire static site ecosystem is designed for developers to set up a personal blog using whatever front-end framework they think is “cool” at the time and never add content to it.

I would guess 98% of gatsby/Hugo/etc sites have less than 10 posts on them. And of those sites, there’s a 78% chance the only post is “how I rebuilt this site in Gatsby”


I'm not in the target market (as I find coding easier than learning a new UI) but it's something like this:

- Select a starter template (free or paid)

- Customize text and css, add any elements, the UI is what you would expect from Photoshop or Unity

- Add forms / payment forms

- Publish on a xxxx.webflow.com domain or on a custom domain (for money) - pay extra if you are using e-commerce features

I guess the goal is to shift the market from developers who know how to code to developers who know how to use a UI (similar to what Unity did for game developers).


sounds similar to Wix


I'd put Wix, squarespace, etc. in a different category. They are classic sandboxed site builders, you can only do as much as they allow you to.

Webflow is like a modern version of Frontpage/Dreamweaver that actually spits out modern, semantic HTML and sane CSS. You start from scratch and can build anything with it. It's actually hard to use if you don't understand how HTML/CSS works, because the UI is basically just a faster way to do front-end code.


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.


Worse than being torn to shreds. Ignored.


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


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?


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.


I often wonder how much of that 20% of functionality is really needed. What if we as society spend the 80% effort that goes into customising things into building more that uses the readily available features? This is not an argument of quantity over quality. It’s just that I’ve seen so much effort going into doing the last 20% with so little outcome that it has me made skeptical.

Of course, for products deeper in the stack we should strive to implement that last 20% because the quality of the stack depends on it. I just don’t think it’s worth it for leaf/end-user projects.


I hear what you're saying, but for successful businesses in competitive spaces, those last 5% or even 1% are the sauce that sets your business apart from your competitors. Of course you won't know it is until you build it, but that's what quick mvp cycles and "lean startup" methodology is all about.


Exactly. So such a company should focus their effort on discovering that 1-5% edge and not waste effort going beyond 80% on things like hr/tooling/billing/etc that are irrelevant to (finding?) their value proposition.


For a business, I agree. I should have clarified, I'd be happy with something that works pretty well at the hobby level.


Ah, these are more for making standalone simple frontends. Think more landing pages with built in email conversions or some payment integrations and not front end connections to a back end API. I've had to make some backend api connections on the different service and it was a PITA.


(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


When I worked for Snipcart (HTML/JS shopping cart), many of our customers used webflow as their website hosting. Even though site builders and developer / third party tools are generally not a good match, Webflow seems to be the less painful to integrate with other stuff among site builders (it's not first hand experience, but still encouraging).


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.


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.


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?


I concur doctor dang. And well i blew that in my first YC application. Told how i got 50-100k euro seed, but didn't achieve anything after 1 year, and the review crew has seen me as one of those who just wants money but won't do anything to be worth it ever since, so hasn't considered my 11 applications since then. Heavy sigh


> 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).


https://www.ycombinator.com/howtoapply/

They don't say that and that doc doesn't even mention traction. And, amusingly, it points to Dropbox's application as example of how to apply. When in reality it was due to traction on HN that Dropbox got into YC, Drew Houston was a solo founder so likely would've been rejected again on the basis of being a non-great founder since he hadn't even convinced anyone to join him.

Of course, one can always claim that "great founders have traction" but that's an obvious cop out.

This isn't malicious or bad. It's just an example of the common problem where people's view of themselves is different from their actual behavior. Something all founders should learn. It applies to users just as much as investors.


> This isn't malicious or bad. It's just an example of the common problem where people's view of themselves is different from their actual behavior. Something all founders should learn. It applies to users just as much as investors.

I did a bit of research and you're right; they clearly say in multiple places (including here on HN) that they fund non-traction companies often. I'd agree that this is stretching the truth and it's probably orders of magnitude more difficult to get into YC with no traction.


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.


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!


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...


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.


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

That sounds awful. Is she OK now?


Yes, she is now, thank you for asking!


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?


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!


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!


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.


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.


Could you then say to succeed you need a good idea and a good implementation of it, along with perserverance &c?


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.


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.


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.


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.


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 :)


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?


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.


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


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!


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


> You mean survivorship bias

Yep, fixed :)

> Crazy to think how big of a factor luck plays

Indeed! Although I think it's best to focus on the things we can affect: persistence, hard work, grit.


Very true, life is a never ending chicken egg problem


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

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


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.


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.


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.


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.


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.


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).


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.


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.


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.


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. :)


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!! :)


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.


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


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


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

Congrats though!


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


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.


Congratulations on your success! This is really amazing!


How is your daughter?


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


Do you support collaborative editing?


Congrats, and thanks for sharing!


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.


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.


> 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.


> still one of the most reliable ways of [...] becoming financially independent (if not outright wealthy)

There's just no way this is true. For people with the skills needed by SV startups, working at one of the startups is almost certainly financially worse than using those skills at a large company.


I was specifically talking about founders (but even early stage engineers can do extremely well if the startup takes off). The upside is much higher doing your own thing rather than working at BigCorp (the two aren't even remotely comparable, but neither is the risk). Not to mention the end goals/QOL of working on what you want, commanding your own ship, being financially independent, etc.

Virtually all self-made millionaires+ started companies[1]. There's really no other way to get there.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/giacomotognini/2019/10/02/self-...


Sam Altman has argued against this in a number of places, here's the first one I found: https://startupclass.samaltman.com/courses/lec01/

Looking at the potential upside is disastrous without looking at the downside. That's what the '00 tech bubble was -- we're prone to HUGE biases and it is important to have constant reminders to bring us back to reality.

The founders who have succeeded are known to be _irrationally_ optimistic, literally irrational. This means, statistically, it's a poor choice to do what they did. It means, in some sense of the word, they got lucky. Many founders publicly acknowledge this -- luck was a huge factor.

If you want money, being a founder _might_ get you there, but odds are, it won't.

Being a founder makes the most sense when you're obsessed with solving a problem and the money is a perk, not a motivator.

Transparency: ex-founder of Series B company


You're making a giant logic error. It may well be true that most self-made millionaires started a company. It is certainly not true that most people who start companies become self-made millionaires, which was the premise of your original post.


I think the more salient question is whether starting a company is the most reliable way to become a self-made millionaire (one of the things they're actually claiming), which could be true even if the chances were low. The parent comment's error (or perhaps an intentional omission if for example they thought it to be self-evident) is in not taking into account the volume of people starting companies vs the volume of people doing other things which could turn them into millionaires.

On that note, I do think there's a flaw in the logic or premises (or unstated assumptions -- maybe "millionaire" is code for some larger quantity of wealth) somewhere. A decade in FAANG with conservative spending habits will easily create a millionaire with a near 100% success rate, and it would be surprising if starting a company would have better odds than that.


> ...most people who start companies become self-made millionaires, which was the premise of your original post.

This is a complete fabrication. I never said that, directly or indirectly. In fact, I've said multiple times in this thread that 9/10 startups fail and that startup life is a "lottery" but people still choose to do it for reasons X, Y, or Z.


> Virtually all self-made millionaires+ started companies[1]

The article you linked makes no sense related to your claim. Unless you're saying that millionaires+ (whatever the + means) don't exist outside of Forbes.

> There's really no other way to get there

Joining a startup as an early member? Working in finance or computer science or medicine with ridiculous salaries?

Here's a link[1] with thousands of jobs with an average income higher than $100k. If you have that kind of income, you can become a millionaire.

> QOL of working on what you want, commanding your own ship, being financially independent, etc.

How about the QOL of not knowing for a long time whether you'll succeed or fail? Or having to deal with investors, marketing, managing people, aka everything that you probably don't want to be working with? Not commanding your own ship because most of it is built with other people's money?

If you're talking QOL, I don't see how playing the lottery with your future (in your own words) is better than having a high-income job, then FIRE in your 30ies.

[1] https://www1.salary.com/Six-Figure-Income-Salaries.html?page...


> How about the QOL of not knowing for a long time whether you'll succeed or fail? Or having to deal with investors, marketing, managing people, aka everything that you probably don't want to be working with?

This is kind of silly to bring up. Obviously people starting a company are okay with managing people and dealing with investors (or if not, being bootstrapped). You're saying "being an elite athlete sucks because you have to deal with working out and eating healthy" like.. yeah, you kind of signed up for that. You can't be an NFL player and eat donuts all day.

> FIRE in your 30ies.

This is ironically very similar to doing a startup (but with less risk, and a lower upside). Are you forgetting that investing didn't go so well for people in 2008? I actually like the FIRE movement.


> Obviously people starting a company are okay with managing people and dealing with investors

I must have dreamed all the posts and comments about people learning that they were actually not made for being a founder, that marketing is more important than what they like doing (programming), and that the stress of creating a company is higher than they thought.

It's nice that you found your path in life, and I have nothing against that path being creating a company. I just don't see what's your goal by repeating that everyone who doesn't agree with you is a "survivorship bias naysayer". Self-reassurance you made the right choice?


You can also get to millions by investing while working a regular job


Again, the upside is significantly higher if you start a company (financial independence is just one piece). It can be risky (see OP), but it's pretty rational to be a founder, especially if you can weather the adversity. I'm not even sure how my claims are controversial (especially here on HN, of all places).


Looking at upsides on their own is meaningless. The mega millions jackpot is currently at $550 Million dollars in cash. That doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to spend 2$ on a ticket.

So sure, it’s possible to become a billionaire by writing books just look at J.K. Rawling. Hell someone got 10,000 bitcoins for the price of 2 pizza, which in theory are worth 366,790,000$ today. In the end the upside of being the founder isn’t worth much on day one. It might be worth something down the line, but it’s critical to have a fallback option.


> Looking at upsides on their own is meaningless.

Which is why I've been mentioning "risks" in just about every post I've made. Which is why a big part of OP is how taxing and difficult it's been. Why is why we keep talking about how 9/10 businesses fail. There's no free lunch.

But my original point was that we already know this. So it's not particularly insightful to point it out on a forum almost exclusively dedicated to people working on startups.


I think the problem is you called it a "reliable" route to financial independence, when the variance is actually pretty high. Anyone who can get a job at a large tech company in SF/Seattle/NY has a much more reliable route to financial independence.


> I think the problem is you called it a "reliable" route to financial independence, when the variance is actually pretty high. Anyone who can get a job at a large tech company in SF/Seattle/NY has a much more reliable route to financial independence.

I feel like I argue this ad nauseum here on HN. No, being engineer #3489 won't ever make you financially "independent" (and by that, I mean having FU money). Financial comfort is something else entirely. Making 100-200k (even including stock bonuses) somewhere like SF/NY where rent for a 1 bed 1 bath is like 3k (and houses/condos start at $1 million) will never have the same upside as starting your own company. Let's ignore for now the very real chance of getting laid off, or otherwise fired in favor of a younger engineer that gets paid less than you do (when you hit your 40s).

But again, financial independence is just one aspect of "winning" at a startup. Everyone conveniently ignores doing your own thing, freedom, self-reliance, self-determination, etc. -- these are non-existent at BigCorp (where you're treated, at best, like a cog). I personally value freedom much more than I do money -- which is why I accept the risks of every few years throwing my hat in the ring and seeing what comes of idea X or Y.


Have you ever heard of the FIRE movement?

Plenty of engineers working at FAANG and investing in index funds have enough money to retire comfortably in their 30s. That’s what the GP means by financial independence, I believe.

Also “senior” engineers (>5 years of experience) at these companies make a lot more than 200k a year.


> Also “senior” engineers (>5 years of experience) at these companies make a lot more than 200k a year.

No they don't, look up the numbers. Average salary on most websites is around 180k. Principal engineers start making north of 300k (at FAANG, which is already a subset of a subset) but it's very difficult to snag one of those.

I like the FIRE movement, but ironically, I think it's pretty analogous to doing your own startup. Obviously, it's less risk (but also less upside).


This entire thread seems a bit silly.

1) Average comp for a senior (not principal) engineer at FAANG is 350-400k, not 200k.

2) It's much easier to get a job at FAANG and get promoted to senior (or get a job elsewhere and hop to FAANG later) than it is to start a comparably successful startup. Google alone employs 30k+ engineers, most of them in the US, which means they employee ~1% of the software engineers in the country. It wouldn't be unreasonable to say that 8-10% of all SWEs in the US work for a company where standard career progression will get them to that level of comp in 10 years or less.

3) Starting and growing a startup to the point where it can provide an exit event that translates to financial independence (in a comparable time frame) is much harder than getting a job at one of those tech companies, and much less likely to succeed.

4) You don't need to earn 350k/yr to become financially independent much earlier than the typical retirement age, even if you live in the Bay and suffer with the rent. You need to save 25x your future annual outlay. This is trivially achievable by age 50 with most work/life/family configurations that include at least one software engineer (single earners, 2-income couples, 1-income couples w/1-stay-at-home, etc) earning half that (i.e. your 180k), if you don't insist on retiring as a property owner in the single most expensive city in the US. If you are in FAANG/comparable, getting there by 40 is a no-brainer if you aren't really awful at managing your money. A couple working at FAANG can easily manage by 35. This isn't "eat rice and beans, then retire in a tiny shack in the middle of nowhere" independence, either, this is "hit 5m+ net worth". 5m is "fuck you" money by any reasonable metric.


> No they don't, look up the numbers. Average salary on most websites is around 180k. Principal engineers start making north of 300k (at FAANG, which is already a subset of a subset) but it's very difficult to snag one of those.

I think you're out of touch with modern TC. There are many engineers at FAANG pulling past 300k/yr - many going past 400k/yr. One management track + one senior engineer can clear $1mil/yr. I know plenty of people in the valley who do this reliably... https://www.levels.fyi/2020/ - just check out what a senior engineer can make...


“can be risky (see OP)” is vastly downplaying 1 in 10 odds of nominal success. Simply not failing doesn’t mean the bet paid off.


> “can be risky (see OP)” is vastly downplaying 1 in 10 odds of nominal success. Simply not failing doesn’t mean the bet paid off.

We know this, yadda yadda "survivorship bias." It's just boring to have the same people making the same points about every startup that made it. It's like the old "correlation does not equal causation" trope you see repeated over and over again when someone links any dataset. We get it.

Again, my point is that this is not insightful -- and you've yet to demonstrate otherwise.


I am not suggesting it’s insightful, just the counter argument you’re posts are largely ignoring. If your looking for everyone that made more than 10+ million in the last 40 being a founder isn’t a great route. Even if your benchmark is 100 million it’s not good overall odds.

It’s only when your benchmark is becoming a billionaire that it starts to look like the best option.


If you live in a state where you can play jackpot only, which is 2 picks for $3 and no eligibility for partial matches, there's a positive EV anytime the cash payout is more than $453,863,025.00

Accounting for taxes ruins it a bit, but once the jackpot gets high enough it's dumb not to buy a ticket.


That also assumes single winners, more interestingly it ignores the diminishing marginal utility of money.

Consider your personal utility function, at 70 what odds would you need to play double or nothing with your entire life’s savings. If it takes more than 50.1:49.9 odds then you like most people don’t have a linear view of money.


The expected utility of buying that ticket is quite poor though which is the thing that really matters for most people. You get a sense of this when you consider that the vast majority of the time you lose your initial investment. If you have any other options to get returns on your money you are going to have the opportunity cost of that to deal with too and that's what makes the lottery ticket unappealing from a utility point of view.


Oh sure the upside is higher because you might start the next Uber or Facebook or Dropbox. However the utility of money diminishes IMO for most people past the point you no longer need to work. It depends on what you goals are and the probability distribution you are after. Also many founders end up burned and in poor physical health so there is that risk too.


The only problem with that is that I think a lot of people are okay with any really good upside above XXX dollars (i.e. comfortable financial independence). Given this, even though the potential dollar amount of the upside is much larger, the odds of an "acceptable" upside are significantly lower, and as a result it is a bad choice for people who aren't extremely ambitious.


The comment said "one of the most reliable ways", not the only reliable way. Furthermore the two are not mutually exclusive. I worked at Microsoft and Google before starting my own company, mostly as a way to pay off student debt. A few of my co-workers at Google also left to start their own companies as well. There's no reason why you can't put in a couple of years at a large company to make some early cash, then leave to start your own company.

If it fails you can almost certainly go back to working at a big company and heck even try again later on in life.


But it's not reliable at all. Particularly when you consider the longer and longer time to exit, the greater dilution due to those huge late rounds, the fact that you get hit with the tax burden when you exercise (which can easily be a decade before that stock is liquid), the fact that the late rounds have significantly raised the bar on what a 'successful exit' is.

Now that startups tend to stay private so long, the value of employee equity has absolutely tanked.


If only Mark Zuckerberg knew this back then... /s


Point of GP is that failing while hitting unexpected medical issues in the US will destroy your life with high probability. There is no prize for those who lost, just a feel-good stories for those like OP who “survived”.


This kind of mentality reminds me of solipsism. It's just not interesting to talk about, insightful, or productive, outside of being a contrarian edge-case you could write a paper about.

Cool, you're a cynic. Yes, as we all know, most startups fail and the US healthcare system sucks. Anything else to add?


I'm not sure why you're having such a virulent reaction to my comment? That's probably the most important point about this whole thread, at least this is what I got from the post. If you want to feel good and feel empowered to build your own start up from OP's post, then I don't know what to think of your risk appetite.


> If you want to feel good and feel empowered to build your own start up from OP's post, then I don't know what to think of your risk appetite.

You're attacking a strawman here. My point was merely that cynicism (which your post conveyed in spades), much like solipsism, is an unproductive dead-end. Feel free to make your case, but I'm fairly confident I'm correct.


Not sure how you can describe my post as cynic[^1] to be honest. I think it's the reverse: people who find joy and feel butterfly in their stomach when 1 guy survive but the 9 others die on the streets are nothing but blind.

[^1]: "an inclination to believe that people are motivated purely by self-interest; skepticism."


I find it very productive to talk about. I’m glad it was the first comment for me.

2013: Their reddit, digg, forum posts went nowhere, their hackernews post hit

2021: Their reddit, twitter, forum posts went nowhere, and neither did their hackernews


Would be nice if there was a book/site that listed the 100k failures and their personal stories to the 1k success stories.


I'm picturing your idea like StumbleUpon, but with 1/1,000 of telling a success story. Don't Stumble too fast or you'll miss the success among all the failures!

It's sort of like a failure resume, which is certainly an interesting exercise.

https://www.uni-goettingen.de/de/document/download/bed2706fd...


There are hundreds of post-mortems online, and they're often shared and upvoted here on HN. The idea that this community only celebrates unicorns and success stories is pretty unfounded.


we've been at this for two+ years and making a ton of progress but it's been a continuous, unfunded slog, and we continuously think "maybe it's better to just shut things down and join an already funded startup?"

but then the people work with us tell us how important our work is to them / the community and it encourages us to push through... it's kind of bittersweet


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?


I am not cynical, I am a 3 time founder and looking to start another company. I am the opposite of cynical. It is simply cautionary advice. I think we have a tendency to glorify startup life and I think people should be grounded in reality when making massive decisions like this.


There is also something called dealing with the consequences. People figure it out. It's not a joy ride, but it's not the end of the world.

At least most people in tech have the skills to fall back on a career if their company fails. Needless caution advice coated in a cynical tone just creates negativity around the whole topic.

Can't we just celebrate that the founder of Webflow managed to rescue his company from the brink of fail (even if it was dumb luck - it wasn't) and has built a life for himself? This is the stuff that inspires human beings and makes everyone feel like they could do it too. Clouding it in _oh but what if you're in the other 9 out of 10 camp_ is just you know .. pointless.

It's fine to say, hey make yourself comfortable first, play small bets and free yourself from complete ruin before you go bet the farm, but, yolo so you do you. But no need to rain on the parade of the person who has crossed over to the other side.


so basically you're saying it's ok to create positivity around a topic on a regular basis, but not negativity, even though the negative consequences happen more often than not?


And what do you aim to accomplish with that negativity? We all know the risks in everything.

By educating me about the risk, you haven't accomplished anything. If you have ideas for how I can play the odds better and improve my success rate, I'm all ears. It's better to say look to each side of the road when you cross vs you're gonna die if you're not careful.


better analogy would be that in this case you are unaware that crossing a road is dangerous and you are most likely to die. 90% chance.


Research shows that people view negative evaluations as being more intelligent. It’s extraordinarily difficult to be intelligently positive, and very easy to seem intelligently negative.


The point is that people should avoid that path until universal healthcare is a thing, and we need to showcase more stories of life destroyed not feel-good stories that give you hope that the system is “fine”.


So I suppose most people should not start a company for the next 50 years?


Either move to a country with universal healthcare or spend the money for a good private healthcare. Don’t half ass that, you’ll end up homeless for life otherwise.


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.


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).


try funding a startup in europe and you will understand why.


I hear about a lot of startups moving to Canada, the best of both worlds?


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.


*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


I love this comment. I don't think this notion gets highlighted enough.

This is definitively anecdotal, though I've been at / through approximately 5 startups across 12 years, and looking back, I believe each end everyone one (except for one) was definitely helped / started by a founder or set of founders who didn't have to worry about whether they went belly up or not due to family wealth. Hell, I still know some that I've consulted for that have lived in the bay area for the past 8 years without a product that makes any money, no vc funding, and were just out of their masters 8 years ago.

Clearly looking back, nearly every founder I've worked for came from a family with $$$. Even currently, at least one of my co-ceos just up and left their 2 million dollar menlo park house and went to live in their parents vacation home in monterey right when covid began.

Taking risks becomes extremely easy when you have a large family wealth backed safety net propping you up along the way. This happens way more often than people realize, and often the founder(s) will definitely not talk about this at all / downplay it if it is brought up.

The privilege is real.


If you don't come from wealth, please don't be deterred by this and similar narratives. The OP is not referring to any facts or data, just a personal experience, aka n=1. If you're looking for a more reliable guidance in life, look at YC which is n~3,000. If there's anyone who knows where to look for startup success, it's YC - and their search has increasingly shifted towards India, Nigeria and similar countries [1].

[1] YC publishes stats on each class, but here's an umbrella stat that should cheer us all up: in the last 5 years alone, around 1,000 YC founders were female, Black or Latinx (https://www.reuters.com/article/venture-capital-y-combinator...)


Definitely not meant as a deterrent for anyone. Just stating information I've viewed. That's all.

If anything those coming from backgrounds I didn't list should try to be as involved as possible with startups. Thanks for the alternative take, but nothing stated was meant to deter as much as inform.

We also shouldn't erase potential truths for lack of crowdsourced data. We as a tech community have a large desire to ask for the source, which is great, but double edged.

Relaying information of this sort that I and others brought up is important on the basis of more eyes on the potential problem and looking into the data than not.


It's no surprise that the largest predictor of wealth is... wealth. Lots of founders might not be directly funded by family wealth, but the various safety nets and conveniences (even op said they sold 2 of their cars) are a major factor, if not the largest factor, of success.

It's an ugly truth of life that I've come to accept: the rich stay rich and the poor stay poor.


Unless they bought Bitcoin for 1$ in 2009.

Another tried and proven way is to marry somebody who is rich. Mostly just an option for women, though.


People who bought Bitcoin for $1 in 2009 won the lottery. There was no rational basis for expecting any significant payout from that.

Marrying into money is an option for some, but you have to make a big emotional sacrifice (at least in Western culture) if you opt for going by wallet instead of going by heart. It's doable, but GP's point here is that a rich person doesn't have to make that choice.


Why would it be a big emotional sacrifice to marry into money? Especially if (as some studies suggest) money is a big part of what makes men attractive, odds should be high for actual love being involved in the decision.


You have repeatedly brought up marrying someone rich in this thread saying it is "mostly an option for women". So, are you some how saying rich women only marry rich men, but rich men will consider poor women? So much so it's actually a thing? Sources, please? It sounds extremely out dated and kind of gross...especially because you keep saying it like it is some valid thing.


It's definitely a thing in places like China where you have a much larger population of men, and it is harder and harder to find a woman (so much that some people buy their wives online from other poorer countries).


It's a well known data point. In general, women don't like to marry down, and men have less of an issue marrying down. Think of the classic "doctor marries nurse".

If you Google, you should find a lot of articles about it, as it is an important sociological issue. Now that more women are having a career, in fact, more women than men are having an academic career, it is becoming difficult for women to find adequate men.

Also women marrying up was historically the MOST important mechanism of social mobility (people moving up in status/wealth). Too bad that feminism does not allow it anymore, as any man who marries a less wealthy women is considered to be "abusing his power".

The other claim, women being attracted to men with more money, I am less sure about. I am sure you can find studies analyzing data from dating platforms yielding that result, but I don't know how well they generalize to dating in general.

Edit: perhaps a starting point, but in general, Google should be able to help https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypergamy


in sports at least the old saying was:

"A ball player's got to be kept hungry to become a big leaguer. That's why no boy from a rich family ever made the big leagues.

- Joe Dimaggio


I’m seeing quite a lot of athletes whose parents were athletes, or had the means to pay for elite training.

I don’t expect the hungriest kids to have any chance in most pro sports unless they’re above average, at least in size for the major US sports.


Agreed, pro sports is more genetics than anything, you can train till you bleed for years, but if you aren't at least 6 feet plus, no way are you gonna reach the NBA.


To an extent it doesn't get highlighted enough because the community buries these comments. The comment you are replying to is sitting at -3 karma at the moment, and I wouldn't be surprised if similar comments were flagged and downvoted.


Yes, having money is good. That's why many people strive to have money.

I personally also don't think it is unfair if kids of rich parents inherit their money (or their support). After all, being able to take care of one's children is a major motivation of many people for trying to make money.

It's also well known that money is an important factor in mate choice for women.

Even without money, biology would be at work and people would be striving to find attractive mates to conceive "fit" children.

You could then also say those "fit" children are "privileged" compared to "less fit" children.

--

Anyway, as your own anecdotes highlight, if you are not rich, find another way, for example a rich person who gives you money.


Don't think there was any weighing in on fairness going on as much as it not being acknowledged enough.

I believe, from experience seeing it, many founders who succeed will quote literally everything but their background, upbringing, and privilege as a factor, even though the fact that they had little to worry about while building their empire with respect to you know, the things everyone else has to care about on a daily basis (bills, debt, what happens if I fail) is an extremely large factor.

The barrier to entry of them taking a risk is so much lower that it is (in my opinion) directly correlated to their success at the end of the day.

Anyway, that's all. Less about fairness, and more about wish this was really highlighted more.


My impression is that "privilege" has by now taken on that meaning of "unfairness". It seems to be the most common modern use ("check your privilege" and so on). It sounds as if those people don't deserve it.

It's a shame, because I think it used to mean exactly the opposite, having a privilege was an honor. Is the phrase "it was a privilege to have known you" still being used?


You should recognize your privilege along with your strengths, and not overtly hide your privilege to appear on equal footing.

I have intimate knowledge with writers, specifically offspring of well known writers who do their best to hide this fact, yet will still use their parents agent. And yes, it is unfair for them to believe they are on equal footing with any other writer.

That doesn't mean they don't try hard, but they do have benefits built into their life that others don't.

If you want to trailblaze without being perceived as someone of privilege getting there then you should take paths that align with that, and not ones that don't.


Pretty sure that every good writer can make it, though. Perhaps the mediocre writers have an advantage if they have relations. No doubt a lot of awfully bad books are being published every year, and some even are successful.

I used to think about this, "only people with relations can make it". When I got older I realized that if you care about some subject, you will probably end up making relevant connections on the way.

And I also think this way of thinking about privilege is self-defeating. If you don't have "privilege X", find another way.

Some writers now got rich without ever having an agent, self-publishing.

I'm sure people will find some other alleged privilege they had, which allowed them to do that. That's not the point.

If you are dead poor and have no connections whatsoever, you have the "privilege" to write authentically about being poor.


>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.


That's a *successful* entrepreneur. OP was talking about any entrepreneur.


No...

>I think this is why a lot of crazy big startups come from younger people,

"crazy big startups"


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

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


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.


> it's a shame grown ups with families can't find this backup in the community. once more capitalism shows it's ugly side.

OP had a three year old daughter with a life-threatening medical condition, so I'm not sure what exactly you're talking about.


Thank you HN.


this is an ad


Seems great


(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


I've copied this into the post above.


[flagged]


"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.


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.


Your mental gymnastics are impressive, if not a little scary.

Having lived decades in both Canada and Australia, I can tell you there is a much better way, that works extremely well. Imagine nobody ever worrying about medical bills, ever again.

It's like the future.


Though If I'm reading this right the minimum tax rate for citizens of Quebec is 30 percent: https://www.canada.ca/en/financial-consumer-agency/services/...

You will not have to worry about medical bills, no. But it will be harder to build the nest egg you'd need to bootstrap a company, since the tax brackets only go up from there. Wealth formation might explain why Canada has fewer tech startups and entrepreneurs than California, despite the decreased insurance risks associated with national health care.


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


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.


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


ReRe's Law of Repetition and Redundancy [3] agrees with you:

  A programmer can accurately estimate the schedule for only the repeated and the redundant. Yet,
  A programmer's job is to automate the repeated and the redundant. Thus,
  A programmer delivering to an estimated or predictable schedule is...
  Not doing their job (or is redundant).
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=192


[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19249822


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.


That wasn't the case with Luddites. They were fighting against the transition to unskilled labor but even more so against worse working conditions and pay. When technological progress makes it more efficient to exploit people, there is a problem, and more efficient production does not make that go away or balance it out.


Well, I didn't say to keep the world complicated and inefficient, I just thought it was funny to write a thank you to devs for saving their company when by some considerations their company could potentially hurt the employability of certain devs. But yeah, I am not trying to be a luddite, (not that I care about how history would judge me)


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.




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