Hey Sadok, you're right - the web has the incredibly hard property of having to respond to a wide range of screens / resolutions / capabilities. That makes creating for this medium much harder (hence why we have to write code now to deal with all the browser differences), but to me that means it's even more important to create good visual tools around it.

Browser are becoming much more standardized than in the first 20 years of the web (see things like Acid3 compliance), and internally at Webflow we've gone from seeing 10%+ of support requests say things like "this looks different in Browser X" in 2013 to < 1% today. Part of that is because Webflow itself normalizes cross-browser behavior in many cases. For example, one user can report a browser inconsistency, which we fix or polyfill centrally, and everyone else benefits from never having to run into that issue again. Whereas if you were writing code by hand, you would have to know how to research and fix each and every one of those issues yourself.

Also, websites don't need to look the same on every browser, and I think the concept of progressive enhancement is a powerful one. I think it's wonderful that websites built 25 years ago can still be rendered on today's browsers, and many sites built today can be read by 10+ year old browsers (even if they don't look exactly like the designer intended). That's a powerful advantage of the web that other distribution platforms (e.g. mobile apps) can't quite match.

But again, you're right - the web has a ton of challenges that still need to be abstracted and solved. But that doesn't mean we should give up and stop trying :)

Thanks for the great questions, Rafael!

But unless you start to dig in, you can’t see what’s better.

Yeah, we need to do a better job of making it more clear that we’re way more than your run-of-the-mill template-based website builder. Webflow is more like an empowering technology that helps turn non-developers into frontend developers (in a smaller way now, but eventually more holistically) and that’s harder to explain then “hey, you can build websites with it!” :\

How secure and solid is the hosting system of Webflow?

Very solid, and I would wager that it’s significantly more secure than your typical cheap shared hosting provider because it’s fully managed by the Webflow team. We utilize state-of-the-art services like Amazon AWS and Fastly to make sure that sites are served quickly across the globe, and we’ve had many (many!) websites hit major traffic spikes via Reddit, TechCrunch, Hacker News, etc without as much as a hiccup.

Why is there not a 24/7 phone customer services available?

This is something we’re considering, but it’s really expensive to provide this level of service at our stage of the company unfortunately :\ We hope to be able to offer phone support at some point.

How strong is the company? Are they funded by large ventures?

Webflow was funded by YCombinator and several prominent investors in 2013, and we have since built a sustainable and nearly profitable business with most of the invested funds still being in the bank (effectively as insurance for a rainy day).

The majority of startups end up blowing through their invested funds in the hopes that they can raise more and more with every year, but a lot of times that leads to unsustainable spending that forces a shutdown or sale of the company. We’re building Webflow to be around decades from now, because we’ve only built maybe 5% of what we ultimately envision creating for the web :)

Is Webflow going to be around next year?

Yes, we’re not going anywhere!

I secretly wish Adobe or a large company would offer you guys lots of money and conquer new markets!

Based on historical precedent, this is dangerous territory and might not have the effect you want. Almost every single company that has been acquired (especially by Adobe) ends up discontinuing or severely neglecting their product. For us, we want to stay independent so that we push our vision forward without a set of suits in a board room deciding our fate every quarter based on short-term metrics :\

Great potential, but I am a little worried to use it as not knowing where the future will be.

This is a totally valid concern, and as we keep improving Webflow and as the community keeps growing, this will become much less of a worry.

Hey Kris, we definitely feel your pain and have something that's going into beta soon that will make billing your clients really easy. Shoot me an email to vlad@webflow.com if you want to be part of the first batch of beta users - we'd love to hear your feedback on it!

My dad was bald so I didn't have a choice (ಥ﹏ಥ) .... haha. We plan on sticking around in San Francisco but we have been thinking about opening an office in Hawaii. ;)

Hey Julian! Assuming that all goes to plan, our secret plans to develop self-driving cars would have come to fruition by then :)

But in all seriousness, it's hard to predict that far out. For example, responsive web design was only a thing ~5 years ago, and it's the main Webflow even exists as a product. So for the time being we're really focused on solving as many of the immediate problems that we see in web design today that help people get real work done.

One thing I can say with really high confidence though - the majority of professional websites that will be built in 2026 (assuming were not all permanently plugged in to the OculusNet by then) will be created in visual software - not code - and hopefully Webflow will make a significant contribution in making that change happen.

Have have you been managing the growth of the company (both the user base and the amount of staff)?

We've had steady growth over the last 2 years, so we had the luxury of scaling our team and processes at a deliberate (read: not hair-on-fire) pace. We are a team of 20 now, and that has grown almost linearly as we’ve had more people become customers. A big part of that is our focus on creating a long-term sustainable company, so we only bring on new team members as the business grows - that has made it easier to adjust the way we work incrementally and organically.

Are you willing to share any stories or advice about any major hurdles you have had to overcome with managing a growing company?

Ha, I can probably write an entire book on this (more the stories, probably not so much good advice yet), so a comment here probably won’t suffice. We’re incredibly lucky that we were able to build a product that really resonated with a lot of folks, and when you have have a passionate community of users you build up a strong sense of accountability to them. That in turn helps you hire really bright and passionate people, so the challenge becomes more along the lines of maintaining a great culture with both of those elements. We’re still a relatively puny company, so we have a lot more to experience and learn before we can give advice to others :)

Hey Rafael, great question. There are Squarespace users out there that crave more customization and naturally gravitate to Webflow. In general though we've been focusing on building powerful tools for web designers so that has left the usual SS user out of the mix. But recently we got into the CMS space which means we've had to start thinking about web designer's clients, who would get lost in Webflow's UI as well. We imagine developing out our CMS Page Editor and making it more accessible to our first time users. Over time we'll be competing with these "easy" website builders more and more I imagine.

Hey Brent, yes! We're already working on the technical infrastructure to make this happen, and the entire team is really excited about the potential that this will unlock. The way we're thinking about it now, you would created a "site" that would essentially be your design system -- it would contain global styles and components, almost like your own mini custom Bootstrap. Then, when creating a new actual website, you would have the ability to choose a template/styleguide/system that acts as the base of that new site that you will build on top of. One of the harder parts in designing this has been thinking through all the edge cases - e.g. you wouldn't want a background color change for a Button component on Site A to affect Site B unintentionally, so there are quite a few things we still have to think through to make this happen.

We're also working on cross-project copy/paste, which will make it easy to reuse components in a lightweight way between different projects.

Hey TF, good question! You’re totally right that we have designers all around the world using Webflow and building multi-language sites. It’s a bummer that in the CMS’ current state you have to hack some collections together or integrate with another service to support multiple languages. So we’ve been brainstorming some ideal flows for adding multi-language content for static and dynamic pages. It involves some heavy infrastructure changes which is why it will take a bit longer for us to implement. We're doing some heavy restructuring right now to prepare for some big upcoming features.

I do like the idea of creating different variants of the collection item like you’ve shown in the mockups. But I think it has to start at a higher level and allow the designer to specify URLs and other settings for their targeted locales. A lot of it is up in the air though. Thanks for the suggestion!

We're releasing a feature soon that will allow you to integrate your dynamic content with Shopify. A full-fledge e-commerce solution is something we want to tackle as well.

Thanks for the suggestion Clifford. Education is so important for getting the most out of Webflow. We're always thinking about what type of resources would have the highest ROI for our users. We currently offer small 1-hr weekly workshops because they have higher attendance. We plan on experimenting with longer workshops as demand increases. Soon we'll be restructuring our help center (help.webflow.com) to provide different types of education including General Docs, Video Tutorials, and Courses. My hope is that the courses we'll be creating will get you to "Webflow super expert" status.

Thanks for the kind words, Jaron!

What is our team missing if our web design knowledge is solely based in Webflow?

There are a few things that Webflow still doesn’t have that are widely available if you’re writing code by hand in web design, but we’re actively working on adding them soon. For example, flexbox is a great new way to build layouts, but it’s hard to learn even for seasoned developers (I’ve been writing code for 15 years, and I still have to go look up CSS flex syntax all the time) - so we’ll be introducing a visual flexbox layout builder soon to get to parity with what’s available in CSS.

Also, we haven’t yet released a way to create responsive websites in a mobile-first approach (where you create the phone design/content first, then work your way up progressively enhancing along the way), but we’ll be adding that option as well.

There’s also a lot of flexibility you have if you’re using raw code or something like Wordpress plugins to extend beyond standard functionality and components, but rest assured that we’ll have a plugin ecosystem as well :)

In short, if we do our job right, then the web design industry will undergo a similar transformation as the desktop publishing industry. People used to feel like they were missing out on “bleeding edge” publishing if they were using QuarkXPress because Quark didn’t support certain things that you could do manually on paper (or via custom PostScript code), but once the software matured enough - the entire industry switched over. These days, you won’t find many people doing print layouts manually (which used to be the norm) - everyone uses software like inDesign to get the job done.

The other thing about Webflow is that we don’t reinvent the wheel - it’s just a layer above HTML/CSS/JavaScript that helps you work with those technologies. Adding a class in Webflow is directly equivalent to adding a “class” attribute in an HTML and adding a selector in a CSS file, so it’s not like we’re creating a proprietary output medium (ala Flash). It’s just a glorified DevTools or Web Inspector, with lots of sugar on top. And you’re learning the concepts behind how the web works (e.g. relative layout, the box model, etc) just by using Webflow.

So if you’re already at 99% of what your clients need, you’re in a great spot. We’ll get to that other 1% soon enough!

What should I encourage my team to learn beyond Webflow?

Oh, so many things! E.g. I’m learning Spanish right now ;) Though I assume you mean in the sphere of web design, in which case I would say the most important thing is solving a problem for your clients - which might mean that you might have to learn some really bleeding edge CSS features (e.g. CSS filters) so that you can offer your clients a unique/fresh website experience. There are so many things to learn in web development though, that even I’m overwhelmed at where to start :\

Hey Eli, thanks for the question. Yes! We're considering adding a Markdown element (and corresponding CMS field) to live alongside our existing Rich Text element.

Hey Simonas, yeah we would absolutely consider it. We've already had two interns from Europe, so let's chat - can you send us more info (and ideally a portfolio) to vlad@ and sergie@ webflow.com? Thanks!

Webflow was designed to design/build websites. We would need to design a unique interface for mobile app development. There are just too many differences (code, layout paradigms, touch interactions, etc). Building for web and mobile might get easier with technologies like React Native, but I think they would still require separate UI's.

Nooice! It's awesome to see our users being so active in the community. :) As for our office... actually it's kind of a mess right now since we're moving into a bigger space. Ask again in a couple months when we're settled.

Hey Thomas, thanks for the kind words! There's a tiny peek at part of our office in this intro video on Skillshare - we're hoping to have more of our new office up on our website sometime soon.

We call this our Localhost Plan, it's very popular :)