Hi everyone,
Thank you all for sharing your candid experience and perspectives with us. There’s so much to respond to, and so many issues to tackle, that I have honestly been feeling stuck in how to let this community know that we’re truly listening and are taking your input very seriously to change course – so I’ve decided to just write personally from the heart even if we don’t yet have detailed plans to share with you on how we’ll address each of your concerns.
At Webflow, one of our core behaviors that we strive to live by is “start with customers” – and it’s hard to argue that our actions have matched our intentions when it comes to actively engaging with our loyal customers and addressing really core needs like scalability and performance.
First of all, this has become my personal ongoing priority #1 as CEO now to solve in a sustainable way. Not just a bandaid to show we did something and move on, but to truly show our community that we’re listening and engaging with you on things that affect your livelihood, adoption of Webflow as a core part of your work, and confidence that we can scale with our community’s needs into the future. (I recognize that it should have never stopped being my top priority, and for that I’m truly sorry.)
While we don’t yet have a detailed plan to share with you all, in the interest of time I wanted to let you know directionally what we’re doing to address many of the broad themes brought up here – most notably customer voice, performance and stability, and customer support.
1. Customer voice. We’re working on funding and staffing a dedicated team of customer advocates and Webflow experts that have lots of influence and visibility internally and whose main charter will be to dramatically increase transparency and engagement in this forum and on the wishlist. This will increase our monetary investment in full-time staff on the forum by over 10X, and as we ramp up this team you should expect to see a huge difference in engagement and transparency from dedicated Webflow Staff here.
2. Scalability and performance. We’re forming a new targeted engineering team around scalability and performance (with a heavy initial focus on CMS slowdowns and limitations), whose charter will be to dramatically improve the experience of working on Webflow projects as they grow and scale. We also have a team-wide effort in progress right now with most of our engineering team focused on application-wide foundational core architecture improvements that will improve scalability, performance, quality, and the pace of future feature development. This work doesn’t result in new features shipped to you faster today, but we believe is absolutely critical for the long term success of Webflow to serve more complex customer demands. (It will also unlock the ability for developers to create a wide range of 3rd party extensions to Webflow.)
3. Customer support. We’re more than doubling our financial investment into growing our customer support team so that we can reach 24/7 support.
In the spirit of openness and honesty, we’re committing to share an update on each of these areas every 90 days going forward, regardless of whether we’ve met or exceeded the expectations our community has for Webflow’s progress. I’ll be personally accountable for driving this, and I genuinely look forward to getting feedback about how we’re doing.
As JZ mentioned in her recent post, we’ll have our first Community Business Review in early April, where we’ll share much more with you all on what our team is focusing on and how things are going. This includes an update on our active work towards our #1 requested feature – user logins and membership functionality!
These steps won’t happen overnight, and have reliance on hiring new staff and onboarding them. They also won’t solve every issue raised here, and won’t lead to every feature request prioritized the way that some would prefer – but I know they will lead to meaningful change that will help restore the tighter bond we had between our company and this community in our earlier years.
I also want to ease any fears that the company is somehow driven by some shadow shareholders driven by profit motives, or some desire to flip/sell. That couldn’t be further from the truth. Webflow is overwhelmingly owned by people who work here full-time and are driven by our mission to empower everyone to create for the web – and the investors we’ve brought on to help us expand faster share the same mission. Similar to Walt Disney’s ethos of “we don’t make movies to make money, we make money to make more movies”, our business serves to fuel our mission to bring the power of software creation far beyond the <0.5% of the world who knows how to code today.
That’s a long journey, and you are seeing some of the growing pains of us collectively trying to reach that vision. We appreciate your patience, but also don’t want to rely solely on it – that would be unfair to this community that has helped bring Webflow to where we are today.
Thank you for reading, and from the bottom of my heart thank you for investing in us and believing in us – I wholeheartedly believe that Webflow will rise to the occasion to ensure that you can rely on us to scale with you into the far future.
With gratitude,
Vlad