Hey everyone, I am the CEO of Webflow, and I wanted to personally respond here to the original post and to some of the replies.
No, this is not me saying that anything that is on the wishlist should be made by Webflow. It’s asking you to actually respond to what the community is saying (which can be by implementing these features, or simply by acknowledging them - the most popular items I am referring to, not every single request.
@liamemery You’re right – we need to do a better job of being transparent and accurate on our Wishlist. I won’t make any excuses, it’s a fact that we can do better here.
The original intent with the Wishlist was to provide this kind of transparency and give our community a voice into our product development process. As we grew, we faced more challenges trying to build more ambitious features that were often much more complex than before, given these features had to work on top of existing functionality. As a result, some had to be deprioritized after we had initially marked them as “In Development” on the Wishlist. We saw how disappointing this was for our community, and so we started erring on the side of caution and only updating the status once we were basically ready for launch. One recent example is actually something you listed that the community has been waiting for: nested collection lists. This feature was actually in development over the last 6 months and recently shipped (woo!). However, it was categorized (rather inaccurately) as “In Backlog” the entire time. Another example that @Fonsume mentioned was coupons for Ecommerce, which is now available in beta.
However, it’s clear that there are better ways to communicate these kinds of setbacks without limiting transparency for our community and valued customers. Our thriving community has expanded exponentially over the last several years, and so have expectations for what we should build next. While we want to live up to those expectations, we hope our community recognizes that building such a powerful product for such a diverse audience will also come with tradeoffs – and there will be times when we’ll need to prioritize some long-term investments that might not be at the very top of the Wishlist.
Speaking of long term investments, I want to address the funding topic mentioned in the subject of this thread. We primarily raised additional capital in order to ensure Webflow’s longevity for decades (and we’re especially glad to have done so in times of uncertainty like today). We don’t plan to deploy even the majority of that capital immediately – we’re still focusing on thoughtfully growing our team and our business to ensure that everyone relying on Webflow will have ultimate confidence that we’ll always be around and always keep improving. Our (awesome and supportive) investors have functionally zero control of our business, all the speculation about acquisition or decay is simply unfounded – I think I’m at risk of sounding like a broken record at this point in assuring you all that we’re in this for the long haul.
So… next steps. Luckily, Webflow’s product development and roadmap definition process is maturing quite a bit lately, so this is a timely conversation. We recently had Jiaona Zhang join our team as our VP of Product, and we’ve been working hard to get laser focused on not only working on the products/improvements that will be most impactful (which includes “invisible” investments like performance improvements that don’t come with fancy launch announcements), but also doing a much better job in keeping you all informed of how things are going.
While our team has been very active in informing everyone about what we’ve been shipping, we will do a better job of providing updates on what things are in flight on the Wishlist. You will soon start to see much more accurate and active updates on there. One small teaser is that for “user login and membership functionality” (the top rated item on there), we are already in very active development with internal goals to ship the first set of functionality within the next 2 quarters. We’re still figuring out how to best provide that information on the Wishlist, so please bear with us.
I know there is a lot mentioned in this thread, and I wanted to make sure you knew that I read every word. While I can’t address every point that was brought up, I hope you take away this main point on the original post – we need to a much better job of increasing transparency and accuracy on the Wishlist, and we will.
(Since this thread has gone in so many directions and it’s hard to keep track of all the topics here, I’m going to lock it after my response.)