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Show HN: Open-sourced Webflow for your own app

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Re: Show HN: Open-sourced Webflow for your own app

#81

Post by noorvir »

danielvaughn wrote: post #45

Looks interesting. One word of advice - the CTA "talk to a founder" makes me stop and think. I wondered to myself "why would I want to talk to a founder?" You don't want the user doing that, it should be obvious. I'm pretty sure that button is for a demo, so you want to phrase it in terms of the value to the user, i.e. "schedule a demo" or some variant thereof.

I would say the opposite. I much prefer the “Talk to founder” option. I regularly use this to ask the founder to clear up concerns I have before trying a new product. It also has a much more personal touch to it. I think this is especially important for an early stage compony.

“Schedule demo” sounds too enterprise-y and makes me feel like it isn’t self serve.

Re: Show HN: Open-sourced Webflow for your own app

#82

Post by rsp1984 »

aabbcc1241 wrote: post #76
rsp1984 wrote: post #10

This looks pretty awesome but, speaking only for myself here, the thing I actually want is just Webflow but without the BS and predatory pricing. A visual editor that produces plain old HTML, CSS, JS and that anyone in our company can use to make changes to pages or create new ones. That's it. I don't think it exists (if so, pointers would be very welcome!), so here's my comment to incentivize someone to build it.

You can try to use auto-cms [1], it works on plain HTML and light js-enabled interactions. [1] https://github.com/beenotung/auto-cms

I'm not super deep into web development and since it doesn't have a demo or any other visual preview unfortunately I don't understand what this does or how it could be useful. Let alone how to "install" it for "my website".

Re: Show HN: Open-sourced Webflow for your own app

#83

Post by gargan »

rsp1984 wrote: post #10

This looks pretty awesome but, speaking only for myself here, the thing I actually want is just Webflow but without the BS and predatory pricing. A visual editor that produces plain old HTML, CSS, JS and that anyone in our company can use to make changes to pages or create new ones. That's it. I don't think it exists (if so, pointers would be very welcome!), so here's my comment to incentivize someone to build it.

"the thing I actually want is just Webflow but without the BS and predatory pricing" - checkout Webstudio, it's free and open source - https://webstudio.is/

Re: Show HN: Open-sourced Webflow for your own app

#84

Post by hoakiet98 »

ENGNR wrote: post #55

I think you're onto something. I'm not sure what you mean by 'components' on the roadmap, but if it's the ability to bring react components back into the editor, and have the designer WYSIWYG modify the props - that's the exact thing we've been saying "suuurely this must exist" for a long time (rant mode enabled). The key pain for us that I think you're touching on is that "design/dev mode" isn't how teams actually w…

> but if it's the ability to bring react components back into the editor, and have the designer WYSIWYG modify the props

Haha yeah this is the plan. I really like Storybook for this reason but I loath the setup you need to do to expose every single prop.

It seems straightforward for me to parse the React node and expose the inputs such that you get a Storybook experience that is also editable. I'm sure there are unknowns that will show at implementation time.

> Devs do far more design than we think.

I also think devs do more design than we should. I've never been handed a design where I don't run into edge cases at implementation time. At this point, I have to go back to the designer to clarify. The hope is that if designers are more involved in building front-end, they will hit these edge cases before handing them off.

> a paid hosted tier for convenience

This is a great idea, the goal is to get a point where designers just don't have to think about it

Re: Show HN: Open-sourced Webflow for your own app

#85

Post by hoakiet98 »

aabbcc1241 wrote: post #75
hoakiet98 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most tools end up trying to find a sweet spot between targeting a developer and targeting a designer, and as a result end up doing neither well. Emphasizing this because this happened to us. The initial version was trying to cater to designers and it was very hard for them to get value out of the to-code part because they need to convince the engineer to set up the codebase. Then when we add more support for engine…

I made a WYSIWYG tool to edit HTML file without polluting the code. It works well for landing pages but it doesn't work well with js-generated webapp. https://github.com/beenotung/auto-cms

Very cool!

Re: Show HN: Open-sourced Webflow for your own app

#86

Post by hoakiet98 »

meiraleal wrote: post #43
hoakiet98 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, that is the most obvious plan. I want to find a community-friendly way to do this. I know Supabase has a similar and successful monetization plan but I know some take issue with the way they offer their hosting.

There is nothing to take issue, open source projects are allowed to monetize the same way as closed source projects. Your first thought needs to be how to create a sustainable project otherwise you won't have a community.

> Your first thought needs to be how to create a sustainable project otherwise you won't have a community.

I agree. Do you have any tips here besides being good with answering questions, documentation, and otherwise continuing to work on the project?

Re: Show HN: Open-sourced Webflow for your own app

#87

Post by hoakiet98 »

coryvirok wrote: post #66
hoakiet98 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It pained me to do this. Everyone I talked to used React instead of Svelte. At some point, we realized we were spending half the time supporting Svelte just for ourselves for I still love Svelte and will continue using it for side projects but right now I think the tech needs to get out of the way of the better user experience.

Ya, that seems about right for my project as well. Although mine won't be OSS so I'm more concerned with finding good ppl with Svelte skills vs React skills. I may need to bite the bullet once I'm closer to hiring. Thanks.

No problem. This is very poorly documented but this entire repo is built in Svelte. I'm porting over functionalities from it so this is a much more mature editor. If there's a specific implementation you want to learn about, let me know :)

I'm always happy to talk about Svelte! Though, I'm starting to enjoy the flexibility of jsx now that I'm back to using React.

https://github.com/onlook-dev/monorepo

Re: Show HN: Open-sourced Webflow for your own app

#90

Post by meiraleal »

hoakiet98 wrote: post #86
meiraleal wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is nothing to take issue, open source projects are allowed to monetize the same way as closed source projects. Your first thought needs to be how to create a sustainable project otherwise you won't have a community.

> Your first thought needs to be how to create a sustainable project otherwise you won't have a community. I agree. Do you have any tips here besides being good with answering questions, documentation, and otherwise continuing to work on the project?

Honestly, marketing. Great open source projects die because the creator doesn't know or doesn't want to marketing. Your app looks great which is already way above average in open source so I'm hoping you can succeed in creating a sustainable business already it!
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