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Thanks HN: You helped save a company that now helps thousands make a living

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Thanks HN: You helped save a company that now helps thousands make a living

#41

Post by dumbfounder »

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.

Re: Thanks HN: You helped save a company that now helps thousands make a living

#42

Post by TAForObvReasons »

dumbfounder wrote: post #41

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 afterwar…

*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

Re: Thanks HN: You helped save a company that now helps thousands make a living

#43

Post by tornato7 »

darepublic wrote: post #40

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

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

Re: Thanks HN: You helped save a company that now helps thousands make a living

#44

Post by dvt »

dumbfounder wrote: post #41

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 afterwar…

> 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.

Re: Thanks HN: You helped save a company that now helps thousands make a living

#45

Post by ATS22 »

dumbfounder wrote: post #41

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 afterwar…

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.

Re: Thanks HN: You helped save a company that now helps thousands make a living

#47

Post by staunch »

dvt wrote: post #31
staunch wrote: post #25

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…

> 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.

Re: Thanks HN: You helped save a company that now helps thousands make a living

#48

Post by callmevlad »

darepublic wrote: post #40

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.

Re: Thanks HN: You helped save a company that now helps thousands make a living

#49

Post by yayr »

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.

Re: Thanks HN: You helped save a company that now helps thousands make a living

#50

Post by dvt »

staunch wrote: post #47
dvt wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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.

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