Startup Weebly takes profitable leap forward

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/08/13/MN1I1KJFNV.DTL

by pg • 15 years ago

128 17 15 years ago

skennedy• 15 years ago

I love that they are profitable, growing rapidly, and generally kicking butt. My biggest wish for them is to start taking market share from Adobe by making their website toolkit more flexible and advanced. When a professional designer can get everything they want in a browser, no extra software, and changes are real-time...for me, they win.

drusenko4• 15 years ago

We actually just did that! http://blog.weebly.com/2/post/2011/08/a-summer-focused-on-de...

When we launched the Designer Platform, we completely revamped our theming engine to be super flexible and introduced a pretty cool web-based IDE with real-time preview of HTML and CSS changes (and pop-out functionality for dual-monitor development).

It's a huge focus for us going forward -- we'd love to hear your feedback on whether the new changes allow you to do everything you'd like to, or if not, where we can improve.

dools• 15 years ago

Yeah I think the market for Designers is huge - that's basically all we're focused on at Decal is the deployment model and integrating with designers' existing workflows.

It's hard trying to make people realise that we're not "DIY" though :) I've just come up with the phrase "DIY for Designers" which I think captures it pretty well. Designers have, for too long, been punished by dynamic web deployments (the "big 3" Joomla, Drupal and Wordpress) - time to disrupt!

trafficlight• 15 years ago

I'm a big fan of Weebly. It's by far the easiest tool to recommend to a new web client. I can build a simple template and then hand over the reins.

pitdesi• 15 years ago

I love that they are profitable and have been for a long time. I've recommended their product to small business novices and they have been impressed with how easy it is to use.

I'd love to see more articles about companies that are profitable and how long/what it took to get there. We are seeing a lot of hype in the consumer/social media space, but it seems to me that it is much harder to be profitable in that space (but also more likely to have a massive exit). It seems that the B2B space offers less risk and reward.

Way to go, Weebly! (disclosure: they are a customer of ours)

rysulliv• 15 years ago

Awesome product and awesome progress from a small dedicated team with a ton of determination and passion! These are the kind of stories that inspire others(myself included) to work those extra hours on their idea. Keep up the great work Weebly team!

petenixey2• 15 years ago

I didn't realise you guys had taken money from Sequoia - congrats. Could you be the first YCC to go public? I've got high hopes.

drusenko4• 15 years ago

We're working on it... we certainly have some stiff competition! :)

skrebbel• 15 years ago

Genuine interest: why is it so important to go public? What does your company win by doing so?

I understand companies who need the one-time cash injection to stay ahead of competition. It doesn't look like you guys need that much. So what is it, then?

tocomment• 15 years ago

I love Weebly. My only complaint is this I couldn't find any professional looking templates for a dance studio. Everything looks like a blog template.

jcc803• 15 years ago

Are the domain renewals still $39.95 through Weebly? Maybe if they raised the price on that they could have already built their new office.

drusenko4• 15 years ago

We add a lot of value on top of the domain name that we think justifies the price (our customers seem to think so too).

If you don't, you're free to buy your own domain at GoDaddy (or anywhere else) and point it to Weebly, completely free of charge.

jcc803• 15 years ago

You've surveyed the customers on the domain renewal price compared to GoDaddy and they prefer the $39.95? Or, they are given the option to purchase/renew from GoDaddy at checkout? Or, maybe what they don't know won't hurt them?

"If you don't, you're free to buy your own domain at GoDaddy (or anywhere else) and point it to Weebly, completely free of charge."

Sounds good. Didn't happen - tried to move a domain off the platform after a year. After 3-5 emails with support the domain eventually just expired. Glad it wasn't anything critical - just a simple site I had thrown together for a family member's business which was remade in Joomla.

I think the product is great for many people, the founders sound like nice people. Just unsure if the experience I had trying to get the domain back is a tactic or incompetence/honest mistakes. Of course I hope it's the latter because that'll get fixed.

Startup Weebly takes profitable leap forward

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