Weebly CEO David Rusenko: It’s Time to Take Us Seriously

http://allthingsd.com/20120502/weebly-ceo-david-rusenko-its-time-to-take-us-seriously/

by tikhon • 14 years ago

162 71 14 years ago

allthingsd.com

AndrewWarner3• 14 years ago

I just booked an interview with him for Mixergy.

Anything I should know about Weebly? Or that I should ask about?

pg4• 14 years ago

This is one of the startups that applied to YC at the last moment. IIRC David applied about half an hour before the deadline and didn't even have time to tell his cofounders he was doing it.

AndrewWarner3• 14 years ago

I usually ask YC founders why they think you picked them. I wonder the reverse. Why you picked him.

timjahn• 14 years ago

Looking forward to that interview. Weebly is the kind of company we should hear more about.

jamiequint• 14 years ago

They run 2% of the websites on the internet:

http://www.weebly.com/jobs.php => "Running 2% of all of the websites on the Internet presents some very interesting technical challenges."

runn1ng• 14 years ago

I would be really interested in their metric of "counting websites", especially in today's mostly dynamic internet.

Do they count Facebook/Google, too?

cyanbane• 14 years ago

I have heard these guys run a great service, however that seems like an amazing statement. 2% seems like a massive amount - especially considering the international reach that I suspect would be needed. Anyone have any stats to back that up or how they came to that number?

waterlesscloud2• 14 years ago

So you're saying their potential growth is limited by a factor of 50? Heh.

brezina• 14 years ago

Ask about how and when they scaled their team. They built this beast on a small amount of angel money, by keeping a small team. Their profitability allowed them to scale the company how and when they wanted to. I'd also ask them about their price/funnel/etc optimizations. These guys have a lot of traffic - so small changes have moved the needle a lot. Easily one of my favorite business in San Francisco.

revorad2• 14 years ago

Jessica Livingston interviewed him a while ago. You could pick up the thread from there.

Edit: Here it is - http://vimeo.com/10123713

architgupta• 14 years ago

David has written a bit about how they got their initial traction in his blog. Can you ask him to comment on how Weebly got their users later on - word of mouth (they have a very high net promoter score), SEO, etc?

I am a huge fan of David. He helped us in a moment of crisis purely in a pay it forward way.

tikhon• 14 years ago

ask about the company culture. they have a really great and interesting one.

AndrewWarner3• 14 years ago

Thanks. What's interesting about it? What should I know about the culture?

krschultz• 14 years ago

He spoke at YCNYC and really hammered on the 'trough of sorrow' where they didn't think it was going to work out. I think there is definitely some inspiring back story there.

waterlesscloud2• 14 years ago

Ask what he believes drives his 80 percent Net Promoter Score. Also ask if in that number matches with his actual experience (IE, is that how they're seeing growth actually come in).

justin• 14 years ago

Weebly website creator for iPhone is an amazing experience. The hands down easiest way to make a website that I've seen.

shasta2• 14 years ago

I assume you mean it's the easiest way to make a website from your phone. Which is like being the easiest way to cook in the shower.

endtwist• 14 years ago

Just because you don't want to get clean and make scrambled eggs at the same time doesn't mean others wouldn't like to.

pg4• 14 years ago

More like the easiest way to cook using microwave radiation.

goblin89• 14 years ago

If someone found yet another task that today's small computers could be used for—great. The fact that these computers are also commonly used to call and text doesn't matter (we do that from their bulkier counterparts as well).

I believe a lot of opportunities in the world of mobile computing are missed because many of us can't stop thinking about modern mobile devices as ‘phones’.

Also,

> Which is like being the easiest way to cook in the shower.

is a kind of response I think you'd get if about 30 years ago you say PCs could be used for publishing.

tomkin• 14 years ago

10 years ago only enthusiasts could create a website. 5 years ago more people could thanks to Wordpress. What will come in 5 or 10 years from now? I feel like Weebly is coming close to that 99% consumer's needs tipping point.

jordanlev• 14 years ago

I agree. I build expensive beautiful custom-designed websites on open source CMS platforms (mostly Concrete5 these days, which is ideal for the kinds of sites I do). But 90% of people don't need that and I refer a lot of people to Weebly. And it seems that most of the innovation in CMS's these days is happening with hosted services, so it will be very interesting to see how things play out over the next 5 years.

andyking• 14 years ago

How do you find Concrete5? I discovered it relatively recently and I've been investigating it in comparison to WordPress, which is starting to feel more than a little bloated. (A WordPress installation with a bunch of plugins installed starts feeling like a Windows installation with a bunch of crap set to start automatically, with everything putting its little infobox, ads, and all manner of dross all over the place. I was turned off it totally the other day when a plugin update filled my entire screen with an ad.)

I'd love to jump ship to something a little more modern, that's been developed from scratch with today's tech instead of patched together over the years. Do you find Concrete5 a decent replacement for WordPress for relatively simple content sites?

fennecfoxen• 14 years ago

It's harder to take you seriously when your name is Weebly. Just saying. ;)

The websites! They weebly and they wobble but they never fall down!

DevX101• 14 years ago

it's a little silly, but not much more so than 'google' or 'yahoo'.

famousactress• 14 years ago

I was trying to remember how I felt early on. Google didn't seem silly to me cause it just made me think of the number. I do remember 'Amazon' sounding like the batshitcraziest name you could possibly pick for an bookstore though.

revorad2• 14 years ago

Weebly is awesome. I recommend it to every non-techie friend who asks me for help setting up a website. So happy to see them doing well building a solid fundamental technology.

robgough• 14 years ago

I've not actually heard of these guys before (maybe I've not been paying enough attention) but this looks like a fantastic product/service.

This looks to be perfect for me to recommend to friends and family who want me to create them "a quick website", with minimal costs.

The iPhone app video looks pretty compelling. Congrats.

bo10242• 14 years ago

Why would they need or want to go public? It sounds like they already have a great product and they're profitable. Do they need to raise money for something in particular?

mhartl• 14 years ago

Going public creates a liquid market in the company's shares, which allows the owners to convert equity to cash. This ability is especially prized by investors, but founders and employees-with-options also benefit. (It's hard to buy a house with stock.)

bo10242• 14 years ago

So please correct me if I'm wrong, but put more bluntly, you're saying that it is selling your company in order to get rich, no?

septerr• 14 years ago

This does seem like the perfect solution for recommending to or building quick websites for friends and family!

demetris2• 14 years ago

I had not heard of Weebly before. I just looked at their website and two things turned me off:

1. No pricing information, other than “It’s Free”. Is everything in Weebly free? If it is, I assume there is not much it does, which makes me lose interest in it. If it is not, I want to know the details before signing up.

2. aboutus.php: Can Weebly not do clean URLs? If it can, then why do I see “.php” on the Weebly site itself?

furyofantares• 14 years ago

I had not heard of Weebly before, either. Usually I would check out their web site like you did to evaluate it and I bet I would have had a similar reaction.

But lately I've decided to evaluate new products by downloading their mobile app, because I think that's how more and more people are being introduced to products and services.

If I had known before embarking that it was a blogging service I definitely wouldn't have done it this way. When I think blogs, I think of the past, I think of desktop browsers, and I definitely I don't think of mobile.

So, I downloaded their iphone app. Probably less than two minutes later I had a blog running on their site with its first post.

talmand2• 14 years ago

Why is showing the file extension a bad thing? Why do you care if you see ".php"?

artursapek• 14 years ago

These are definitely a hacker's complaints. Your daughter's piano teacher won't give a shit, and he'll love that it's free.

alanh2• 14 years ago

It’s a good question.

It is best practice to have well-thought-out URLs that do not have extensions. The reasons include:

- If your site’s back-end technology changes, all those URLs will either break, or need redirected, or be specially handled with have extra cruft forever.

- It takes longer to type and is harder to remember.

- It makes your technology obvious instead of receding into the background.

- It limits your ability to make awesome URLs, because now your URLs are dictated by how you name and organize your server-side scripts. (URLs are a user interface, just like GUIs, though they don’t get as much attention! http://alanhogan.com/url-as-ui)

- There is no benefit to outweigh the above negatives.

untog• 14 years ago

"I am going to tell a phenomenally successful company what they are doing wrong"

Standard fare for the Hacker News crowd, of course, but complaining about a file extension? If you're even aware of that stuff then you're clearly not in Weebly's target market.

demetris2• 14 years ago

“If you're even aware of that stuff then you're clearly not in Weebly's target market.”

How do you know that? How does that follow from what I wrote?

Maybe I am a web designer, or maybe I am a web-publishing consultant looking for good services to recommend to people asking about something affordable.

If Weebly cannot entice me enough to get me past their sign-up form, then I will not try their offering and I will not be able to recommend it to others either.

As for “complaining about a file extension”, see alanh’s comment.

Angostura• 14 years ago

Here you go - the difference between the free and pro account: http://kb.weebly.com/faq-pro.html

ilaksh2• 14 years ago

I think that building sites and applications with tools along the lines of Weebly is going to become fairly mainstream even for people who call themselves software developers.

My question about Weebly: how do I create my own widgets? I saw something on a page at developers.weebly.com that said something about emailing someone, I think his name is Chris?

I am working on my own system based on Node.js/HTML5 which will be totally open and make it easy for developers to create and publish their own widgets/plugins right in the interface with their github accounts. I am extremely early on but I am hoping by the 7th I can have a very basic demo ready. The code such as it is is at https://github.com/ithkuil/cureblog .. on the remote chance that anyone has any thoughts related to my project.

jordo37• 14 years ago

Would love to talk. I work for another YCS11 company and we have some APIs for turning widgets / apps into content sharing and advertising tools. Let me know if you want to talk more. Looking forward to seeing your demo.

ilaksh2• 14 years ago

Cool I am looking forward to my demo also. LOL. What is the name of your company so I can google it, and what did you want to talk about? Oh actually it says on your ycombinator. NowSpots. Interesting.

Actually to be honest, you could create a plugin/tool/widget that would make it easy to select NowSpot ads to drag onto their site or integrate the NowSpot Composer or something right into their site, because basically my plugin frontends are just whatever jQuery you want that will fit in with the tools panel somehow (and the backend is whatever Node.js you want), but I am not sure that would be that great to come out with this platform and have one of the first things people notice is that the blogs made with it are full of ads. Just to be honest.

Having said that, the goal is for this to be a totally open platform, ideally most widgets would be MIT licensed (the part they expose at least), and my goal is to only remove plugins from the database if they are completely junk, i.e. people were just testing something and the widget just says 'Hi there testing asdf' or whatever. And adding plugins with new widgets/tools/components is going to be just a matter of entering a github login and a name for a repo and pressing the publish button or something like that.

gcheong• 14 years ago

I hope I can buy their stock long before Wall Street starts to take them seriously.

tocomment• 14 years ago

Two things for weebly to improve IMO:

More templates. You just can't have too many.

A better undo when editing. It seems to not work sometimes. Also it would be great if it had versioning so if an employees totally goofs I can just revert.

ezequiel-garzon• 14 years ago

For a (way too long) moment I thought their Designer Platform cost [1] $7.95/month for 15 domains... The fact that it isn't the case hints that they may provide reliable hosting.

[1] http://designers.weebly.com/designer_pricing.php

staunch• 14 years ago

Just gotta say congrats to these guys. Such a beautiful example of determined and consistent execution.

theunixbeard• 14 years ago

If you want an interesting puzzle from Weebly, check out their jobs page: http://www.weebly.com/jobs.php

Prior HN Discussion on the Puzzle: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1892693

I just spent a solid 2.5 hours working on it... Fun stuff and I learned a lot about the Chrome Developer Tools!

cageface• 14 years ago

How is this different from Geocities or the half-dozen other me-too free, easy website providers we had the last time around the internet bubble merry-go-round? The feature lists even look pretty similar.

Or is that too long ago for anybody to remember? I worked for a startup that was racking up millions of hits a day and chewing through tens of millions of dollars in funding in 1999. Guess what? It's really hard to make money this way.

I'm starting to suspect Prince knew a lot more than he was saying when he wrote that song.

Weebly CEO David Rusenko: It’s Time to Take Us Seriously

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