#33 - Pioneering The No-Code Movement

**Shaan Patel** (0:00)
All right, everyone, we have a quick ad for HubSpot. But I want to let you know, I actually use HubSpot and I use their sales tool, which is what this ad is for. HubSpot sales platform, it makes it just easier to sell stuff, to do it faster, to look at your pipeline, to see what sales are going to happen. Just prospect to cold outreach and get more customers faster and easier. Plus, it's easy to learn and free to start. So you guys can check it out, hubspot.com/sales.

**Vlad Magdalin** (0:26)
We call it a visual software development platform. It's a way for people to build things that typically coders build, just in a completely visual environment.
For us to be truly successful, to be able to build a tool that builds other products and services, you can't do that overnight.
The next six months were really, really tough. What we thought was going to bring in income, we didn't have anything coming in at this point. And when you have a family and rent and car payments and all this stuff, and kids need to go to school, then just stuff started falling apart. Couldn't get a trademark. One of the co-founders got us motivated. Day job got a lot more interesting. I think we had raised 300K and were really struggling. We went to Paul Graham and said, this is really hard on us. I was waking up every morning with panic attacks. My wife was like, this is not right.

**Shaan Patel** (1:21)
Healthy.

**Vlad Magdalin** (1:22)
Yeah, why? Do you want this?
Is this what startups are about, right?

**Shaan Patel** (1:27)
They've got 75,000 paying users. They just raised a monster round of investment, 72 million, Series A.

**Vlad Magdalin** (1:35)
Those other website builders are like iMovie, and then Webflow is like Final Cut Pro.
Just feels like the Gold Rush or the pioneer era of the space, where we're at the very beginning of it, sort of like the web in 1999 No technology in history has ever spread so fast. Products are going up on product time and like hitting number one. You don't even know that it's built with no-go tools.

**Shaan Patel** (1:55)
The analogy to me is like eating food. Not too long ago in history, I would have had to go out there and hunt and forage.

**Vlad Magdalin** (2:02)
Yes.

**Shaan Patel** (2:02)
Today, it's abstracted away where I don't even have to think. I push a button on my phone and the meal appears. When you remove those barriers, magical things happen.

**Vlad Magdalin** (2:10)
Even something that feels slower to other companies or founders, getting to where we are today seven years from now. For me, it just feels like a natural progression to a much larger company, because we want to be around 50 years from now. We want to be a foundational company.

**Shaan Patel** (2:56)
Every week, we sit down with self-made millionaires and ask them, how did you do it? I didn't start a podcast. I started my own personal business school, and the teachers are the successful entrepreneurs behind the biggest brands and businesses that we find today.
I wanted to know the real stories with all the details, like how did you get your first hundred customers? What did it feel like when shit hit the bank? I asked them, how do you spend your money now that you're rich?
And what would you do if you were starting over from scratch again today? If you're like me and you want to own your own business instead of living a nine to five job, this is the podcast for you. The Hustle presents My First Million.
All right. Here we are. Vlad, you are in the Twitch office.
It's basically Christmas Eve. No one's here except for us. And we are recording this podcast. I'm excited to have you on because we've been talking about no-code tools. And generally, I like anybody with a good startup story. And I think you have one. For those you don't know, so Velazza founded a company called Webflow and Webflow is a company that is doing phenomenally well right now. If you're in kind of Silicon Valley, I would say you guys have that hype train right now. Do you feel that?

**Vlad Magdalin** (4:09)
Definitely the last year has been a lot more hype trainee.

**Shaan Patel** (4:12)
Yeah, but it wasn't always like that. We'll talk about that. So they have the hype train right now because they've got, you know, 75,000 paying users. They just raised a monster round of investment. 72 million, Series A, which is, you know, 10 times more than a typical Series A, I think. So they're doing phenomenally well and we're going to find out a couple of things.