Nearly 5 years ago, a few months after being rejected from YC and a few weeks from being essentially bankrupt (my daughter had an unexpected surgery while we had only catastrophic health insurance), my brother and I posted a Show HN about Webflow (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5407499). It was our last-ditch attempt to show a proof-of-concept to the world before going back to our old bosses to ask for our jobs back.
Thankfully, the post took off - we were #1 for most of the day, and over 25,000 people signed up for our beta list in the several days after that post. This helped us reapply to YC with a lot more confidence and traction, and we were able to get into the next batch.
Webflow (https://webflow.com/) has since grown into a profitable business with close to 1,000,000 users all over the world, billions of website requests served, and close to 60 team members in over 14 countries. I'm pretty sure none (or very little) of this would be possible without HN and the community here, and the super positive reception our post had.
Today, we're on a mission to enable more people to create powerful software without having to learn how to code - we probably have decades to make that vision a reality, but we're on a decent start in large part thanks to our launch on HN.
Nearly 5 years ago, a few months after being rejected from YC for the first time, I came across your Show HN and started using Webflow to build a mockup of my product's sign-up page (I did not know how to code at that time).
Over the next 2.5 years, I reapplied to YC five more times. I interviewed twice in the second round. I eventually got rejected every time. From the ideation stage, to $1M in revenue, YC has an application of mine for every milestone in between (until I did not need to raise money anymore).
My company, Y Athletics (https://yathletics.com), is a profitable business with no investor funding and 7 figure revenues. We've delivered products to over 25,000 paying customers all around the world. We don't solve problems, but we create some amazing products that people want.
This post about Webflow made me nostalgic as it was during that time that I started to read HN religiously (and now I discovered that Vlad and I applied and were rejected in the same batch as well). My first landing page was made on Webflow. I learned how to code using Codeacademy. My first 100 users came from a comment I posted on an Ask HN thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6617551). Seeing others building their startups inspired me to continue building mine. My company would probably not exist if it wasn't for HN. Thanks for everything!
As an angel investor solely focused on Y Combinator with more than 100 startups under portfolio, my observation indicates being rejected by YC can be equally inspiring as being admitted, because over the time, I found out some startups may survive and then thrive better if they are not admitted by Y Combinator. Therefore, I feel great that Y Athletics has been a $1m profitable business without YC or any other angel investor like Zillionize!
There are some really amazing stories in this thread about how HN helped launch some really great products. And such a variety of innovation. Really the only thing I can find in common is that their websites allow you to enter a discount code. I can only assume these benevolent entrepreneurs pass out these codes to give a little back to loyal customers, or maybe even a small community who helped spotlight their company. Anyway, I'm just thinking out loud ;)
It's a pain to ship outside US (because of taxes/shipping prices) , but aside from that you make great products. keep going, and it's nice to see some bootstrapped examples too.
The crazy thing here for me is that YC rejected you as a business with $1M in revenue. I think any business with $1M in revenue has tremendous potential.
It’s not that crazy. YC wants businesses with the potential for billions in revenue. If your ceiling seems like it might be millions or tens of millions, you don’t meet their criteria.
Sorry if you've answered this elsewhere before, but what's with the logo? It almost looks like an exact copy of Y Combinator. Was that the case when you were applying?
Yeah our logo has not changed since inception but it’s not a copy of YC or anyone else. Take a closer look here - http://bit.ly/2obM60y (first image is our logo)
I wasn't struggling, since my mobile app business was already giving ramen profitability (which is around ~1k/month in Poland). I wrote a post onto HN, outlining new features of our service ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3693151 ), it got to the front page, and was picked up by TC shortly afterwards.
6 years later, I moved to other projects, but still maintain the site, and the site still brings profits, and has happy users :)
I love Webflow! It perfectly fills a niche between Weebly / Wix and raw HTML / CSS / JS.
It's for the technically savvy who want to build websites quickly but for whom Weebly / Wix are just too inflexible.
You guys did such a nice job executing on the UI/UX of Webflow. It feels very quick and offers lots of choices without overwhelming me. That's such a rare quality these days.
Couldn't upvote this enough, for folks who are lucky to get those fat checks from investors with just a POC or even a business plan, never understand the pain and pressure of making it without that.. good that you hanged in there till the last moment without breaking.
25k signups from just HN? That's a lot more than I expected. My startup was on HN frontpage for 22h last Friday and until now (3 days) it gave me ~9k unique visitors and ~1900 new signups. Since before I only had ~30 users the HN post was by far the best driver of signups so far. So I'm super happy and have been working a lot on it.
What we posted got shared in various other places (Designer News, Twitter, Reddit, etc), which might we why it was higher. But Hacker News was definitely the catalyst of it all.
Hi, I just signed up for your website and everything looks really good but on your design dashboard I am getting your browser is currently not supported.
I am using Firefox 59.0b10. It seems like Firefox is not at all supported. I should not have to switch browser.
On the other hand, the homepage looks great in Firefox with NoScript enabled. It's nice to be able read about what a product does without enabling a bunch of scripts first. It seems a lot of sites these days make their landing pages using SPA frameworks.
Quick question: My understanding may need to be updated, but doesn't YC give you Ramen-survival cash? How did you deal with the financial challenges with so little and a family, etc.?
Yeah, the first year even after YC funding was very tough. Long story short: sold a car, borrowed a ton on those credit card write-yourself-a-check 2% balance transfer deals (thankfully had good credit to be able to do that), and withdrew early from an IRA (those penalties hurt!) - wouldn’t recommend :)
I'm delighted to hear that after taking on all that risk and "doubling down" by believing in yourself(ves), that you're doing great now. Totally inspirational success story!
Ah. Understood. It can be a tough call: Am I being persistent and believing in my team/self/product or am I just being stubborn and not reading the signs? There's always a certain insanity to starting a business in the first place, hence is it any less sane to continue?!
So, I imagine that the ray of hope that YC-acceptance presents might embolden one to continue and take on that additional risk as you did.
Still, very gutsy and glad it worked out for you.
(BTW, I can attest: yes, those 401k/IRA penalties hurt!)
Thankfully, the post took off - we were #1 for most of the day, and over 25,000 people signed up for our beta list in the several days after that post. This helped us reapply to YC with a lot more confidence and traction, and we were able to get into the next batch.
Webflow (https://webflow.com/) has since grown into a profitable business with close to 1,000,000 users all over the world, billions of website requests served, and close to 60 team members in over 14 countries. I'm pretty sure none (or very little) of this would be possible without HN and the community here, and the super positive reception our post had.
Today, we're on a mission to enable more people to create powerful software without having to learn how to code - we probably have decades to make that vision a reality, but we're on a decent start in large part thanks to our launch on HN.
A HUGE thank you to the community here!