Japanese Webflow SceneIs Something Else

0:00Janne Parri: Okay, Igor. You do not use Webflow frameworks like Client-First at SupaSaito. So why is that and how do you structure your projects?

0:09Igor Voroshilov: Yeah, thanks for the question. Indeed, in our work at SupaSaito, we don't use this famous frameworks. And this is coming from my own experience because I actually tried some of them. So I remember when the Client-First was announced, I maybe missed the timing when the Looms was announced, but I know that there were like this, some frameworks, but what I always felt is kind of using the framework like Client-First. I felt it's kind of limiting my creativity with some set of rules of how I should do it. And in the end, I also didn't kind of like, I wasn't really agree with some of the like practices which were pushed there. And you know, like we are operating in Japan. So most of our clients are Japanese clients and we don't have this problem when kind of like we need to follow some guideline because like maybe the other developers will be taking on that. Because this industry of like workflow

1:00Igor Voroshilov: Being used in Japan, we're building it from scratch. So like before we started teaching workflow here, it was not really popular and like not almost like nobody was using it. So we're kind of like building this from the ground and we're trying to do it like in the way which I think is the best way for the building the websites and for making them of course very localization friendly because most of the websites which we're building in Japan. They require some localization. They usually have of course like Japanese version of the website and the global version of the website. And what I found out is that you need to use like some components with the visibility switches and these things. Like when you need to kind of like build different structure of the pages for different versions of the market, because like what works for the global audience definitely doesn't work for Japanese audience sometimes. And you need to be really

1:55Igor Voroshilov: You need to have them very well customized. So that's why when we build a project for the client, if you open the page, it's just like a bunch of components. And we basically have one huge like page wrapper components. And inside of that, you have all of the necessary like navigation and footer, maybe like some cookie components. And inside that you have a huge slot with all of the sections inside, which are also components. And if the sections have like some headers, and maybe like cards or something like that. It's usually also some different component because let's say if we're talking about the lineup of the features, which we describe on the website, that can be also very different from the Japanese version of the website and the English version of the website. We may be adding some sections on the Japanese version and maybe we don't want to see them on the English version. So we kind of like switch this visibility with the components. It makes it super easy.

2:50Igor Voroshilov: For us to build and also for the client to maintain this kind of website in the bilingual, kind of multilingual websites. So this is the primary idea. And also because kind of like we quite often handle over the project to the clients and they kind of like to try to do things on their own. And when you use this popular frameworks, they always use kind of like the idea of these global classes, like things which are used across the whole website. And what happens is that clients very often, just break the things because they change the classes and then like accidentally they remove like paddings from everywhere, all of the sections or something like that. And then they kind of like end up not being really understanding what happened. So that's why like when we build with our framework, we try to use this class specifically for this component.

3:42Igor Voroshilov: So that if client is doing some changes on the class, they do not break anything on the whole website. And thanks to the per page CSS feature, which was released, I think, this year, this approach doesn't make the page too heavy with the huge CSS. So it actually becomes even better and better for our approach and also with the dynamic filters as the component properties. Everything just goes into one place.

4:10Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah, that's beautiful. And I have used localization in quite many of my projects and I have found like same challenges that you usually end up doing a lot of hiding and showing of components. But luckily we have those components and it has been a talk or a conversation topic. If the clients should like edit the classes and those things, or could we do a like whole websites for the client and the client just uses those components. Of course, that's the end goal for many developers, but I got to ask a little detailed question. Do you,

4:51Janne Parri: You probably need to do the class naming still in English. You cannot do that in Japanese,

4:58Igor Voroshilov: Yeah, of course, yes.

5:00Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah. That is my like, my like, understanding of Japanese and Kanji. But of course, yeah. Code is still in English basically, but that is, that is fascinating. Do you have like your own documentation and are you like, especially proud of some features in your, like your own, so to speak, framework?

5:22Igor Voroshilov: We don't have a comprehensive documentation. We've been thinking about that. Think that Francesca, who was actually kind of an advocate for creating this documentation, but I'm kind of holding back saying that this is not the priority for us right now. But yeah, I wrote a blog article. So we have a blog post where I explain this approach from the examples of one of my recent projects, which I finished for the client. And that's basically maybe the only place where we actually explained this system. But other than that, like this constantly involving. Like we are still kind of like finding out the new ways to do it. Like every project adds up something to this, to this method which we're doing. And so like, we still think that it's still too lightly, like too changing to put it in some documentation. And we would probably end up kind of like changing this documentation quite often, which.

6:19Igor Voroshilov: It requires time. And more than that, we still haven't come up with the best name for that. I would be really happy to actually get some ideas maybe from your listeners about how we should name this framework. I think it will include some super framework or stuff like that. I don't know. But that would be really cool.

6:40Janne Parri: That would be an obvious choice and I'm not sure if I can come up with anything better. But hopefully maybe some of our listeners can put some ideas into the comments. But okay, before we go any further, little introductions are in order. So my name is Janne Parri. I'm a web designer from Finland and I'm also your host today. And with me is the one and only Igor Voroshilov. And Igor, you are known best from SupaSaito, where you are the founder and CEO. And I would say that SupaSaito is basically the best known Webflow agency in Japan, at least in my little bubble. But I'm curious, how does one decide to move abroad?

7:29Janne Parri: Learn a foreign language, in this case Japanese of course, and start an agency that serves like mainly Japanese businesses. I guess that did not happen like overnight. So could you tell us how did you end up here?

7:43Igor Voroshilov: Yeah, it's a very long story. So like if I think about when I started the agency, that was 2021, something like that. So the story takes around 10 years actually. So have you watched the movie Kill Bill?

8:01Janne Parri: Yes I have. One of my favorite movies, yeah.

8:02Igor Voroshilov: Yeah, so, yeah, that's amazing. I also, think that this movie is absolutely epic. Like every scene of the movie is perfect. I don't know if it can better. But like as a kid, you kind of like watch this movie, you see like Japan, such a cool, mysterious, like Catalan stuff and very cool. You know what, like in the end of the movie first, like there is one Japanese song. And I kind of like this song, it's very old one, it's actually from the 70s. And very kind of traditional, kind of like old style singer, a woman is singing this song. And I really like how the Japanese language sounds there, like in this song, it's like super beautiful. And when I was still a student, was still like, I was a high school student, maybe I just graduated, I was going to the university for the international relations.

8:57Igor Voroshilov: Of like faculty. So I was supposed to learn English as my primary kind of like foreign language and something else. So something else was different options. Most of my classmates they choose like some European language like French, Spanish, German, Italian and out of like 110 people probably like 90 like maybe 95 people choose those languages. And we also had some choice of Asian languages, which was supposed to be a little bit more difficult choice. But I kind of felt like it's a good chance to try something new. Because everyone is going for the European languages, why don't they do something different and try to kind of be a little bit maybe more competitive or something like that by using, by doing some other language. But at the time, we had the choice of Chinese or Arabic.

9:46Igor Voroshilov: And like Arabic, I was not really interested. Kind of I didn't, I didn't kind of like was learning about Arabic countries or anything. Was not my thing. So for the Chinese, it was a bit difficult because, you know, like when I was living in the dormitory on the same floor, there was kind of like a big group of Chinese students living as well. And we had one kitchen on the floor. And every time I would cook my breakfast or lunch or something like that, they would come in together in a huge group. And start a conversation and it's like so active and so loud and I could not get any idea of how I can pronounce anything like that. It's kind of like it's totally impossible for me. To be honest, like actually right now I'm already learning a little bit of Chinese and I actually spent half a year living in China afterwards. But back then it kind of like felt impossible. And one of my classmates, he was kind of like...

10:41Igor Voroshilov: He was anime otaku. The word otaku is kind of like people who spent most of their time being super huge fans of something. There are some otaku for anime, for trains, for airplanes, some other huge fans. And this guy, he really liked Japanese language and he wanted to learn it. But at our faculty, was no Japanese language offered. So what he did is like he gathered like maybe 10 people who are interested in learning Japanese and we signed the letter to the faculty administration to find the teacher for us and create a new like Japanese class. So I was thinking like, yeah, that sounds pretty interesting. And I was, I remember the day when I was kind of like deciding on doing the Japanese, it was, I was kind of like thinking about should I go try the Chinese or should I...

11:36Igor Voroshilov: Try something else and what language should I learn and like on my playlist there was that song from the Kill Bill and my brother said like wow Japanese sounds like pretty good why don't you learn Japanese and he maybe said it half a joke and I was like yeah that's a good idea like if I'm going to learn some new language in university why don't I do the Japanese one because you know like the image for Japan is like very mysterious country nobody knows what is there. Then like robots, samurai, anime stuff, like it's kind of like you don't really know what to expect from there. But somehow it looks very interesting. So I started, I signed up for this Japanese class and my class was starting from the second semester. But in the end of the first semester,

12:28Igor Voroshilov: There was kind of like an event with Japanese students coming to our university for like Japan-Russia student forum and I joined it like on the side of Russian students at my university and this was kind of like my one of my first experiences of this kind of like multicultural exchange with people of my same age because before that I was joining some sport events like we're talking with some adults like foreigners but this time it's kind of like being just around the same age people and they're hanging out together. It was super fun. I really liked them. Again, like I could listen to how they speak the Japanese language just here in front of me. I really liked it. And the day then the forum finished and they fly back to Japan. The next day I went to the bookshop. I bought the Japanese language student book and I started learning everything. And by the time when my class already started, I probably went through more than half of the book.

13:25Igor Voroshilov: And

13:25Janne Parri: You

13:26Igor Voroshilov: For the whole next semester, we didn't cover everything what I learned on my own. So I was really, really passionate about that, especially because I connected with these people like on the Facebook and I kept like talking to this Japanese students and we became friends. It was kind of really interesting. Was like dreaming about someday I will go traveling there. I was checking out the Google maps, how the Tokyo looks like and this kind of things. Yeah. And on the next year, I applied for the same forum, but happening in Japan. And I got also selected for this thing. And it was my first trip to Japan, 2013, for the student forum. So we spent a couple of days in Tokyo, then went to another city in the university where actually the forum happened. Then again, back to Tokyo for a couple of days. So that was, I felt like I'm kind of...

14:17Igor Voroshilov: It's not your Earth, it's like some other planet. It's kind of like somehow also has cars and buildings and the walls and trees, but it kind of like, it doesn't really look same as what I saw before, like in Russia or Europe countries. It's kind of like different. And it was really fascinating. Like this one week in Japan was definitely not enough and I felt like I want to get back. So I later on, when I was already the third grade student, I applied for like exchange program, one exchange semester at one of the universities. So it also went well. Like I went for half a year, I went to study in Japan. I was taking Japanese classes. I joined a sailing club. So I was like doing this yachts kind of like, it was very nice because like I was the only one foreigner there. There was like 15, maybe 16 people in the club. And we would go to...

15:10Igor Voroshilov: To the harbor, which is like nearby Tokyo, stay there for the whole weekend. And that was kind of very immersive experience into the culture. So I could really learn the language. I could really learn the culture, understand the Japanese people, create friends. I also went to do bartender job. So I went to work part-time at the bar also, to get this experience of working in Japan as well, and also taking classes. Classes were also very fun because like I had the whole class of foreigners from all different countries learning Japanese. It was very, very fun. Yeah, just hanging out with my friends. It was super cool. And until the last day of my exchange program, I definitely didn't want to go back. Was like, I'm enjoying so much. And I definitely felt like this is a place to be. I really wanted to be in Japan. So after I graduated from the Moscow University,

16:06Igor Voroshilov: I was looking for the ways how to get back to Japan for the graduate school because I definitely wanted to try to live for longer. I was lucky to find this program at the university of Tokyo, which was also for the sustainable development, which was the same as a topic for my graduation thesis. And also this program had the scholarship. So the scholarship actually amazing. What Japan offers is kind of... They pay the whole tuition fee, they pay you like some monthly allowance and they even bought a ticket, like flight tickets from my hometown to Tokyo to come to the studies. It was amazing. So I got this two years master's program at the university of Tokyo. And that was also pretty fun. But it was kind of like much more mature, kind of like focused on the research thing.

16:52Igor Voroshilov: Because it was involving a lot of research. Me and one more of my friends, we kind of like started thinking about what we would like to do after we graduate. And went on the career forum, kind of like career event or something like that, where like some Japanese sensei was talking about like, does it look like to find a job in Japan, like to do some job seeking. And... Kind of like in Japan they have like very specific way it's called like shuukatsu, shushokukatsu though it would be like the full name is kind of like basically the process of finding the job and there is a specific process they all of them they wear like black suit, white shirt, a necktie and they go to the like apply to the companies go on many interviews and everything so and the this

17:39Igor Voroshilov: Person who was doing this career seminar was explaining all of that. Another guy, like another foreigner was saying that, giving a question saying that basically what you explain is that as a foreigner, when I'm looking for the job in Japan, I am supposed to wear the suit like Japanese people. I'm supposed to speak perfectly Japanese. I'm supposed to do all the perfect Japanese manners and everything. So basically what company wants me to be, they want me to be a Japanese person. So what's the point for the company to hire a foreigner instead of Japanese person? Why don't they just hire a Japanese? And it was kind of like the sensei who was explaining the Japanese woman, guess it was. She couldn't really clearly answer the question. Like what would be the main motivation for the company to hire a foreigner? Because it looked like many companies, don't really take advantage of this.

18:31Igor Voroshilov: Kind of like unique talents which they can get. So who have like different mindset, like different knowledge, maybe like other like knowledge of other languages and like so much of different potential, but many companies end up not really using that. And I also know that from the, from what I heard from some of my friends who actually ended up going, working at Japanese companies and... The another thing is that this process of looking for a job in Japan is very long. It's usually takes one year. And because

19:02Igor Voroshilov: I came kind of in a different timing. Usually Japanese academic year starts in April and I came in September. They said that you already like a bit late, so you need to start already soon for you to be like one and a half years or something like that. That's for you to kind of find the job. And I was thinking like, it doesn't really make sense to spend one and a half year for finding a job, which probably will not be really satisfying because from what I heard from many other people, this kind of corporate culture is a little bit... It's good for Japanese people, but not very easy for foreigners to go with. And even some Japanese people would because of this corporate culture.

19:46Igor Voroshilov: And then at the same time, I happened to go to some startup event and, you know, like in my past, in my dream, had this, I had this image of like some day I'm running my company and being like a big boss, like something like that. And I had that dream, but the problem was that I couldn't bridge this gap between me being a student and me being like a big boss in a huge tower with like thousands of employees and millions and trillions of dollars in revenue. And. Kind of like when I went to the startup event, I could kind of bridge this gap because I saw like just a team of couple of founders, actually foreigners doing some service, like some SaaS or some platform, starting their business in Tokyo, starting very small and like doing step by step growing and kind of like getting building the product, doing some revenue. And by going into this kind of events, this dots started to kind of like connecting in my mind. And I thought like, okay, now

20:40Igor Voroshilov: It's not like you start with the building and thousands of employees, you kind of like start with maybe a couple of founders and like some idea of the product and doing that stuff. And at the same time, I came up with some idea, like I learned one business idea in the news in Russia and I offered my brother to... Started a company, so he's a very technical person. He's like an engineer. So he became our CTO. I became a CEO, basically doing everything except for the development. And that was super exciting journey, like for around one year, because I was going to different startup events. Was talking to like venture capitals, to some angel investors, like pitching my ideas, creating this presentation, saying that they were participating in some pitch events, like being on the stage, kind of like explaining my startup.

21:28Igor Voroshilov: And it was very energetic, super cool period of my life. And I could get like two angel investors and later on I could get the venture capital to invest in our company. It going pretty well. And my brother also moved to Japan and we started getting some team members and even some users and everything. Kind of after that we how to say? It was very difficult. What were doing required a lot more resources than you had and probably a lot more knowledge than we had. And also the timing, like the COVID happened and most of our clients, were kind of doing the food business, restaurants, cafes, this kind of stuff. So many things went wrong and we had to pivot, to make a pivot.

22:14Igor Voroshilov: We were trying a couple of different ideas about like a new services or well-being on this like lockdown. Everything like the whole Tokyo was like just sitting at home. Even like the most populated, I don't know, maybe you heard about the crossing Scramble Square in Shibuya, which is like actually every day you're knocking out a couple of million of people crossing this place. But it was empty. For those two, three months of the lockdown, it was empty and... All of our clients, they either the close the business or they kind of like couldn't really operate. They had to kind of like stop the operations. And during that time, we kind of like already we had to move on like to do something else because we understood that it's not going to work. And it was not very clear ⁓ when the market is going to be back. It was kind of it to actually eventually took several years ⁓ for the COVID to ⁓ end.

23:10Igor Voroshilov: And we tried several different ideas. And by that time I already built my first Webflow website actually for this first business. And how it happened is that when we just made our company, my brother, created this custom coded website. So basically it was one or two pages and we just uploaded it on the Google cloud. And one of my friends, actually was he told me that you should like while your startup is still very young, you need to kind of like iterate on your message, iterate on your marketing and everything. Your website right now is just custom coded, uploaded on the cloud. It's probably very difficult for you to update. And he suggested me to use something like WordPress to like a load code tool. To make it easier. And I remember

23:58Igor Voroshilov: I was replying him on the messenger in Facebook saying like, damn, like I don't really understand about the website. It's nothing. It's kind of like so difficult. And I was kind of, okay, maybe like we'll figure out something. And that was like one of the last messages which we had with him. And then after that we really needed to do something because we ordered and after we raised money from the VC, we ordered it, like we hired a designer to make a beautiful design for our website. And then we hired like some junior developer to help us to build this. And it took half a year. And I was kind of like, okay,

24:29Janne Parri: Man.

24:30Igor Voroshilov: That doesn't, it doesn't gonna work. Like if it takes that long. And I was looking for some like no code tools and I found the flow by accident. So again, as I found my initial idea, I was reading news. It was Russian news. And this was the news article about like some Russian born founders like getting like series A or something for their, like for the startup. In America and that was Webflow and the startup was about building websites without code and it like, interesting. I'm more interested in the product rather than in the kind of series A funding. And I went to check the platform. The first time I opened it, looked very scary. I was kind of like, okay, just close it. The second time.

25:15Igor Voroshilov: I really, I really already wanted to build a website. So I got this like Adobe XD file of the design and I built it and I thought, wow, it looks good. Now let's make it work for the mobile. And then everything broke. Like because I didn't make it work in the proper way. So the third time, my third attempt was kind of, I found a template, which looks the most, the most close to what I want to build. And I started to tweak the things small by like little by little. And of course, like I didn't know about how to name my classes. And I created several hundreds of the deep blocks and everything. And it's kind of was, it was very mess, but it looked good. Yeah. And I could kind of like rebuild the whole website, which before took half a year to do. I could rebuild it like in a couple of weeks. And then the following couple of weeks, I also did the whole.

26:07Igor Voroshilov: Redesign again, because the design was already almost year old. And kind of like started, we started doing this pretty well. Kind of like just in several hours, they could add like, let's say some voices of our customers or like some shops which we are partnering with, or like I made several pages for this feature, for this feature, for this feature. And we also started writing blogs, we started writing some articles and our SEO traffic in several months went like 30 times up. So it was huge success for us. The only thing is that this was the COVID and all of that didn't really bring us any business. But I learned this skill and I felt like, wow, I now really know how to build a website fast. Okay, I didn't know that it's such a mess, but I thought that it's super fast. Like, let me see like how much people can earn by building websites. And I was checking out some.

26:59Igor Voroshilov: Platforms like a Fiverr, I guess, a Fiverr, know, like the marketplace and something like that exists in Japan as well. And when I opened it was like all like WordPress, like only WordPress and no single kind of project with the workflow. And I was kind of like trying to reply saying that, know, workflow is much better than WordPress and this kind of stuff. Usually it doesn't really help because I also posted one job as a test and they received so many applications. So I understood that it doesn't really make sense to try to convince them to use some other platforms because there's like too many people like replying to this. And what was my take is that, okay, nobody knows about Webflow even though it's such a good tool for building websites. So I'm going to teach them how to do it.

27:52Igor Voroshilov: I'm going to teach them how to use Webflow. And what I started is like I started the academy, basically online school, where I was creating this video lessons, video courses in Japanese. I also built it with Webflow and Memberstack with a little bit of Zapier or something like that. Hosted my videos on Vimeo. And I just put my computer in front of me. It was like old, like Xiaomi laptop. My camera on the laptop was broken, so I had to connect my Android phone with some wire to work as my camera. I was sitting in my living room and in my bedroom I had a huge window. It was like my source of good lighting because it was daylight. So I could only record my videos

28:38Igor Voroshilov: During the day because I didn't really have a special light for that. And I used also like some... Very old wire with the wire like this, know, like the Apple earphones. And I started, I was like looking very, very young as well. Like I was pretty young and I started recording this video with the loom on the free version. It was kind of, and putting that on YouTube and Obviously like I cannot speak in Japanese as like Japanese speaker and I'm look like foreigner So when I right now I will watch this video is I cannot even believe that somebody got interested

29:12Janne Parri: You

29:13Igor Voroshilov: In that it's kind of it's just everything all of that. Like if I know all the setup and all that it's just such a cringe but like somebody

29:20Janne Parri: Yeah, I know the feeling.

29:22Igor Voroshilov: Somebody actually watched my videos and even one guy signed up for my Academy And it's actually one more interesting story, which I may be telling you if we have some time. But slowly, like I was making these videos, making the courses for my academy and some people started to sign up and I started making some revenue from selling the courses and also the mentoring. So because I was compensating the lack of the video materials with like just basically selling my consultation time. That like, if you don't know how to build something, just don't worry.

29:56Igor Voroshilov: I know how to do it and people would just like sign up for mentoring with me and ask questions for that. Yeah, and slowly some people started to say that, we don't really want to, we don't want to learn, but we just, like, can you just build it for us? And started offering this kind of agency job. And I also started to be the global leader for the workflow in Japan, in Tokyo. So there was no community, workflow community in Tokyo. It was very huge because kind of like I could say that, now I'm kind of like official community partner with the workflow and it instantly gave more credibility to my company as well. And like slowly we started getting this portfolio of some small companies first and then some bigger companies started coming for specifically building the workflow. And now we kind of like have a nice portfolio of the even public companies, like the listed companies who built the workflow with us.

30:49Igor Voroshilov: So yeah, from 2021, I guess, I started doing it as an agency. It's a pretty long introductory story, but that's it. Yeah.

30:59Janne Parri: Hey, but that's a beautiful story and lots of like learnings right there. For example, that when you start a company, your first idea might not be the one that like is the successful one. And,

31:14Igor Voroshilov: No.

31:15Janne Parri: If I'm, if I understood correctly, the Academy is still running and that is part of your business still. Is that right?

31:22Igor Voroshilov: Yeah, yeah, it's kept changing. It's not the we already migrated it from one platform to another, maybe three or four times. And were still changing. We are thinking about what is the best way to sell it, like who is the best target? What is the best pricing? Like all of that things that keep evolving. And we're planning some changes very soon as well. But yeah, this is still it exists.

31:49Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah. And now that we are in the year 2025, is Webflow like a bigger thing, more better known thing in Japan? Or do you think that there could be some progress to be made in that regard still?

32:07Igor Voroshilov: Yeah, definitely. Still actually a long way to go. Even though we've been kind of like evangelists for the workflow here in Japan, it kind of like didn't boom, you know, in Japan. And there are several reasons. One of the biggest reasons is that because it's completely English and Japanese people don't really like the English interface and everything, what is like everything in English. They're really not good at English at all. And even though we created this education materials in Japanese, just overall, it's very hard for only us to create so much of the content in Japanese, which will be attractive for the clients. And there appeared maybe a couple of other companies who started also writing some blogs and doing some videos about the Webflow. But so far, that's kind of like, that's it. Not a huge boom of the Webflow. So I think it still will be coming.

32:58Igor Voroshilov: And yeah, we're kind of like working on that, like, but quite often we work with the companies who already want to use Webflow. So our next kind of goal, what we want to try to do is kind of like target let's say companies who use WordPress at the current time and target the companies who haven't yet decided to move to Webflow. Like we want to target the companies who now kind of feeling that they have some problem with the WordPress, but they kind of like... Still exploring what tools to use because Webflow also has one competitor, it's called Studio. It's kind of like a local Japanese local tool for building websites. It's not as powerful as Webflow, but it's more kind of like designer friendly. So it doesn't involve like so much of the knowledge of this HTML and CSS. It's a little bit more like Figma, maybe like Framer, but not as that high spec as a Framer.

33:47Igor Voroshilov: But it's Japanese tool and the interface in Japanese and all of the content, everything in the support, everything is Japanese. So that's why they are much more popular in Japan than, Webflow. But we still have like some companies who come to us saying that we feel like some limitations of the studio and we want to move to the Webflow to have a bit more comprehensive website or something like that. So this thing's also happening, but yeah, still not the scale, which I would like it to be. So this is one of the challenges for us to kind of bring more attention of the companies to workflow. But even though we still have some companies, even the big public companies, so we have let's say Ricoh, who is like 60,000 employees, Toppan, who is like 80,000 employees, and other companies who are coming to us for specifically this workflow development service.

34:39Igor Voroshilov: They are really, really great people because they made all of this research. They understood that among all of the platforms, probably the Webflow is the best choice. And they usually all, of course, they come in with a question with the final confirmation for the final confirmation. Is it like, do you really think that it makes sense for us to go with a Webflow or like go with this local Japanese tool ⁓ or use something else? And, well, yeah, actually, I'm honestly, I think that the Webflow is the best. Best tool for building websites, so you always recommend it to them. ⁓ And it usually becomes like the last push for them to actually make this decision and go with the Webflow.

35:14Janne Parri: Yeah, it is so awesome to see big companies like adopting Webflow all around the world. Like you told about your journey with Webflow and you mentioned that at the beginning you were like the only person and you saw like your search engine traffic spike up. I had the same thing in Finland. I was basically the only one writing like blog posts about. About Webflow and I kind

35:44Igor Voroshilov: Hehe.

35:45Janne Parri: Of grew up with Webflow. It is still a smaller platform than let's say WordPress here in Finland, probably all around the world. But I like the idea that we are all like growing with Webflow. The platform gets more powerful, more serious and bigger companies start to adopt that. That is totally awesome. But Yeah, I wanna dive deeper into the technical stuff because I understand that you have some experience with like migration projects from WordPress to Webflow. I have done one or two of those myself and I know that there are some technical challenges, but yeah, what are your experiences? What are the...

36:33Janne Parri: Most crucial things? That you have to think before you start migrating.

36:38Igor Voroshilov: Yeah, so the biggest challenge probably is content like the articles and that actually very heavily depends on how the how people handle these articles in the WordPress. So it's not more, it's not really about WordPress being bad. It's more about like people not using it correctly. And you know, like not really using proper HTML markup for the articles. And I think that that might be also like, I'm not pretty much sure, but quite often I see this problem with the WordPress websites that say that this paragraph, they're not like really divided. It looks like just simple text, like without like paragraph tag or

37:19Igor Voroshilov: Something like that. And then when you import it into the workflow, like all of that kind of like all of the page break line breaks, like all of that just disappears. And other stuff is like, let's say if you're, if you're HTML and WordPress supports like some tags which are not supported by the workflow. I tried to do like API kind of like population of the data. So I kind of like scrapped the scraping of the current pages of the WordPress. And I put all that inside of the spreadsheet. And then I used make to make this automation to populate this data. And what I found it is kind of like if you have a paragraph.

37:57Igor Voroshilov: And inside of that, you have some tag which is not supported by rich text or the workflow. The whole paragraph just gets thrown away. So, and the funny thing is that, let's say the span is not supported, you know? And if the span is not supported and it's very commonly used, and sometimes clients, they use like so many spans inside of that. And even like sometimes I don't really understand for what, like because you just have a span, but nothing. Actually like no styling, nothing like no special classes applied as well. And I had one project like that and we had to migrate like 1300 articles.

38:34Janne Parri: Do.

38:35Igor Voroshilov: That was really painful. And at first I was, I did that kind of like API migration and I thought like, wow, I'm so clever. Like it's just the, I saved so much time by migrating that automatically. Just like in a couple of days probably like I set up this automation and kind of like test it run it and all that and then they realized that so much of the like some parts of the pages were just gone from the Webflow and Unfortunately, we couldn't figure out how to do it automatically even like with the import of the CSV something was not really working well and like sometimes even images were not really looking good, so

39:14Igor Voroshilov: In the end, we had to just like manually go through the, 1,300 articles and put like, make sure that all of the, all of the images, like all of the content is okay. So if you have a lot of these articles, it might be very kind of like depending on the, on the work, like hard work. And also what I noticed is like sometimes you can export data from the WordPress, but then the problem with, another problem is that the URLs for images and this kind of stuff, they usually use like a relative path. You, then the flow doesn't really understand

39:49Igor Voroshilov: Where to get the image. And I was trying to use some AI like to kind of like process this, but always kind of like AI was not giving me consistent results, you know, like sometimes maybe like out of like 10 operations, like seven operations were good and like three operations, the queue was starting doing something. Unpredictable. Was kind of okay, like how I cannot really, I cannot really count on this because there is no consistency in the results which I get with the AI. Unfortunately, quite often these migrations, they happen to be kind of involving a lot of manual work. But what I'm doing is I'm usually coming up with the list of this data.

40:32Igor Voroshilov: I'm doing some scraping of the current website to scrap all of the titles, all of the like dates, maybe like some categories, tags, the URL slacks, all that data and coming up with a spreadsheet of these articles. And then I'm kind of like putting that data inside of the workflow. And then I am going through that like manually to basically work with the rich text because rich text is the only part which cannot be. Cannot really be automated. It's maybe like with the same CSV import sometimes, yes, if the code is still quite okay. So I'm kind of like trying to do that. But yeah, I'm trying to automate it until like as much as I can, but still some manual work is involved.

41:16Janne Parri: Yeah, I have had similar headaches like the rich text formatting is tough. I have found myself like trying to write some scripts using AI, something like SQL

41:33Igor Voroshilov: Mmm.

41:34Janne Parri: Scripts to format that WordPress like rich text part. And there's always some sort of weird short codes and stuff like that. And yeah, it is like hard work and basically every project has like its own weird little quirks.

41:57Igor Voroshilov: No.

41:58Janne Parri: But yeah, I'm not sure if there are any good tools, like better tools. You mentioned that you made like your own make. Automation. Have you found any other useful tools? Probably AI in some form to help you.

42:12Igor Voroshilov: For the formatting, unfortunately, I couldn't really figure out what would be the best, except for this manual stuff. And sometimes you really need to come up with a new format. Let's say another project, was a support website and we had to move over like 400 articles and in four languages. In total it was again like 1200, something like that. The thing there is that the original kind of like this article, was the whole article was a list and deeply nested. And inside of those list items, you could have like some images, were like in line images. Like some icons or something like that. Like different paragraphs and different things inside of this list items, which is again, like not supported by the rich texts and workflow. So for those kinds of things, we had to

43:03Igor Voroshilov: Come up with some new rule of the formatting, we're going to kind of, if we cannot use the same, like the whole thing is a list structure. So what would be kind of other way, like how we will be probably using some different levels of the headings for some list item headings and then put it like the list of stuff inside. So kind of not only moving the content, but all of the articles, had to be reformatted. So that also involved a lot of manual work and I spent maybe one month doing it. So it was very boring. But yeah, that's the job. That's what we're being paid for.

43:44Janne Parri: Yeah. And I feel that quite many at Webflow folks do not want to do that job. So if you are kind of

43:50Igor Voroshilov: I know.

43:50Janne Parri: Like known as, the guy who can migrate from WordPress to Webflow, that is a good position to be like, there are probably quite a few clients and customers who need that. So have you found that you already get some clients that specifically come for the kind of like migration service?

44:12Igor Voroshilov: Yeah, exactly. They are coming. So we have like, let's say on our website, we have a couple of like, this kind of like offers like solutions. One of them is specifically like migration from the WordPress to workflow and some company coming for that. And we also have something like in English, actually not, maybe it doesn't really make that much sense. It's called like some kind of like workflow implementation, but in Japanese there is a good good word for that, which clearly explains what we help with. And this is basically like helping companies to get on board with the Webflow, to get started with the Webflow. It's usually not only migrating on their website, or maybe sometimes it doesn't even evolve actually migrating their website, but mostly like kind of helping them to figure out if the Webflow is the best platform for them.

45:01Igor Voroshilov: Maybe answer all the questions which they may have. Let's say for one of the clients like that, we had to have a talk with their security team. And I was on a call. It's also a subsidiary of a public company in Japan. So they're pretty strict with all the security stuff and everything. And they had a huge questionnaire about the security of the platform, of the management and everything about the workflow. And because I'm not the workflow myself, so I couldn't of course like sign any of those checklists for them, but I kind of like could help them to kind of like figure out like just go and the kind of like with the limit of my own knowledge of the of how everything is working. I could kind of like answer those questions and the funny thing was that I was the only one on the call from my company, but from their company was around maybe eight people. And

45:50Igor Voroshilov: They were like some guys like asking the the questions and then like some other like main guys like kind of like just coming in and asking more detailed questions and this kind of stuff. So it was, we spent like one and a half or maybe even two hours like just talking about the security of the workflow and like checking all the like white papers and like different stuff in there and they're like in terms of use and in the other like specifications so that they could get all of these answers to the questions. And like this kind of things we also do. Kind of like as a part of the sales as well sometimes, because the client wants to make sure that's done. And the Japanese companies, are very risk averse. They want to make sure about

46:28Igor Voroshilov: Every single small detail so that if they get a new platform, if they use something, they really pick about it. And we go through all of that and through like how they're going to use it. And they're kind of like a little bit of teaching how to use Webflow as well. And sometimes it also actually involves the actual migration of the platform, of the current website with all of the CMS data. And quite often it also involves kind of like redesign. But in our case, clients, usually come up with their own design. So whether they already use some designer like outsource, maybe agency or freelancer, or also quite often these big companies, they have some internal designers who use Figma and they come up with some design.

47:15Igor Voroshilov: And were usually helping with the development and this kind of CMS migration part is the most, but mostly.

47:22Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah. Again, I have kind of like similar experiences, although I'm just a freelancer, but I have seen that more and more companies come to me for just the webflow part, like just the technical implementation. And I believe it's a bit due to webflow being like more powerful, more complicated, and so on. And of course, bigger companies usually like differentiate those two parts of the project. They, as you said, have

47:52Janne Parri: Some internal designer or completely different like partner who designs the side. And I think that is kind of good. Those are good projects. Of course, sometimes I like to still do the design part too. So I haven't said no to the design, although it is more subjective. Sometimes it's so easy to just do the technical stuff because it either works or it doesn't but the creative

48:19Igor Voroshilov: Nah.

48:20Janne Parri: Part is always up in the air. Do you still or at SupaSaito you still do the design too if you are asked, right?

48:29Igor Voroshilov: Me, myself, to be honest, I'm not a super good designer, so I don't do much of design. So we have another designer who also does the flow of development as well as designer, but another Japanese member who is much better than any other of our team members in design. So she's usually handling that part. I'm doing mostly development if we need like, so I still have some clients which I kind of handling on my own. I'm trying to kind of like give it more like to the team and kind of like free up more my time for the sales and this kind of like network building, maybe like branding PR stuff. But yeah, some of the important clients I'm still keeping.

49:06Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah. And of course, at some points you are so deep in the technical stuff or at other stuff that is like really good to give the design or other parts of your job to other members, especially with those bigger projects. But there was one thing you mentioned before. It was the Webflow community. Leader and I'm curious what is the Webflow Webflow white like circles the Webflow community like back there in Japan do you like meet up in real life often do you have like events or what do you do

49:47Igor Voroshilov: Actually, it was more often last year, this year I kind of like got really busy with that. We've been doing, during the COVID were doing online events, but then we started doing offline as well. It's not big, like our meetups, like usually like maybe 10, 15, like people, sounds like that. We did like some fun things, let's say, have you heard of hanami? It's kind of like a tradition of...

50:09Janne Parri: Haven't.

50:10Igor Voroshilov: In the periods of Sakura blossom, this cherry trees blossom, Japanese people do hanami. So they basically go to the park, make some picnic. It's basically hanami means like hana is a flower and mi means watch, like look. And this basically like a small picnic, like drinking, eating, party when you kind of like enjoy the cherry blossom and like enjoy the company of your friends. So we did this kind of workflow meetup as well. We did some kind of like meetups with presentations when the people were kind of like talking about some interesting project which they did or some maybe like things which they learned about. We also did like just like going out like having dinner kind of event as well. We also did one event was more about kind of like business side of doing the website. So like we also collaborated with two other companies who were more.

51:02Igor Voroshilov: Into design and another company is more like in the marketing and it was focused on how to use the websites and all the design, marketing and development part all together to win in Japanese market. So it was English speaking event mostly for international audience, foreign founders who try to do business here. This kind of things. So it's really different. So sometimes online, sometimes offline. Recently, not that often. But I think we will be getting back together, back to that. There is like one small sneak peek, like is that we are now planning to make some meetups, which will be more like closed meetups for our client companies, like in Japanese for talking about what kind of things are happening in workflow, about all of the new features which they're coming up with and kind of like this.

51:58Igor Voroshilov: Sharing the information with the current client and maybe like with some potential clients who we're looking to get into workflow.

52:04Janne Parri: Yeah, those sound awesome. And I should maybe do more for my local community. We tried to have this one, meetup in Helsinki with Felix, a fellow Webflow designer, but the show up was not that great. Maybe we could have done,

52:23Igor Voroshilov: Mmm.

52:24Janne Parri: Done more for the, for the like advertising or communication. Telling people that there is an event like that. But yeah, I also feel that people are so busy nowadays that there's a quite high bar to go out and do some like easier stuff. Yeah, maybe.

52:45Igor Voroshilov: Yeah, it's kind of... It's difficult of course, yeah. You cannot find the time which will be perfect for everyone. And some people, just feel more like they want to spend time at home. Yeah, it's kind of difficult. For me as well, it's always very difficult to do these community things.

53:04Janne Parri: Yeah, but it's always like afterwards. It's really nice. Do you think that you should do more of that? Because it's where else do you like see people, other people like in flesh and people who really like know what you are doing. For example, I'm totally a freelancer. And, of course I talk with the clients, but it's not that often when I get to talk. About Webflow. Well, now I have this podcast

53:31Igor Voroshilov: Or no.

53:32Janne Parri: Thing going on and this is awesome. I get to meet awesome people about it. It can really be quite lonely. So that is one way to like try to

53:43Igor Voroshilov: Hmm.

53:44Janne Parri: Try to do something about it. But

53:46Igor Voroshilov: Yeah, like now I have one client who I meet offline every two weeks. And they always like telling me like, thank you for coming to our office. And then like, thanks for inviting me because I'm quite glad to go and meet somebody in person. Because you know, like after the COVID started, it's kind of all of the meetings are online. Even like we both like in Tokyo and even these people, they're kind of like the same district of the Tokyo. And we're still meeting online and like I have one company like from my home I can walk like maybe 15 minutes to their office and

54:22Janne Parri: You

54:23Igor Voroshilov: They but the problem is that they don't really go to their office and we still meet online so yeah

54:29Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah. I totally feel the same. Like I always say to my clients that especially at the start of the project and at the end, it would be nice to meet face to face. But more often than not, the clients are just saying that it's totally fine to meet online. So we do not have to meet. And that's a bummer. It would be nice to, of course it takes more time. But still it would be nice to have that human connection at least one

54:59Janne Parri: Time per project.

55:00Igor Voroshilov: I'm asking them for that. Even like I had some clients who I was working with during the COVID, of course we didn't meet while were working on the project, but then after the COVID was kind of like going down and it was end of the summer or like even like early autumn, I was sending the message saying like, then recently the COVID is finished and also it's not that hot anymore. Kind of like, why don't we have a meeting in person? And yeah, some of them they were like, yeah, why not? Of course, it was difficult to gather all of the people who are working on this project because they come to the office at different times, but they usually say,

55:38Igor Voroshilov: We'll find the day when most of our members are coming and then we'll be happy to come. So I'm kind of like just offering that. It can be a little bit awkward because there is no particular reason because we already finished the work and maybe we're doing some support for them and they don't really have any urgent task, but it's just me wanting to... Kind of like meet them. And sometimes also very interesting because you kind of like meet them and like you exchange the business card as well like when you meet. And they like sometimes saying, like you're actually taller than I expected or like maybe like,

56:09Janne Parri: You

56:10Igor Voroshilov: Like you look kind of like a bit maybe different or like you look same as in the camera or something. And this is also interesting because let's say one of my clients, Japanese client, he happened to be like really tall guy, like even taller than me. And they was, wow, that's so, so... It's kind of rare for Japanese people to be that tall. Was more interesting. So it's kind of involved all of these interesting talks which you don't really have when you do online stuff.

56:33Janne Parri: Totally. There is a kind of vibe. And I believe everyone knows that, but it is just so easy to be online every time. So that is bit ⁓ bummer. But I have ⁓ one more, ⁓ at least one more Japanese question. I believe Supasaito is about seven years old. Am I right?

56:54Igor Voroshilov: Kind of. To be this name is only one and half years old. So the seven years old is my original company, which I started as a student. And my first failed idea because I made this company. And even though my initial business idea failed, we kind of keep the same legal entity. We keep the same company. So that's why we're kind of having all of those years. But during these seven years we changed our main business a couple of times and we changed our name as well. It's kind of like a long bumpy road story. But yeah,

57:30Igor Voroshilov: If you're talking about how long I've been doing business, seven years.

57:34Janne Parri: Yeah. And I'm curious, how is that like peace business culture in Japan? Because I don't know a thing about, well culture in general in Japan, but I would imagine that there are some like unique aspects of it. So you mentioned like the business card, I believe that's a big thing in the business business world there. There any other like, interesting stuff or maybe challenges that you have come up with? That people like us, like in the Western Hemisphere would not think of.

58:09Igor Voroshilov: Yeah, so one of the reasons why my first business didn't really work well is because I didn't really have an idea how to sell to Japanese people, how to do that. And at some point I was very kind of anxious about that. Was kind of like, I don't really understand. And I had like this dream of like how I can maybe do business online, work with foreigners and earn from them abroad and like just enjoy living in a super comfortable Japan. It ⁓ was a really nice dream and most of the foreigners who live in Japan dream about that because Figuring out how to sell to Japanese people is quite hard. I think it's also because of the culture. Because it's ⁓ a bit different. It's kind of like, Japanese culture in total, it's a huge separation between us and them.

58:56Igor Voroshilov: Basically. So and it happens in many different layers. So it can happen that they can mean us as like, my family and them is like everyone else. They can feel like us is our company and then them kind of like it's our other companies. They can feel us as Japanese people and them as the rest of the world and the other foreigners as well. And that kind of means that you always, let's say, they of course trust much more to the people who are like us, kind of. And for them, it's always will be much more comfortable to work with somebody who is like same Japanese or something like who speak the same language and everything like that. But yeah, in this sense, it's kind of like quite close country. And also it has like the most of the time.

59:44Igor Voroshilov: There's like process of the sales and everything, making a good deal, it goes into creating very, very trustworthy relationships with these people. And it's not like only having something what can solve their problem. It's also like you need to get trust from them, from meeting them multiple times, maybe even going out with them together, like doing some drinking together as well. And there was even one interesting advice which I got from one salesperson in Japan. He was saying that, if you're going to visit your client company, make sure that you put an appointment for like maybe four or five PM and make sure that you are the last person who they see on this day. Because after your meeting is finished, you're like, okay, so should we go drinking now? And like, kind of like go drinking together with your clients. And this is where you kind of like get to know them each other well. And they kind of like, after they drink, they become much more, they kind of like lose up their defense and like they...

1:00:43Igor Voroshilov: They can be talking to you more real and kind of it's very in Japanese culture they kind of look at you in overall it's not like just this person can be really kind of like shitty guy but like he's super good professional so I will be getting like ordering my work to him no it doesn't work like that you should be kind of if they like you they like all of you and they kind of respect all of that like including your business your like personal stuff like your hobbies and everything. It's kind of like should be overall good impression. It cannot be just we tolerate everything just because he's very well doing the job. This kind of thing is like building this relationship is quite difficult. But one good thing is about that is like Japanese customers are very loyal. So if you start working with them and you deliver the results and everything is very well, even if like they maybe find some

1:01:38Igor Voroshilov: Like cheaper opportunities or something like that. Mostly they will not catch this opportunity because they really appreciate this long relationships with the, which they already have this, with this contractor, like with this company who helps them out. And because again, like they can trust this company saying like, mostly the Japanese companies, they kind of, especially big companies. People are very like generalists, know, like they're not really specialists in anything then they may be working in marketing department, but they're not really specialists in marketing they may be like working in design, but they kind of like know some ways of design but don't really do that and they very heavily rely on this outsource people like small specialist companies

1:02:20Igor Voroshilov: And Whenever they have like some problem and they don't know how to do this or that, they always will go to the specialist and ask for advice, like what should we do, how we should do it. And then it's a great opportunity to sell your services because they genuinely asking for advice and you kind of genuinely offering your support and it all works very natural. Mostly these people, are kind of like moving around the company very often. So let's say I had a project and we have one project with this company and after we finished it, on the next fiscal year, the main guy for this project, was moved to like sales department and he was not doing this web stuff anymore. And then were kind of like providing support to other like team members. Then in the next fiscal year, he got back and we started doing like a new project because he now initialized like new migration as well.

1:03:12Igor Voroshilov: These people, are really moving around in the company, especially if it's bigger company. This is kind of like part of the corporate culture of Japan. Really like kind of like shuffling people around. So in the end, what happens is that, like let's say the guy who was just ordinary kind of like employee in the marketing department, he may be appointed as a kind of like one of the managers in let's say HR department. Or something like that. And even though like he doesn't really know much about HR, but they kind of like try to grow them as like managers, general managers who can handle different processes in this company. And then what happens is that their main expertise is being expert in this particular company and how this company is

1:04:05Igor Voroshilov: Working, what is the business processes in different departments. And that's why... For this more technical stuff, they need to outsource it to different companies. And this is how these big, huge Japanese companies are working. This is how it happens. Maybe some companies, they start to hire some more professionals, but this is very, very common thing.

1:04:26Janne Parri: Yeah, that is that is fascinating. And for example, the drinking example, it's

1:04:32Igor Voroshilov: There.

1:04:32Janne Parri: It's very interesting because I totally understand that. And we have like this drinking culture back here. Well, every country, almost every country has some sort of drinking culture. But nowadays you cannot be that sure that the folks that you are talking with are like going to have a drink after the work. Like young people nowadays can be totally sober and do some

1:04:57Igor Voroshilov: No.

1:04:57Janne Parri: Totally different things. So it's changing. But I'm curious about you mentioned that at first it was quite hard to sell to Japanese customers. So do you like remember when you did your like first proper sale to a proper Japanese business.

1:05:19Igor Voroshilov: Sale to proper Japanese business. I remember the first sale, was kind of actually it was the only project which I got from this freelancer marketplace kind of. So there was the company that was specifically looking for somebody to build a Webflow. They ordered me just like three pages of the website. That was kind of like the proper deal that my first deal which I had with the Japanese company, but they kind of like followed me so I didn't really have to sell my services or

1:05:53Igor Voroshilov: Something. So it was not like that. But you know, like in my position probably because I picked like very niche stuff. So I'm doing this workflow and I'm kind of like positioned myself as a kind of like go-to expert for the workflow in Japan. Actually put me in a position of being like very big fish in a very small sea and kind of that's why I quite often I have people coming to me for this like help so I don't really have to offer them a lot of kind of like push them a lot because as I said like Japanese people they distinguish between like us and them and this kind of stuff and of course they are more comfortable working with the Japanese people but

1:06:34Igor Voroshilov: Sometimes what happens is that if they have some specific need and you have this solution for this very specific need, it can overcome this idea of preferring to work with some local people or something like that. So if you have this kind of positioning. And of course, even right now, our agency and other Japanese run agencies, they exist as well. But what happens is that we have completely different branding with them. So they are talking about the flow being like no control and being kind of like cheaper and easier or something like that. But we're not talking about the flow being cheaper or something. We kind of like actually our clients save a lot of money by moving to workflow and working with us, of course. But we don't put it as the main thing. And when we kind of like showcase what kind of companies we work with, we showcase these big companies.

1:07:26Igor Voroshilov: And our competitors, they showcase small companies and they're talking about that they are helping to build like same good quality of the website to the small companies comparing to the big ones. But we don't want to work with the small companies. We want to work with the big ones. And that's why after we started putting those logos and to kind of like changing our branding a little bit like that, small companies stopped coming to us. They now like we don't really get approached by small business. But those guys, get approached by small business. We get approached by this like big enterprises or like their subsidies and stuff like that. And I'm kind of like satisfied with this position as well because I feel much more comfortable working with bigger clients. So this one is also interesting.

1:08:08Janne Parri: Yeah, it is. And, I would say that many people like know the feeling or know that small clients can be very, very like hard to work with compared to the big ones. Like the big ones

1:08:22Igor Voroshilov: That.

1:08:23Janne Parri: Have big budgets and, they have multiple people working at the project and they are not that well, it's wrong to say detail oriented, but they are usually more fine with trusting you as the expert. The smaller companies just, it might be their first like website project and they might have opinions here and there, and they do not understand that you are like the authority or expert on the website. And yeah, there are multiple things. And on top of that, the

1:08:54Janne Parri: Smaller businesses have smaller budgets and you might end up doing a lot of work for not that much money. So I totally, I'm totally with you on those bigger companies. And of course it's like scared, scary to do or to say that on your website. You feel like you are like closing the door for the smaller companies. Are saying no to someone, but at the same time, you are like doing better work for the bigger clients. So that is, that is the way to go for quite many even freelancers. And at the same time, I would say that Webflow is getting to a point that it is like the sweet spot for the end user is more like bigger company or

1:09:45Janne Parri: At least mid-size company and of course the enterprise clients. I believe you are also a enterprise partner, am I right?

1:09:54Igor Voroshilov: Yeah, yes, we are.

1:09:56Janne Parri: Yeah, was it hard to get the badge or was it just to, it is probably just when you get the first like actual enterprise clients or you refer the first one.

1:10:09Igor Voroshilov: Yeah, it was kind of a lot of communication. So we had multiple like prospects for the enterprise and we kind of were chatting with this like enterprise sales team and kind of like on this prospect, on this prospect, on this prospect and then finally you have a deal and we already got like by that we already got pretty well. Known in this enterprise sales and we already had the person who is working with us, kind of like a partnership manager who is managing us without us being a partner yet. But yeah, in the end, it just transitioned into being our curator, partner, partnership manager.

1:10:50Igor Voroshilov: It was only in 2023, so only a couple of years ago when we became a partner. Before that, I was not really going after that batch or something like that, so were just getting some opportunities. My first enterprise prospect actually came from Twitter, which was also very interesting. It was Japanese company. It was like a consultant, a consultancy company. Who was doing some consultancy to a Japanese public company. And they were considering moving the website and they were kind of like exploring the plans. It was like, it was 2021. It was like quite many years ago. And that was kind of like the first client which was considering to get the enterprise. And at that time I remember like, didn't really know how to.

1:11:42Igor Voroshilov: How you get to talk to enterprise team in Webflow? I asked the people on the, like from the community team, like how do I get to talk to enterprise team? Because like I have some prospect and they connected me to some of the sales managers and kind of actually I was kind of kicked from one to another manager three, four times and they finally had the call. With one of the managers and explained what kind of deal it is and got the kind of general idea of how much it costs to do this and this. Then we made this proposal to the company. Unfortunately, this first prospect, they actually ended up not even going with the workflow. They probably just ended up not really doing anything with the website. So they just put it on delay, kind of like on the post for the whole website

1:12:33Igor Voroshilov: Renovation stuff. That kind of like was my first kind of key to go to talk to this enterprise people in the workflow. Then like maybe half a year after that, like I had another prospect was kind of like interested in the enterprise plan. Then started kind of like pinging those contacts which I already had. And then those discussions became more and more frequent. Recently, like from the last year, we actually started to even get introduced by the enterprise team.

1:13:06Igor Voroshilov: To the proper, to the clients. Because it happens sometimes that these Japanese companies, they think that they need an enterprise plan and they directly contact their workflow. And what happens then is that they get on the call. So like when they contact the workflow enterprise team, they immediately of like get them on the call. And actually this is not very common for the Japanese sales style. It's different like the CTAs like all that stuff like which is working for the B2B in Japan is different from the workflow from the from the US or Europe and they get this call and as I mentioned one hour ago Japanese people are not very good with English usually it's kind of like a very broken conversation they don't really get an idea of like what each other wants and

1:13:58Igor Voroshilov: At this moment, sometimes people in the enterprise sales team on the workflow, they started to look in who can help them, who is our partner in Japan. And they say, okay, this is a super site. And they reach out saying that we have this potential client, but we cannot really communicate well with this client because they don't really speak English well and we don't really understand what they need. And we don't have understanding about the market or anything. So maybe you can help us. And then I joined the call and at some... Kind of like some part of that I'm doing translation between what kind of like just figuring out what this client wants, what they need, what is the situation and maybe translating some questions from the, from the workflow team and kind of like facilitating all of this conversation. And one of the recent deals like, we closed it, but we closed it due to that I joined this because without that, probably that deal wouldn't happen. And

1:14:50Igor Voroshilov: The interesting thing was actually the selling, like the process of the sale as well. And kind of like the expectations about this process from the Japanese side and from the like Buffalo from the American side was completely different. And the style was completely different. And I had to kind of really teach this Buffalo salesperson about how to handle the sales negotiation in Japan because it's completely different. What was kind of like happening there is that Japanese overflow salespeople, they come up with like sales deck and there's basically a bunch of features which they are talking about is the PowerPoint

1:15:25Igor Voroshilov: Presentation. And then in the end they have like some tiers of the pricing and they kind of like giving this like options to the Japanese company and they kind of give this information and then Japanese company gets this and they're going back to kind of like have a look at those things. And then the following week, like the salesperson kind of like follow up follows up and they kind of like, they really want to make things move very fast. And they say like, okay, we like end of the month, we can get you like some discount. Then next week is kind of like end of the quarter, we can give you some more discount or something like that. Please sign, like, can you sign this form, this like order form by the next week or something like that. And they're kind of like always trying to close it the next week.

1:16:11Igor Voroshilov: And when I was talking this story about this kind of story to one of my Japanese friends, when I told them about like, you do it like next week? He just was laughing very loudly because saying that

1:16:24Janne Parri: You

1:16:25Igor Voroshilov: Like one week for Japanese company is nothing. It's just like, you know, it's just like one hour for American company or Europe because like nothing happens in one week. In Japan, like the process of making this decision is very different. Quite often you kind of like try to find a key person or something like that. But in Japan, of course, there is some key person, but he never kind of like just decides on the things on his own. Instead, they have meeting and maybe not only one meeting and they have multiple meetings and they kind of like discussing about again and again and again. And they kind of like collectively come up with the decision to go with this option or not to go with this option. And of course there is one like facilitator who is kind of like mostly probably saying

1:17:07Igor Voroshilov: That, I want to go with Dustin. And if he is the boss and everyone agrees that's kind of like what happens. But you need to go through this process of kind of having the decision through multiple stakeholders within the team, within the company. And that process cannot happen in one week or something like that because everyone is busy. Even my clients, they say like, damn, like we don't have any time to work. We just have meetings and meetings and meetings. They always have meetings. What happened is that the client wanted to kind of confirm some details, like some technical requirements, and we had this call and they confirmed everything as well. And now the salesperson is like, can I send you the form to sign it? And they're like, no, not that fast. We need to kind of approve it to get approval for that. And he said, we are going to get a budget. And it was September last year, guess, one year ago.

1:17:56Igor Voroshilov: And they said, we want to get the budget, so we need an estimate. And he said, oh, here's a pitch deck, like, get the, no, no, no, we need one A4 paper, which says like enterprise plan, how much, and the estimate is valid until this time. So we need it to be valid for like several, like half a year from now, something like that, like until this time. So we just need this one paper. And it was really like, I was having a hard time to really. Communicate the idea that they just want this one paper. They don't need one anything else we just need one fun paper without the sales that's not necessary and okay, we finally got this fun paper and they said okay. Thank you like bye and then we Talked to the salesperson. He's like I know that feels very strange like I think this deal is off like and I think they off the hook and I said like total like super hot like super hot lead is like it's

1:18:53Igor Voroshilov: Almost 100 % is done. He's like, really? How can you tell? They're so reluctant. They don't want to sign this order form, something like that. They just need time. Just give them time. And he said, what's the next step? And I said, it was September. So I said, as we kind of already understood, their fiscal year starts in January. So probably we will be doing budgeting around November. So they will be getting the budget. Around the end of November, so like around the end of November, they will message you saying that we got the budget and they will sign up, sign the contract and everything. And he's like, okay, then what should I do? And like nothing, just wait, like for two months. Yeah, just

1:19:34Janne Parri: Nothing.

1:19:36Igor Voroshilov: Wait for two months, like they will get back to you. And he's like, okay. And then he couldn't resist. And in the beginning of the November or like mid November, he sent a message to them in this same like email thread. Asking like, how's it going? Like, did you come up with a decision or something like that? And you guess what they said. We are now getting the budget. So please wait a little bit more. Like we will get back to you to sign the contract. And like, just as I said, so they are not on the hook. They are on the hook. Are very, very, very promising lead. They kind of like basically already going to get the money. And this style when there's salespeople, they keep kind of like giving some discounts and changing.

1:20:19Igor Voroshilov: The price, it actually creates more problems for the companies because they don't know how much of the budget they actually need. They're of like trying to get with a little bit of the surplus, like to make sure that everything is fine. But it's kind of like, makes a little bit difficult to do the budgeting because mostly for these companies, kind of, especially for the big companies, the budget is not really a problem. It's the problem is like how to justify it, how to... Present it and make it as a good solution worth spending money. It doesn't really matter how much is the number. So it's just like the same process. The difficult thing is to go through this budgeting process and you kind of like need to help them with that and give them enough time to do it. Like and kind of like have enough understanding that it takes some time and don't be kind of like too pushy because that will be just stressful for these companies if they need to kind of always.

1:21:07Igor Voroshilov: Reply to this follow up messages and everything and they're busy doing other meetings, you know. So that was interesting experience.

1:21:13Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah, Webflow, I can imagine and Webflow is quite lucky to have you guys helping them. And I can also imagine that it is hard for a probably American salesperson to do nothing for several months. He would like to send messages every day probably. But okay. I know that it's getting late back there are at least one topic that we have to go through. We are recording this on September 16th and tomorrow there is Webflow Conf starting. So do

1:21:56Igor Voroshilov: Mmm.

1:21:56Janne Parri: You have any like predictions or things that you would like to see announced in Webflow Conf this year?

1:22:05Igor Voroshilov: Oh, that's a good question because to be honest, like I've been quite busy with recent stuff. Like I didn't really think about that. I remember I was very, very excited about like localization stuff. So I was kind of like waiting for that like to be, to be coming with like a couple of years ago, guess. Actually that conference I went to the San Francisco, was there when they were announcing

1:22:30Janne Parri: Yeah, all of that. Nice.

1:22:31Igor Voroshilov: Localization. It was really cool. And it was also really nice because like when they were showcasing these different languages, they also put the Japanese language, which was nice. And they were of appealing that, showing to the Japanese customers. It was also really cool because at that time it was still night in Japan, and very early morning. So right after that, at the venue, we wrote the article. We translated this official announcement and we published it in Japanese on our blog. So that many people were really kind of like happy to see it like very fast. They just woke up and already they have this Japanese translated version of what was announced. Yeah, but for this time, I'm not pretty sure. I think it will be quite technical because like recently, workflow is going very heavy on kind of like this workflow cloud and like different stuff. So

1:23:19Igor Voroshilov: I think this will be something about this kind of like developing the ecosystem, I guess. Maybe some AI stuff because they've been talking about this like AI things to be happening for already quite long. They made some releases, but I think that the something they still like have some main thing kind of, not announced yet. I believe so.

1:23:43Janne Parri: I hope so too, because the stuff, like the AI stuff that is already out is like nothing major. I do not use those at all, basically. So of course every company kind of has to do something with AI nowadays, but I also would be just fine with like some like, updates to basic features like CMS localization you mentioned.

1:24:13Janne Parri: So some kind of improvements to just basic stuff and they have come up with all sorts of new features like the multi-editing thing where people can edit stuff at the same time. That would be cool to see it's in beta, but yeah, who knows? There might be something totally new and I'm excited about those. Yeah.

1:24:37Igor Voroshilov: Yeah, one thing which I would like, it's kind of like one thing which was like somebody commented about that or wrote a post about that on Twitter several years ago, but maybe it was like Pixel Geek or something, I don't remember. But like was asking for creating multiple CMS, like multiple template pages for the same CMS item, like for the same CMS collection. That was really interesting. So... You can kind of like maybe put them under like different slack or like different subject or something like that. But that could kind of like open a lot of possibilities for a different CMS structure for us. And also, you know, a little bit more freedom on how we can make like this structure of the pages. Very often like customers, they let's say they want to have some like category slack and after that going like this post.

1:25:29Igor Voroshilov: Slugs, something like that. So this thing is very often heard and like some things with the folders, like recently I made some work around, I hacked a little bit to make kind of like a static folder and the CMS folder is the same name, same slug. So there was kind of like some very weird work around. So I kind of figured it out and I even had some people commenting about that on Twitter. So these kind of things which

1:25:59Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah, and I...

1:26:00Igor Voroshilov: Maybe will help us to do some, not like obvious, but like just a little bit of easy, easier life.

1:26:09Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah, I feel that the community is asking more like little updates, little improvements than the AI stuff that everyone feels forced to do now. But we'll see. By the time this episode is out, there's probably the keynotes already published. You can, the audience can check if our predictions were right. But there's one.

1:26:33Igor Voroshilov: Yeah, it's interesting.

1:26:36Janne Parri: One more thing. I'm not sure if you have seen my previous episodes, but we have talked a lot about Japan, but I have to add a little bit of Finnishness at the end of this episode. So there's this section where I tell a Finnish saying to you and I will translate it word to word to English. And you have to guess or know what does that mean. Like it might be a metaphor, saying, idiom or something like that.

1:27:10Janne Parri: And the saying that I have picked for you is in Finnish it is... and in English it is no one is born a blacksmith. So what does

1:27:27Igor Voroshilov: Blacksmith okay

1:27:28Janne Parri: What does it mean when someone says that no one is born a blacksmith or it can be translated also that no one is a blacksmith when they are born.

1:27:40Igor Voroshilov: Yeah, we have a very interesting, similar probably expression in Russian as well. And I think in many languages as well. My guess is that you kind of like do not have the skills from the beginning. Like let's say as a blacksmith, right? Like you don't know how to do, how to create those tools, like how to use that from the beginning. So you have to learn. And same as like as we do with the workflow and the other everything basically what we do we start from nothing and when we learn and in our language is actually what we tell is like our expression is translated in English is like Moscow was not built in one day, something like that.

1:28:23Igor Voroshilov: And I think there is something about Rome, it's very similar expression.

1:28:27Janne Parri: In English that is probably about Rome. Rome was not built in a day. Yeah, that it is.

1:28:32Igor Voroshilov: Yeah, sounds like that. We have that about Moscow.

1:28:35Janne Parri: Yeah, but you are completely right. And I'm not sure if this was an easy one, but you were the first one to get this like section right. So no one has previously figured out. But this is the,

1:28:50Igor Voroshilov: K.I.F.

1:28:51Janne Parri: Yeah, this is the like funny thing at the end of every episode. I have to add a little bit of Finnishness to this, but okay.

1:29:00Igor Voroshilov: It's a good way to finish.

1:29:03Janne Parri: Yeah, totally. But Igor, if someone wants to know more about SupaSaito or about you, where should they go?

1:29:11Igor Voroshilov: I think like on my LinkedIn, yeah, and also supasaito.com. So just be careful with the typing because it's not like SupaSaito, it's SupaSaito because like our name of the company is coming from how Japanese people pronounce SupaSaito. In Japanese it's like supasaito. And this is like completely how they would write, how would they kind of like use the English letters to... Kind of like letter changes into in the Japanese letter. This is complete transliteration. So yeah, make it like S-U-P-A S-A-Y-T-O, SupaSaito. Or just find me on the LinkedIn, then Igor Voroshilov. Yeah, I will be really happy to talk like maybe I'm recently posting more stuff about the sales as well. Well, what I'm learning actually, I'm reading a book in Japanese about sales and kind of.

1:30:02Igor Voroshilov: If you're interested in those insights as well. Yeah, we'll be really happy to connect.

1:30:06Janne Parri: Yeah, and I will add all the relevant links in the description so you can check those out there too. But once again, thanks Igor for being here and we'll see everyone in the next episode. Bye.

1:30:19Igor Voroshilov: Thank you.