Webflow Enterprise,Components, and Scale

0:26Janne Parri: This is going to be a great episode but I just wanted to let you know before we get started this episode actually contains a little bit of screen sharing not much but on the later half of the episode we get to some dirty stuff so just keep that in mind. If you want to check out the full video, you should go to YouTube or Spotify. Those both contain video version of the episode. That's all on with the episode. Okay Hal, what do you get when you bump up to the Webflow Enterprise plans?

0:58Hal Zeitlin: I'll take you to a moment where some urgent thing comes from the CMO and we have to push this live. And we're working on three other pages at the same time and they're on branches. And we don't have to worry about, my gosh, if we publish the whole site, all this work we've been doing is gonna go live. These are things that are really nice to have and very desirable for all of us, but for larger companies where they're juggling a lot. It's extremely valuable and necessary to have that level of control. So a lot of customers we've worked with that are on Webflow Enterprise, those are things that are just at their scale. It's just non-negotiable to have that level of control. Some don't realize it until it's too late, but many of them do see it and have that need.

1:40Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah. Many of us just have the picture of the pricing page and the little list of a couple of features that the Enterprise plans have. And there are not like too many of those features, but us mortals get the sense that those might be like very, very crucial for the big companies. So what else is there than like the branching thing?

2:06Hal Zeitlin: A lot of companies that are larger, 1,000 plus people, and there's even companies with 500 people, they have certain SLAs and requirements from legal teams of support. For some companies, need that extra level of assurance that would not come from a self-serve plan. For some companies, they just go to enterprise just because Webflow has a great staff to help support when things go wrong. We have some customers that just, for their compliance, they need to have certain features. It's usually on their web applications where security is more of a thing, but we have clients too where on their marketing sites they need to have those boxes checked. So Webflow Enterprise's platform has more of those advanced security features that are just non-negotiable. And we see some companies that are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on their web platforms already.

2:58Hal Zeitlin: And going to Webflow Enterprise, they're actually going to be spending a lot less, they're going to be moving faster... And they're going to be still checking off the security boxes. And so I know it's kind of crazy to think that someone would be excited to pay over six figures for Webflow Enterprise, but we have to give credit and also we want Webflow if they're helping a company move from a platform like Adobe Experience Manager, where contracts, I can't speak to all specifics, but contracts like... Very regularly are above a million dollars for a license for a year. If a company has that and it's overkill, and they overpurchase, and they want something that's more appropriate to their needs, and Webflow Enterprise is that, I think it's good and important for Webflow to charge for the value they're providing. And that helps them invest in the company and build more features and support also the self-serve plans too.

3:49Hal Zeitlin: Until I started working with these larger companies and meeting these people and talking to these buyers and CFOs, was kind of like, okay, what's going on here? But now that I'm seeing more and seeing companies evaluate Webflow's platform as opposed to the older way of doing web development and engineering, I'm very understanding now and supportive of how Webflow can find ways to serve. My first customer was a video production company of one person. But how they can also serve large public companies that are used to having dedicated teams building their marketing site, where now it's people like you and me who can be doing that work.

4:23Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah, that is totally awesome. What do you think of the general discussion or maybe sentiment that you might get from the internet that a Webflow should not be focusing on the enterprise clients and they should be more to the, self-service plans towards those plans.

4:43Hal Zeitlin: I think people are never happy. I'm not looking to point the finger at people, we always, especially us in the webflow community, we always want more. There's like thousand ideas you and I could jam out of what would be nice. And so it feels like when a webflow puts energy and money into building some features that are more advanced, that they're portraying, building out features that are also useful for smaller businesses and self-serve. There is important like grouping CMS fields. Like how is it 2026 and we still can't group CMS fields? I have a bone to pick there, okay? But I think it's perhaps unfair to jump to the conclusion that because they haven't done that for whatever reason, that it's because they're not thinking about a lot of their user bases. I think just in some cases they have all these teams, all these people working on different things and that...

5:37Hal Zeitlin: That's an example more than the general theme. And that Webflow is still continually building features to help everyone who's building on the platform. So I think it's okay to be critical and ask questions. But I also think if, I have a software company too, if you ever built software, know it can be tricky and maybe sometimes taking a step back and saying, like is Webflow still building for us? And my opinion is that they still are very much building and so that's my take. If you disagree with me, feel free to reach out and I'm happy to discuss.

6:05Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah, but just was it like yesterday or even today? There were some good updates for all the plans and we have seen that some of some of those enterprise features at some point will trickle down to the other plans and for clients it is always a good thing to know that if we like blow up in a good sense that the website platform will still serve us. So that is a good thing. But still on the topic of enterprise plans and enterprise sphere, I'm curious because oftentimes people compare webflow to Framer or good old WordPress or those. But is the competition different? It probably is on the enterprise level. You mentioned

6:53Janne Parri: The Adobe thing.

6:54Hal Zeitlin: Adobe experience Manager.

6:56Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah. And what does the competition look like on that level?

7:03Hal Zeitlin: We have a few clients and examples and it's kind of crazy to see one company we worked with, can't name them yet, I'm still fighting with their legal team on these things, but we're building a good case. So they are an organization, part of a public company with sister organizations that everyone knows about. And in our Slack channel, have 50 people and maybe eight. To 10 of them are candidate leaps. They have 40 people in the Slack channel, engineers, VPs, marketers, content people. For 20 years, the workflow was a certain way, the traditional way. They took a bet on Webflow. They've used every DXP, CMS, they're looking at Contentful. We've been working with them for over six months now. I met with one of their VPs last week, and I asked,

7:52Hal Zeitlin: Bringing on Webflow. He's like, how we're now favoring Webflow over headless in almost all circumstances. He's like, even for custom next.js builds we typically do. And he the reason is because our current engineers, can let them focus on more advanced use cases where pure coding is needed. And they've hired two in-house Webflow full-time developers. And then where they're consulting, helping on some more complex stuff and guidance. And the cost savings of being able to bring on. The webflow developers are being paid well and they're happy in there, the difference of having a full stack engineer building out your marketing pages

8:32Hal Zeitlin: And the speed there compared to having a webflow developer using the webflow platform, it's just the speed and cost savings are significant. To use the platform, even sometimes building in API integrations and putting in custom data from their proprietary database. They still prefer doing that over custom coding. So for them, that was really exciting to hear that they're technical, but usually it's the marketers who are pushing for Webflow. And I'm selling to marketers and I need marketers to win the deal, because we're trying to give them the keys to the castle.

9:04Hal Zeitlin: How they are seeing the value and how it's helping them hit their goals too. And with Webflow Cloud and code Components and everything that Webflow is doing there, more and more we're going to be seeing technical teams come on board. I think the challenge, we actually lost a deal yesterday selling to a company, big enterprise, like billion-plus ARR, that was evaluating Webflow across they're looking at all the big DXPs, Sitecore, not Contentful, Sitecore, Adobe, Optimize, all that. And they have four internal engineers on their marketing site alone. And these people are coders,

9:44Hal Zeitlin: They want to code in and all that there. And so much of the organization wanted Webflow, the marketers, but the engineers, it's too foreign. So the first company I mentioned for them, their use case was having hiring Webflow developers and keeping their engineers working there. This other company, it just didn't make sense for them to have their four full stack engineers building on Webflow or bringing in new people. That was a resource thing. And so I think Webflow, really talking about the value of enterprises, if you want to have, keep your engineers doing some things, but also bringing on Webflow experts to build and have that marketing influence on the site, it's strong. But I still see their

10:26Hal Zeitlin: There are challenges and they can be overcome. We've had one company that went enterprise and they had one full-time engineer on their site move to doing Webflow and they ended up hiring a second Webflow developer. For them that made sense, but for some companies that have multiple coders moving to Webflow still is a challenge. I think this is why I'm saying it's good for Webflow to develop these more coding and enterprising features because these billion AR companies, they should be able to use Webflow too, but we have to build for them to give that entry point and not betray the core feature of Webflow, is giving non-technical people the ability to build and manage highly scalable sites that are custom and on-brand. And so that's why I'm so passionate talking about what's the bigger picture of how Webflow can really help these companies and it doesn't just have to be helping small and medium-sized businesses. So Webflow already is serving a lot of companies that are larger and public companies.

11:21Hal Zeitlin: Look at Verifone, NCR, this and that, but I want to see that expand more. And so it's definitely a balance in a dance. And it's fun to be here for the ride.

11:30Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah. There were so many like interesting topics we could go on with, but I guess we have to do little intros before those. So my name is Janne Parri. I'm a Webflow partner all the way from Finland. Yeah, that one country in Northern Europe. And my guest today is Hal Zeitlin. Hal is the owner of Candid Leap, a Webflow focused agency from Los Angeles. And Candid Leap is also a Webflow enterprise partner, obviously, and they focus on building those cool, scalable, well thought out Webflow fields and design systems. On top of that, Hal is an active member in Webflow community and knows a thing or two about Webflow apps and sourdough bagels. So Hal, you come from a marketing background.

12:21Janne Parri: So in your experience, what makes the marketing manager love their website?

12:27Hal Zeitlin: When I first started building websites, I was using Squarespace and WordPress. And if you've ever done a Squarespace website, you're like going to the setting, like writing CSS by hand, going back and forth. I don't know if they changed it. I didn't even know what I was doing with CSS back then. I was just like, because the padding and the responsiveness and I couldn't get it right. And then with WordPress, you had all this power and control, but like it didn't look good. And so I was attracted to Webflow. I saw this video from the future and I was like, wait, I don't need to write code and I can do this. Like I literally didn't believe it. You know the saying if something looks too good to be true, it's probably, it's

13:02Hal Zeitlin: Probably too good to be true. And I was flipping out and I just said, I gotta, I gotta find a way to use this. So think the first thing the marketing people care about, especially today is like the look and feel that you can give that custom look, without not being trapped by coders. And that's the second part, which is just maintenance of the site. Know, a site that can be used by non-engineers where something has to be built or added or changed, that is possible. And that is the promise and that is the core value prop of Webflow. And that is how I sell and deliver on Webflow.

13:35Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah, you used the phrase keys to the castle. So that was a

13:41Hal Zeitlin: You

13:42Janne Parri: Good like metaphor for what we like to do for the marketers because marketer does not want to like send a email to the developer and wait for a week for the edits. So that is obviously a cool thing. And nowadays we we're probably in this episode too gonna talk about component based building. I want to focus on one buzzword, which is scalable. And everybody says that their website is scalable, but I'm curious, what do you think? What is actually scalable in the

14:18Janne Parri: World of websites and webflow and what separates like the actually scalable sites from the not so scalable.

14:27Hal Zeitlin: Okay, so I have a strong opinion here. And there's a lot of ways to describe it, but I think one of the quintessential attributes of a scalable website is that you have a component library and that it's dynamic enough that you can use it to build new pages in the order that you want. So an unscalable site or a less scalable site would be you have your component library, you your components, and you want to build the page. You have your header, you have a feature section, a three grid. You have some FAQs, then you have some testimonials. If you want to move up your testimonials above the FAQs and you want to put your feature component below. So the first place you might hit a hiccup is that like the colors of the sections where they look good in a certain order. But if you don't have the ability

15:13Hal Zeitlin: To flip the colors and have the design system in variable modes, that it can still work and be good. And you're not forced to do things in a certain order of the template because that. That is a less scalable site. There might be still some scale, but that's the first place that I'm very passionate about with my team. Clients need to be able to, and in some cases some components don't look great next to each other and we can't be 100%, but in 80 % of the cases we need marketers to be able to tell the story in the order that they want. So that's the first thing that I think is a sign that honestly I think most Webflow developers struggle and should struggle

15:50Hal Zeitlin: To check off that box...

15:51Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah, totally. Because you are used to like building static sections and static elements. Well, Webflow in itself, like in the basic design mode, that is not too user friendly for the marketing managers or whoever wants to use that, who is not like a focused Webflow developer or anything like that. Luckily nowadays we have the components. But I'm curious what is your approach to components and what is happening behind, like in the backend, if you may, in your builds.

16:24Hal Zeitlin: I've been like over two years ago, I was telling the team I've been and it's going to happen maybe this year, like Webflow just launched some new funding stuff too. And so I might want to apply for one of those. I'm like, we need to build the course and resource of like how Candid Leap and how to build and plan an enterprise scalable site. Like what are processes? And we just keep every project we do, we keep improving. And so

16:48Janne Parri: You

16:50Hal Zeitlin: We spend so much time. Like I have I have two full-time designers in the company that all they really do is just design system work. They do some creative design work for sure, and they're champs, but so much of their time is doing very technical planning of components, necessary components, variables, variants. So the developers have precise rules because the idea is when we first started doing Webflow, okay, we deliver to the client, okay, this looks great. And then they check mobile like two days later. Like this looks like really bad in mobile, like the padding's off in the top and bottom space in here. Okay, let me go in and fix that. All right, good. And then the next week, okay, here we go. Can we tweak this on tablet? You know, it's like that. Like our goal is you drop in the component on desktop, and it just works in as good across the board to accomplish that requires either like tolerance that things don't look consistent or strong, or

17:41Hal Zeitlin: Like a really meaningful mathematical amount of planning in Figma. Like the idea of like, hey, I want you to rebuild my site in Webflow. And like if I wanted it to be scalable and component based. I think we probably right now are overdoing it a little bit just because you have to get down really solid to then come to do it simpler. But I think the idea of just freestyling it and just taking screenshots and rebuilding it without going to Figma and planning, like I cannot fathom how that could be done in a way. Where the client's not gonna be frustrated in the end. And we have a whole system that while we're designing, if we have to start development before the designs are done, we have a whole system of, okay, this component, we're updating it, then we flag it, and we track every detail. We're like, okay, we're adding this, because if you don't do that, then it kind of falls through, and then the client will come back later on. And so really, starting in Figma, we have a 12-page document in how we name components. We are very much about closed components.

18:36Hal Zeitlin: I listened to your podcast with Alessia recently and like two things I want to comment on. Number one, either it's the Amply input enhancer Chrome extension or the Lumos extension. One of them lets you like click at the top of the properties panel to open and close all at once. You both are like, it's so overwhelming and everything's open. I totally agree. And that is like so nice. And I literally tell clients, I'm like number one rule. First thing we do to click a component is you have to close everything. You can only have one at a time. If you have more than one at a time open, you're going to get overwhelmed. So I'm, and I love hearing what you're saying because that's, and I validated why I'm like, that's one thing I prioritize saying. And the second thing is, you know, I agree that teaching clients to update classes, talking about a scalable site, sure, there's ways you could update classes to change colors in that example where we're doing that, but like clients, that's probably too much to ask.

19:29Hal Zeitlin: I fundamentally feel like these open components where you're having to build stuff and nest them, I still think that's too hard. Like said, it's easier for clients to learn that. Still feel like when they're having to know all the different modules and what goes in where, I feel like there's some cases where that can work, but it's really meant for our team that might know, or that one champion inside the company that built the site with us. When you hire us, you're not gonna have one person who can touch the site, you can have multiple people. Which is why I think strategic, closed components that are strategically named with nested elements that are thoughtfully strategized with visibility switches, a lot of really consistent grouping, I feel building out those components and planning them, which is a huge strategic undertaking and mental energy, like that is how to get marketers actually building pages.

20:19Hal Zeitlin: Easy to train. When you have built some at 50 section components, I wrote a 15 minute loom video and document that I sent to Webflow this week, and I've been talking about this for over a year, like Webflow needs to solve discoverability of components. The component panel is nice on the side, but like it really needs to be improved meaningfully. Because it's just a fact that someone who joins a company, there's 50 plus section components or what have you, they're like, how are they going to know what to use and how to find it? And remember it. It's just, you know, we need to help solve that.

20:47Janne Parri: Hell yeah.

20:48Hal Zeitlin: So that's the, those are my hot takes on how to build scalable component libraries and sort of what, boxes I need to check to feel safe at night.

20:56Janne Parri: Okay. Again, so many topics. But I want to mention that I have run into the same problem that when you build like multiple components, it's hard to find, or even hard to remember what you have built, and then actually use those. So that is definitely a place where some UI enhancements would be in place. But I want to bit circle back to your like design system stuff and you mentioned that you have to do thorough planning of the components so that is very interesting to hear and I'm kind of curious what does like your planning phase look like so

21:40Janne Parri: Do you like separate the actual like visual design and then preparation of all those components

21:47Hal Zeitlin: So best case and look, have there's like six different kinds of projects we do all with differences. There's projects we do where we have a company right now, they're on sanity, which I think is a great platform. But they're again, they're engineering dependent. They want to have marketers make edits and have more control. And so they're moving to Webflow. Let's go Webflow. That's like a pretty much one to one migration. We are doing some visual refresh, but we're not doing brand new creative work copies not changing. That's a very different workflow and project than another project we're doing right now that will launch in March. Really, really exciting one where it's a total redesign. So I think two different projects need to have different processes. If you're an agency, you need to have a great operations leader who can help know the difference and know how to staff and direct people. So if it's a one-to-one migration, we can pretty easily at the beginning

22:38Hal Zeitlin: Like go and download all the files. There's this Figma extension called HTML to design. If you haven't heard of it, we pay for it. You just, you call the site, you can paste 20 URLs at a time. It downloads everything. You get all the pages and you just start evaluating and seeing all the components, section components. You group them. Okay. These are all the similar ones. Then you look at all the modules, which are like cards, FAQ drop downs, you know, anything that's not a section component is a module. We used to have like a third level. But we always have section components and module components.

23:09Hal Zeitlin: And so yeah, so that's, you know, first that's the step one is like, can you identify every section and group them and find the commonalities and find all the properties. And also sometimes maybe things are built away where clients are hiring you to be a strategic expert. They don't want you to rebuild what's not working well. So there's a lot of conversations and this is like, I've been doing this for many years, Sabrina too, who runs the agency with me. And so we have strong opinions and thoughts. So our framework and systems built upon knowing. Okay, this is going be a CMS section. These are the properties we want here. Okay, does every section should have a heading or an eyebrow built in, even if it's not there? And so we're really doing that level of work. And even on a one-to-one migration, it's very energy intensive. But when you're designing a new site, most clients are not going to wait for you to finish designing all 50 new pages.

23:56Hal Zeitlin: And we have to start. And so we're sort of building the plane while you fly it. And so that's... That's something where we'll build things a certain way. And maybe at first it's like, OK, this is a very specific component for a certain use case for a certain product. But then sometimes we're like, you know what, let's make this into a general component, like a general cards component. And I think that's the other part when you plan these out. This isn't even the technical part. This is more of the strategic planning of, OK, what's going to be a general component that can be generally named and reused? And what's going to be a more specific component for a use case that you might not want to use on another landing page?

24:31Hal Zeitlin: After having all that done, then just using the variables, spacing variables, color variables, it's just the design system stuff that's used often in products and as much on websites, and just taking the creative design we have and then rebuilding every section, componentizing it, making it responsive, thinking about color modes. Okay, this is dark mode, this is light mode. Here's dark primary, here's dark secondary, here's, you know, and not every section is gonna have the same, the same drop downs. But we need to keep it as consistent and as much as possible so that the marketers don't have decision fatigue. If groups are not the same, if names aren't the same, if colors aren't consistent, then it's going to take so much more energy. They should be able to get into a flow. And so a lot of that work we're doing is assessing, OK, this section has an image background. Should it have a light mode? No, it shouldn't, because it's going to put white text or dark text

25:22Hal Zeitlin: On a dark image. And so it's. It's all those details that we're thinking about where there's times we can build something a certain way, but we have to say no, because you going to get way more confused. And even though you want to have that level of control and precision, we are going to be more successful if we limit some of this, because we're already giving you a lot of power. We just don't want to give you too much power, or it ends up making it hard to use, which I'm now very, I used to be afraid to say no, but now I'm like, no. We can't do that because you're just not gonna use it properly.

25:51Janne Parri: Yeah, that's actually a good phrase. Probably many of us should use that with clients. But do you like build the Figma or the designs and design systems with the client in mind? Meaning that will the client use the Figma files at all or is it just for you?

26:11Hal Zeitlin: We've always done that and it's a lot more work and we spend a lot of money and Sabrina and I last week were talking, it's like when we're selling Webflow, we're also, that customer I told you I interviewed, 50 people on Slack, he's like, we're ditching this old workflow where we have to go to like wireframe, to design, to development. And so I'm thinking we might need a position where like our core service offering is that you don't have to go back to Figma as often and you have your Webflow components and you can just build there and know it. And there is definitely a level of professionalism we want to do in Figma. But I think clients always ask and say, yeah, we want to do stuff in Figma and build pages and landing pages in Figma. But I think we're going to be pushing people more or charging more to do because our design system is built on the Atlassian design system framework. And Atlassian is a huge tech company, very detailed. And sometimes it's just overkill. And the time we're spending there, like,

27:07Hal Zeitlin: If it's not gonna be used, then it probably could be spent better somewhere else. So it's a balance, but there's level of professionalism where we're not gonna hand over some Figma file that designers can't use. But I think we need to do better in the company of having service offerings and post-launch offerings where we train and support designers on how to use our systems. Because a lot of designers, I don't know if you've ever worked with a designer that really knows how to use Figma design system features to the fullest. I think every time we've had to do training.

27:37Hal Zeitlin: And like 75 % plus, there's like significant, they know how to design in Figma, they can do great creative work, but actually no one kind of set up variables, how to make them responsive, how to set up asset libraries, all that stuff, it's something that they need support in. And so we're there, we're there to support. The question is, like, does the company, does the economic buyer, when I'm selling the deal, do they value, do they get it, you know, or are they gonna advocate for their designers and have that vision? And that's why it's my job to help. Bring in the right stakeholders during sales to build the right scope of work and sort of sell the vision of what's possible. But yeah, by and large, we build this really cool stuff in Figma and then no one touches it in the way that I'd hoped for.

28:14Janne Parri: Figma variable function, like I do not like it at all. Maybe it's just a me issue, but I can see like all the designers just like eyeballing everything and going with static things. But yeah, you have mentioned a couple of times the like teaching the clients to use the system. So what does that include and how do you do it?

28:41Hal Zeitlin: Yeah, so every time we have a new project, gets better. But essentially, we define jobs to be done. And we look at their org chart, who touches the site, we write down all the people, and we define a before-after statement for each person. And we're getting better and better at this every month and every six months. So we know our people, we know what their current struggles, and we know what we want to do. And we just build out some workflows. And when I sell projects, I'm like, look, site launch is not, that is not the milestone. The milestone is three months after site launch when you're doing these things. If you want to just have someone just build you a site and launch it and then that's that, like we are probably not the partner for you. You know, that's just something like the way we want to, the way the expense we take on our process, like it's just not commercially viable for us to build projects where it's just building and passing it off unless it's like, you know, like Nvidia or some company like that.

29:33Hal Zeitlin: Where they just have a crazy budget and they'll just pay great work for more commoditized Webflow work. So for us, that's how we can afford to have a more labor-intensive design development process, a more labor-intensive strategy process. I think if weren't selling that strategy and enablement and selling, here's the vision of what you can do on Webflow, we'll build it and then we'll train you, and then maybe you'll keep us around. And maybe I'm wrong and delusional, like, and like we're not like, and I'm reinvesting a lot of money in form connector and everything, but like, I just don't see how I can run the business in a commercially viable way. If I was not selling that outcome over just we'll build your site from Figma to Webflow, which is a great service. And like so many of us, and there is a time and a place for that, but I feel like, as more and more people get into Webflow and it gets more competitive, which is good and welcome the competition. We all need to find.

30:27Hal Zeitlin: Like what's our specialty? What's a way we can provide undifferentiated value that we can really make a change and make people's lives easier and happier? And for me and us, that's just, it's a very universal want and need. I feel like usually when there's a demand, like the supply grows up and then, you know, but I feel like the demand is up here and the learning curve and supply is so hard. That's why I've really leaned into his component first builds. Because it's extremely hard for freelancers and a lot of agencies to do it because we've just been practicing it for over two years. And so we've just learned a lot on the job and I don't think there's any resource out there to teach you what we've learned through practice. And we knew this was the case early on that this was something that we wanted to do. So to come back to your question, we define those use cases, we say, three months after launch, we want your teammates to be doing these. And then we just hammer them. We don't let them get distracted and busy.

31:18Hal Zeitlin: Hey, these are the goals. We need to see you prove to us that you can do these things. And we require companies to sign a three-month retainer with us after launch. And this is something newer that I started maybe three, four months ago, but it's just like, I'm like, look, you're gonna have questions, gonna want updates to components, there's stuff you're gonna miss. You need to block off at least three months after us, after launch, that we can help you do those things. And then after that, you might wanna keep us around, maybe not. I think I have a level of confidence that's important that people get it and they usually don't push back unless they just don't have the budget and they're just like, all right, we're going to go with someone else, which is fine. You know, then we're just not a fit then.

31:54Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah, that is a natural filter for your clients. Those who wanna actually build and scale up the sites will get it and will even want it and maybe need it. I always have to ask about the framework. So you have said a couple of times that you are a big believer in closed components, but what is the framework behind are you like so strict that there will not be any like open components or building blocks in the projects?

32:25Hal Zeitlin: We, okay. I mean, every projects and that's like what I'm, what we're selling is very custom strategic projects. And if there's a client and a customer where there is that use case and to make, like if you build in close components, it's really easy to make open components too. You know what? It's just a matter of training and organization. And so our framework for a while, for over a year, were building Client-First. We were like taking Client-First and principles of Lumos, but building it on Client-First and we're always like alright. When are we gonna move to Lumos as like the foundation and we started doing that recently and our opinion is that Lumos is extremely developer friendly and focused and so our framework and it's moved over time to be more marketer friendly but Our whole approach and strategy is how can we take Lumos and then make it as marketer friendly as possible...

33:14Hal Zeitlin: I think the number one thing we do is by having our way that we name and group components and properties, taking a lot of inspiration from Timothy Ricks. Shout out. Let's go, T Ricks. Let's go. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But still taking where he's always going to be innovating there on the developer side and where we can simplify things for our clients. Or maybe not expose. There's things that we're using, but we're just not exposing it to the clients and exposing to clients what they have. So we have a Lumos starter project. That we're continually updating and working on. We like, some people don't like Lumos because it's always changing and evolving. But again, like when I'm selling these, when I'm trying to sell these larger and more strategic, I want us to be using the best in class using all the top Webflow features. There's a chance I'm wrong and we should be using Mast instead. And that Mast like is like a better balance between Client-First and the advances of Lumos. But I feel like, you know, Lumos is gonna get

34:07Hal Zeitlin: More attention for updates of using Webflow features. And Mast has done a lot of great work with components recently, but there's going to be more of a natural lag time. Because my friends at Mast who are great homies, they have other stuff they're doing where I feel like with Timothy Ricks, a large part of his time is spent just innovating and educating the space. And so we want to stand on his shoulders. And yeah, it's very inconvenient that every month we have to go up and like,

34:32Janne Parri: You

34:32Hal Zeitlin: Update our starter project to get the stuff. Like that's kind of like I want my like my teammates, if you're working at Candid Leap, like we want you to be geeking out and excited and like, my gosh, have you seen this? Like that's who we want to work with and attract in the company. And we're like, it just feels weird not use like using the latest feature. And so I feel like even though it's seems like a huge time stock and inefficient for scale, I feel like we're not trying to go for scale. We're trying to do fewer projects of higher impact. And that's why building our starter project around Lumos and then simplifying it and making it as marketer-friendly and user-friendly as possible for non-technical people is a sweet spot for our service offering.

35:12Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah. Lumos is awesome, but speaking about like new features, did you see the components slash CMS features that just launched and are you excited about those?

35:25Hal Zeitlin: This is literally all I've wanted for so long.

35:27Janne Parri: You

35:29Hal Zeitlin: I don't know if I'm allowed to, so are you also in the ACES program?

35:33Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah, I am.

35:34Hal Zeitlin: Okay, so we're both in the ACE program, I was like, I don't know what I'm allowed to say now. All I say is like, this

35:42Janne Parri: You

35:43Hal Zeitlin: Has been, I've been so excited for this for so long. Garrett, who's the PM, is literally such a gem and gives so much value to Webflow. The products that Garrett oversees and builds, he's just getting into the details. He knows it, he brings the engineers together, he works with us community members, and I'm so grateful. And he's been working on huge stuff for like a while. And this is not everything he's doing. Like this has been the biggest gap, being able to control components without having to unlink them. And we're getting very close to a place where we can really build components and expose them without, again, having to have the engineers and the experts involved. And so I'm so pleased and proud of this update. And especially the server side rendering.

36:28Hal Zeitlin: This is the thing where Webflow always was losing deals in the enterprise and the bigger companies where Webflow, you can't conditionally hide content and it's still in the DOM and adding weight and impacting SEO. Now with the server-side rendering of this new feature, as far as I'm concerned, correct me if I'm wrong, it's a huge technical unlock that we've wanted and needed. So Webflow is just moving more in that direction of being that formal development tool than just a drag and drop. Know, Wix or Squarespace or things like that.

36:58Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah, this all ties together. The goal is to like build a website builder within the website builder. And as you mentioned, like there is not a proper resource for the component first builds. So I'm excited. What will be the year that you come up with the course and resources?

37:16Hal Zeitlin: It's, we're talking to one company. The thing is, I just, team, can't hire people. It's so, it's so hard to have the right people that have the experience and training. That's why I, that's why I want to build it. So there's more people that can, there's like all these intermediate developers that are like have that excitement that I'm talking about, but they just don't have the resource. And some people are like, how can I work at Candid Leap for free just to learn? And like, I wish I could say yes, but I'm like, we just like the budgets, like the if we have a tight budget and a tight timeline, and we have this process, even if you want to work for free, it's too risky for us to even do that. And that is how, and I'm not trying to go down this whole thing about working for free or not, but all I'm saying is that is the right, if you really want to become great, practicing on bigger, more challenging projects with really organized Figma files, that is the way to get in. And it's just true that,

38:15Hal Zeitlin: If someone who doesn't have any experience is having difficulty getting practice there, then imagine, then how does anyone learn other than the few people that have been around with us? And so I want to build out these resources so intermediate developers who want to qualify to work at enterprise agencies and meet this growing demand that they can on their own time and excitement build their skills because they want to. And then they can show up to agencies like Candid Leap and others, know, whoever's the ball and be like, hey, here's what I've done. Here's, can provide value. And then we can all scale and grow together. So this is a huge, important thing for me. It's just the costs and time to do it right. And while everything's changing, we just have to find the right resource. We're talking to one enterprise company about potentially rebuilding their whole site, using our framework. And we'll do a partnership where we can feel like we just don't like our teams is booked up right now. And I can't bring on a freelancer to do it.

39:10Hal Zeitlin: And so, and if we're to do this, then we're not going to be really making much money. And we're already spending a lot every month on talent, you know, and like this and that, then it's hard to do that. And then pretty much say no to any other new work. So it's, yeah, man, don't, running an agency is not, I can tell you great stories of success and excitement, but also it is true that, and like, you know, like, we don't pay poorly, but also we just can't afford, some people are like, hey, this is what I want to earn. I'm like, dude, it's just economically infeasible for me to pay you what you're asking for.

39:42Hal Zeitlin: And that's just the hard thing too, where I like to do that for everything, but I think with the business model, if we want to save and have security for the people on the team that we can meet payroll, there's that balance. So that's why I'm very passionate about this course, to help people grow their skills and grow the value they can provide.

40:02Janne Parri: Yeah, but it's good to hear that you are kind of like battling with the same problems as me as a little freelancer because I have all sorts of time restrictions and all the client work always gets ahead of my own project. So that's good to hear. But we have been talking about components and quite... Honestly nerdy stuff and

40:26Hal Zeitlin: Hmm.

40:26Janne Parri: Maybe abstracts for this like audio media. But I believe you might have some sort of like example you mentioned before the podcast

40:37Hal Zeitlin: Let's talk about PolicyMe. They're probably the fastest growing insurance company in Canada. We moved their site over using our component first framework. I asked their head of content recently if we have to keep building components using components, can we just use Client-First and move faster and just build it the traditional way? A lot of different product lines, lot of different content initiatives, and it has to stay consistent. And we have to know that the experience is consistent. And by having these dynamic components is the only way that we know that on all of our pages, we're having that similar experience. And so, yeah, if you go to policyme.com and go to the nav bar and click around, you can see sort how their pages work. And we have some really, I can pass over to you.

41:20Hal Zeitlin: Some examples of pages we built with components that you can put in the notes. But some of these components are really cool. And we're sometimes embedding them in CMS pages. With drop downs and conditional, and where we have slots where they're building a pricing element for different insurance plans. And they can drop in a parent title. And then under it, there'll be a like they can put in another component to like have the description and they can switch a toggle to change like the layout and they can just build these very bespoke and we're writing a lot of JavaScript where we're building tabs, we're the drop downs, but like the markers can go in and build these very custom branded experiences that are interactive using components. And that's even more challenging than building component first builds because now we're bringing in more advanced JavaScript features. Some of the components we build are mostly CSS that we're writing.

42:10Hal Zeitlin: Just to control colors, but now we're really getting into functionality. And so for them, the other alternative to this would be us building everything, doing everything, coding everything, and making updates. We'd always have to do it. We built on these systems that now they can go in and they can build new pages that are very custom experience, custom branded. And it's all visual. You can click and drag and move this block up here or down here. So for companies, their website is really core to their buying experience and product. And there's a lot of education, which for SaaS, that's smooth, but I think for health care companies, these components that are on, if brand matters, it's a huge value add. We have a client, Apex.

42:47Hal Zeitlin: I went to their office yesterday. I love these people. They're

42:51Janne Parri: You

42:52Hal Zeitlin: Literally rocket scientists. They build productized space platforms. I can show you this. So, apexspace.com. These people, they build productized spacecrafts, space platforms. And like NASA, US space Force, our customers. And so if you go here to this configurator, this is all component-based. So this here is a single select. Some of them are multi-select. We can come up here and change this to this one. This comes up here. How this is coming soon. Things along these lines. Then when you come here, because of the components, it populates all this here.

43:34Hal Zeitlin: If I press Download Spec, if they're selling to NASA, they have an important, and these things can cost up to $14 million. Here's a $14 million thing. So all of this is component-driven. So if they want to add a new category, and there's a learning curve and there's a training here. Before, all this was custom-coded and they'd have to go through their stuff. But now, if needed, their team has the documentation and training that they can go in and like, add a new configurator. And the math will work. We've all seen calculators and this and that in the past. But in these use cases with building with components, it's less about the consistency for PolicyMe that on. Let's just pull up PolicyMe's website too.

44:15Hal Zeitlin: I'll show some examples of that.

44:18Janne Parri: Yeah, while you're at it, my mind is like blowing up, like doing something like that client can actually edit like a pricing calculator of that sort. Editable, that is something.

44:30Hal Zeitlin: Yeah, it took, it definitely was a lift. And cool. So like, here we go. So

44:36Janne Parri: You

44:36Hal Zeitlin: Some stuff for PolicyMe. And PolicyMe, one thing I'll say is like, we built this was like one of our first full-on component builds, very open components. And so like, you'll see like, we'll have like open slots. And then it says like, okay, you can put in these like eight components and it lists them out and it's very user friendly. But then what happens when we build new components that we nest in? How are we going to know to go back to all those components and update the names? That's the problem and challenge. Like, at launch, it's great. But what about a year after? Is it actually scalable? And so here, it's a similar site, but we have these different elements that we bring together. Think things like this with these drop-down components, how we're thinking about bringing it together.

45:20Hal Zeitlin: And they just want to have these tables consistently used throughout. Like an example here for this component, they're like, hey, how do we turn if we want to have a CTA? So we have a switch where we have a card, we have a slot, and we have our cards. And you can change if it's two columns, three columns. And you can switch to turn it from a card like this to be a CTA. And we can turn off the images. When we talk about planning in Figma, this is a thing where it's like, hey, if we want to use this across the site and have that power, that's where the planning and time comes in. And there's a lot of other sweet stuff that I'd

45:55Hal Zeitlin: Have to get. And this calculator here of how this comes together, everything here is a component that we bring in and use. And so I can share over some other cool stuff. I have to ask my team on what we've been building, but that's the idea of

46:08Janne Parri: You

46:09Hal Zeitlin: Why they value it across their growing insurance lines.

46:13Janne Parri: And can you keep the webflow canvas, the design canvas clean in a way that it is still easy to edit, so to speak, or does that have to be in the documentation?

46:26Hal Zeitlin: Let me pull up some stuff. I'll start here with Apex. Just give me a moment. So let's have some fun. I'll share my screen now. So really cool stuff. Like look at this spacecraft, man. Don't you want to buy this right now? So we come through, we have our components here. Here's the experience. Nice page, all of this here. Then we have, this is the same component that's used on the other page, but it's injected in here. And we come through and then we have this here. So how does this look? And I think I probably said

46:56Hal Zeitlin: Before, but everything here has evolved our systems. But the first thing here is everything's labeled here as a section, right? We'll come down to this product features down here. And so I'll open this up. And I think the one thing I see very rarely is people intentionally thinking and naming. See how product feature card logically goes into product features? Naming stuff is super important. This is that extension I told you, if you click here, see it just opens and closes everything.

47:25Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah, totally. I believe that might

47:27Hal Zeitlin: And so we can come here.

47:29Janne Parri: Be the Timothy Ricks one.

47:31Hal Zeitlin: I think it is. So we come here, close it, we open one at a time. And then here you can see we have different styles. And I don't know what we're controlling over here. And we can control here all our details. Here we go to our product cards. We got some of this here. Think if we close all this, we have all our buttons. I think the way that we plan these items, in this case, we using the Amply extension, the input enhancer. You see how this looks different than the thing itself. There a whole workflow for that.

48:02Hal Zeitlin: But it doesn't let you preview when you hover, but you see it lets you, instead of having to type stuff in, where if we go here, how we used to build these components here, you can see we have this nonsense, where it's padding section, none small, medium, large. This is how we used to build it, but that's why we really like using components-style variants and the Amply extension, because it's just so much of a stronger experience. There are some companies that can't use a Chrome extension, though, and so if that's the case, then we can't use this solution for them. But yeah, just lets the person come in and plan and build everything here. This, I'm like, treading a little lightly because I don't want to overshare anything I shouldn't, but I think you can see how we think about that. Is that cool?

48:43Janne Parri: Yeah. Totally. That is way too cool.

48:46Hal Zeitlin: Yeah, let me, guess, here, let me just open up a page as a branch and call this like, how test. Okay. Okay. So I think another thing to call out to is I just made like a page branch. It's going to be like an empty page. And this is where templates, I see a lot of people not using Webflow templates where like a better workflow would be to create a new page as a branch. And we can use the page slot. Sometimes clients will go into the Webflow account and there's like 10 draft pages of me just playing around.

49:16Hal Zeitlin: And so what this will do instead is it will start off with some components in the header and the footer in addition to your styles. Like training customers, if you don't train them to start with a template, then how are they going to know? Then they're going to, hey, why does this not look good? Because it doesn't have your global styles. So again, this is one of our earlier projects. But you can see here, like, about like, okay, like, yeah, we're gonna have flexibility and open components and you can come into here and put in the element button. And now we can have the button component. And now we can like change is large to is small. Like we don't do it this way anymore because it's just, in this case, it's simple where you can have this. And then we could also have like this button slot and like hide it if we don't want it. But like this amount of work and training is just too much. And then when we have like, you know, examples,

50:06Hal Zeitlin: Where there's just a ton of options for a card. Let's search like, I'll go to here. So if you didn't know, you can come here up in the settings and only search for components. Did you know that? There you go.

50:16Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah. I have seen that, but for some reason I do not use that.

50:22Hal Zeitlin: So we used to name stuff like testimonial one, two, three. Now, as I showed you here, much more into semantically naming components, which is why that strategy is needed. And then for the testimonial slider here, in this case, there's one example. This is where the open components is hard, because it's like, OK, how do I know what testimonial one is? If I go here to section features, let's do feature seven. You see, we're planning all this stuff out here. But if you really want to have flexible, open components where you can, if you're going to go to this level where we could only put in a certain module, I feel this is better to name it semantically there. And so that's a little preview. I wasn't planning on doing screen sharing today. You're like, it's hard for people to get this without seeing it. There's definitely

51:07Hal Zeitlin: More I could show. That's why I want to build this course and resource to show you how we think about Figma design systems and how they move to Webflow. Really why we struggle so much to hire people to deliver on the promises I make to people I sell to.

51:21Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah, that was so awesome. And that's basically why we are here, doing the nerdy stuff and getting some inspiration and so on. And I might just have to order some Canadian insurances and satellites

51:37Hal Zeitlin: You

51:38Janne Parri: For myself. Those are so cool. Thanks for sharing. And yeah, we'll be waiting for the... Resources as I said, but I kind of jump into another quite nerdy topic, which is migrations. And many Webflow folks steer clear of those because they can be a hassle, but to my understanding, you seem to like those. So what's about it? Why is that?

52:05Hal Zeitlin: So you look at five years of business, you look at our QuickBooks and our accounting, and you see that I've done so many projects where we lose money. It's kind of hilarious. And we've done so many projects where we break even. And all the projects, the few projects that have been very profitable, which is a good thing, I think, in business, are migrations. Again, I'm trying to find ways to build a competitive business where I can stand out and provide value. So there's other companies, you take Amply for example, they're very much into selling retainers and those partnerships. And they have a team and leaders and processes developed. That is their service. That is one of their core ways they provide. And of course they do migrations and stuff too, but they have a really strong department to deliver value there.

52:52Hal Zeitlin: And they should lead into that. For us, we've built out excellence around migrations. And I think that's because a lot of people, when they're saying, want to, this is when I started doing Webflow, people are like, hey, I want to move to Webflow. That's, hey, who should I talk to? Talk to Hal, he's a Webflow guy. I feel like in my circles, those opportunities were coming up more there. And when I saw a migration, I can be like, okay, we're going to put. This amount of resourcing on the project, I'm going to provide this strategy, just like the amount of work and energy, especially before AI, like I could justify, it just could be a much higher ticket price project, where if I'm selling a retainer, it's just like the time to earn that amount, like can happen over many months. And the retainers, it's like a lot of back and forth and a lot of ways. It's so much nicer just to like, okay, we're going to focus our energy for these three, four months, just go all in focus.

53:45Hal Zeitlin: Make a like charge a ton to cover the costs, spend a ton to deliver. And there's just, I think a better, it's just easier for us to like, to make profit that way. And I feel like we just can control more where with retainers it's really hard. We're like, okay, either I don't believe in the infinite model really for retainers, especially if we're doing like custom JavaScript work. Cause like it could be, it's like, it can be challenging to resource and staff and then. There's some months where like we do a ton of work and like if we charge like an infinite plan, we would have like lost money. Like for like the amount for

54:18Hal Zeitlin: Some customers. And so, and there could be some months where like there's very little work. We make a lot of money, but I just don't feel comfortable like having a relationship with a customer where like there's months where we do very little work and they pay us a high bill. I feel like that can work in the short term, but like Tango is a customer we've had for like almost five years now. And like it's because like every month I'm like, okay, how could we You'd be using the hours. Can we deliver value? And I feel like with retainers, there's always kind of that pressure. So, and then on the, on the flip side of the retainers, it's like, okay, there's a ton of work we're going to do. And this month, instead of charging you know, 5k for the retainer, it's going to be like 12 K. And like, that's okay. Once in a while, if it's like a ton of work, big launch, a bunch of product pages.

54:58Hal Zeitlin: But I feel too, with retainers, it can be tricky where it's like, okay, if we have a ton of work, like we really can't rate, like it's harder to get budget to like. Go way over. And so these are just like practical things where it's just like when you sell a one off project, if you sell it well, just the budgets there, it's over a fixed period, or over a retainer to get to that amount of revenue would just take like a year or more. So that's my that's my commentary on why I like retainers.

55:25Janne Parri: That is actually quite interesting. I wasn't expecting it to go to the business model topic, but yeah, the retainers are interesting and of course you can do those in many ways and the clear communication is a key part with those. But about the nerdy stuff of migrations, what are the... What are the platforms that you end up migrating to Webflow?

55:54Hal Zeitlin: Yeah. So HTML to design is really important for downloading all the files, all the Figma designs, all the designs into Figma to build out the design system. We use Screaming Frog. We were jamming out before recording on Screaming Frog. So like use that a ton. We have our own like proprietary Airtable solution where you take a Screaming Frog export and then it will like find all the unique folders. So like blog is a unique folder. Blog author is a folder. Like case studies is a folder, like slash company slash about, as a, you know, like so like all the unique folders, because each one's a unique CMS and all the pages in like the main folder and it filters out like all the 301 redirects, it filters out all the stuff, UTMs, and then we can merge that with their own site export or Google search console data and it just builds us like sort of like a place where we can strategically plan.

56:47Hal Zeitlin: OK, where are we updating URLs? Where are we setting up 301s? And for larger sites where there's a lot of pages, it's a project. And it's always very much more work than I ever want and expect it to be. But it's really important, because then you can account for every page. If you've ever done a migration with a lot of pages, and you're in a Google Sheet, and you're like, my gosh, should I just delete something? Or you put on a filter, and you're like, my gosh. It's very destructive if you make a mistake and like you can make updates manually, but then like to filter and find it's just like a ton of rows in this giant thing. And it's kind of frightening and like, okay, oh, we're going to change this URL. Like way to track it, like having an Airtable and like a relational database where you can group and filter and sort for me is super important. Yeah. Some sites are like small sites where there's like 30 to 50 pages. Like that's not what we're talking about here. Here. We're talking about where there's like a lot of nested folders, a lot of stuff there. So.

57:42Hal Zeitlin: The Airtable system I built, spent a lot of time and money building it out. We're always working on it. It's huge. It's huge for us. But now with AI, I built that before AI. Now with AI, a lot of that stuff can be solved using track to BT in a way that it wasn't possible before.

57:56Janne Parri: Yeah. Yeah. Do you like scrape all the things? Let's say it's a, sort of blog, this bunch of blog articles. Do you like scrape all the content and like skip all the exports from the platform that might not be like formatted in a right way.

58:13Hal Zeitlin: If you can, so like some platforms, like we're doing a HubSpot migrate and maybe I'm wrong, but like some platforms just don't give you a good way to export data. So there's exporting pages and there's exporting CMS. We did like a Prismic, have you heard of Prismic before?

58:27Janne Parri: No, I haven't.

58:29Hal Zeitlin: They're like a coded solution. Maybe you can call them headless. They're probably considered headless. And the exports were these crazy JSON things for all the blog posts. And everything was nested in a table of contents. It's just like, dude, there's no, and I tried, I spent like 10 hours trying to use AI to clean them up, and it just failed. And I'm like, all right, we're just gonna do this manually and copy and paste. And sometimes it actually costs, as far as business costs less money to just hire someone on Upwork. And we really try to avoid doing this because it doesn't like, just manually do it. Cause the thing is like, if you migrate some odd in an automated way where there's like some roughiness, especially around rich checks, we still have to manually check every page for like our own integrity.

59:09Hal Zeitlin: Know what I mean? And sometimes it's just faster and better just to copy paste and check it than like automating it and then going in and cleaning up all this stuff. Like the risk of missing a detail, I think is much higher that way. So, you know, if we can automate and export and import, we can. And WordPress is great actually, like WordPress migrations are relatively easier because it is typically more straightforward to export like a CSV for all your, all your CMS data. There's still some work to do. But for some platforms it's just so challenging and we spend time, we do the API's, we bring it into Airtable and it's just like, we should have just done it manually. And sometimes like

59:47Hal Zeitlin: For one client, they have like, they have 70 testimonials, 70 case studies and it's not a CMS template. It's like, there's like six different static templates all under this folder. So that's why for the migration, like part of our strategy is like, OK, do you want to unify this into a CMS where you're going to have to, and it's going to work for you to fit it in, or do you want us to build you Lego blocks and a template where you're going to build each page and have more control, where you can go and move things around? And there's pros and cons to both. I wish Webflow had like a CMS field where you can link to like a static page. Because right now, if you do this, like the Lego block approach, and we build it out custom, then like,

1:00:21Hal Zeitlin: You make a CMS and you have to hard code the URL to make that directory that you can use on the page. So it's not the most pretty thing, for some stuff, we had a client that wanted to do an event CMS, very common use case for companies we work with. They're like, oh yeah, we'll just use the CMS to do it. And when you have a calendar with attendees and dates and times, there's a triple nested CMS solution. And they're like, oh, but could we add this section? No, you said we're going to do CMS and we're going have limitations like, no, no, no, I was wrong. Now you have to build it out again using Lego blocks.

1:00:53Janne Parri: You

1:00:54Hal Zeitlin: So in that case, like some are CMS and some are Lego blocks and then we and it can work. And it's just more about like me burning out my team. They're like, how, if we just organize this and slow down at the start, we would have saved a lot of time and energy. The client's paying hourly and I feel confident enough to charge them for the time that they're having us double work. Then it's not as painful. Sometimes it's not even about the money. It's just like, this is just not efficient. And my team, even if we're getting paid, don't wanna do it. But if you're doing fixed price, it's exceedingly frustrating when clients, when you don't plan, you don't guide them and they change stuff. And that's usually our fault, not their fault for not setting the guidelines there.

1:01:36Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah, definitely. Another thing that it's good to hear that big agencies are struggling with too. Yeah, but there is, it's to me that there is a level of complexity. So no wonder you emphasize all the planning stuff and all the strategic things beforehand, before building everything.

1:01:58Hal Zeitlin: You learn the hard way. You learn the hard way when you don't do it that way. And we're still getting better and better.

1:02:04Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah. That is so fascinating. But hey, another thing that you are known is your Webflow app, the form connector. And I'm like curious about that because more than once the client usually asks me about what can I or where can I like find all the all the form submissions and

1:02:28Hal Zeitlin: Huh.

1:02:29Janne Parri: Can we do a simple automation and put them into some sort of sheet or something like that and you have probably seen the same problem or same gap and you have done an app to fill that need so could you tell what form connector does and yeah, how can it help us?

1:02:51Hal Zeitlin: So there's two use cases. Might pull off and show a little off right now, but I originally built it because I had two enterprise projects with Salesforce integrations, and we literally look like morons doing the Salesforce integrations because there's all this back and forth that we're doing. And it's like, we have to get on calls and this and that. Why can't this just be simpler? Why does this have to take two or three weeks to build up a Salesforce form integration? And I'm like, is like an enterprise need. Want to build different. So I built, I want to build a Salesforce app. And then when I started building infrastructure, I'm like, wait, should like be just like Zapier built into Webflow on brand in Webflow you don't have to leave. And so then we built out this whole infrastructure and the last two months we've been re-architecting the whole thing so that we can start using AI to like vibe code, not vibe code, that's not the right word at all, to like use agentic coding to build new integrations.

1:03:42Hal Zeitlin: And we spent a lot of time and money doing this, and it's going to work. And it's so exciting. It's finally happening. We could literally say, hey, build a Mailchimp integration. The agent will go, research all the APIs, research how it works, knows all of our components, all of our stuff. It will plan the back end, the front end, build the front end, build the stuff, test it until it works, validate it, and say, hey, here's your v1 of your Mailchimp integration. And so that's what's coming up. So it serves both the. Like the self-serve for like Airtable, Google Sheets, Slack, that self. And then for like the enterprise use case is more on like Salesforce is really the place where we shine. And like we have a company that has spent $6,000 like for per year on form connector for Salesforce integrations. Now they're a company that had to multiple sites and it's not just for one site. To be clear, that's like a huge anomaly and we've like not made any like anything near that and on other sales, but like it does show that there is.

1:04:37Hal Zeitlin: An opportunity there too for the enterprise customers to be using this to streamline their form connections all inside Webflow.

1:04:45Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah. For some reason, it is not maybe the best experience there were flow forms thing but it is still worked in the process.

1:04:51Hal Zeitlin: Now there's a lot of chat and we fill a lot of the gaps. Like the first one is like, how many forms do I have on my site? What's being used? What's not being used? So right here I have, I've pulled up our site with nothing connected. And so now I'm in a, might be attached to our staging account. So this might not be the actual experience of something breaks. That's probably why. So you can see here, we have 29 unmapped forms. So like, why do we have 29 forms on our site? And if, and if I didn't have form, how would I know this? We also have this Candid Leap Footer Form. If I click form Details, it'll tell me all the pages it's on and all the fields here. If I press go to form, this is like an API limitation. Oh, look, form not found. So we'll come here. Let's try this one.

1:05:34Hal Zeitlin: These are API limitations that we're having. So here, we'll go to the form. It'll take us to the page. And it will select the element on the canvas. And so we have sup bro. So if we come to this form here and we click edit Mapping. It takes a second to up. So here, like Google Sheets, if I want to connect to another integration, like I'll come here and I'll go to like Airtable. Like watch how easy this is. I could email you right now if you want to. And like you can email your client and CC yourself and they log in and it authenticates in the moment. But if I just click here, hopefully I'm not logging into too many accounts. Let's add all resources,

1:06:07Janne Parri: You

1:06:07Hal Zeitlin: Grant access. Please work. And there we go. Go back and like, boom, Airtable connected. That easy.

1:06:16Janne Parri: That is so cool.

1:06:18Hal Zeitlin: We go to our forms again. And I'm going to go here. I'm going to sort by page. So OK, on our home page form, I'll select the form. It'll take me to the page. It will open the component. It will select the element right here. So here we go. This is a new page I just built. So I'll map the fields. And then I think for you and your customers, do you like Google Sheets or Airtable more?

1:06:39Janne Parri: It depends. Maybe personally irritable.

1:06:44Hal Zeitlin: Okay, so we'll go to Airtable, I'll map the fields, I'll select the base, I'll pick this website base for a table, I'll auto create a table right here. Here's all the fields I want. Let's call this at a one here, all right. And I don't wanna have, I'll keep the phone field. So we'll create the table, primary fields, email, and then it will, yeah, this is because I'm in the staging account that it's not gonna work. Or actually, maybe it's because of an API. So the API wasn't connected. So then what I could do is go back to our integrations and re-authenticate. It's because I know what the issue is. Watch this. I'll come here to this one.

1:07:26Hal Zeitlin: I have to do it to a different table. So I'll go to like master table. That table like didn't have a field in a way to do it. So we'll try this. Create table. Let's see if this works. A table already exists with that name. See? Today, boom, create table. Email. So watch, it's gonna create the table, it's gonna create the fields. It's gonna map the fields, confetti. I can open it right now on Airtable.

1:07:51Janne Parri: You

1:07:52Hal Zeitlin: So we have our fields, continue. Everything's auto-mapped. I can also map fields. We can combine fields. I can type in a static value. There's formulas. We can map the date or the page URL and all that stuff. We can do UTM tracking. And then if I save the mapping, I can turn it on. And we're good to go. And so now if I come here to the form. And get ready for this. You're gonna love it. I'm just going to publish the site just in case we need to hear. What's the name?

1:08:23Janne Parri: My name?

1:08:24Hal Zeitlin: I'll do Hal at Candid Leap. Hello. And let's jam out, submit the form. And so if we come back to form connector now. Did I select the right form? I think. Let's see. Let's click go to form. See, this is the thing. I wasn't on the right form here. So it wasn't even right there. So I have to go back here and submit it. All I'll say is if I go here, everything will show up in the submission log. And then you can see all your forms and make sure it's submitted. So if I come here, you see it's processing. And then once it's done, you can actually

1:08:54Janne Parri: That's so cool.

1:08:56Hal Zeitlin: See if it was successfully mapped. So if something fails, it will let you know. So that's an ad hoc demo. Form connector. And you can see here it

1:09:04Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah, I'm like thinking that should be like standard for every project.

1:09:11Hal Zeitlin: That's what I think too. And we have all these great stuff. If I go back here to like our forms, so now we have one active form. So you need to clean up all these unmapped forms. You need to componentize them, consist them, make them consistent. But I can come here too and open up Slack. Let me, let's see. I think because I'm on the, I need to put on another plan. But here, I'll go here. I can select multiple channels. Okay. I will go next to the automation setup. We can have conditional logic. We can connect the stuff here. You can run a test. And yeah, you can connect multiple stuff here in Slack. And for Slack, you can also set up multiple notifications per form. So we have Gmail too. So yeah, it's pretty powerful and cool. And I just saw this need, and I don't like going to Zapier and having everything connected. I feel there's also a learning curve there for clients.

1:09:59Hal Zeitlin: I think clients with some training, they can truly manage and update their mappings. Now for HubSpot, it's better to use an HTML embed. Because in styling that because the updates and HubSpot will go live in Webflow. But for a lot of other use cases, this is I think the best, the best move.

1:10:13Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah, and that is like good for smaller clients. And then there is the things for Salesforce. Well, you mentioned HubSpots and what was the thing that is coming like MailChimp? Yeah, that is coming like when can you say?

1:10:29Hal Zeitlin: We'll probably ship our new AI infrastructure like mid-Fab. But it's not just Mail Ship. Once we have this live, we can ship in a week five new integrations if we wanted to. It's going to be crazy. Because the app feels native. We spent a lot of time and energy designing it. And we have all the components and everything. And we should be able to also just you know, instead of writing all the code, using AI to prompt to build new features too. And we still have developers who like review the code that's written and stuff, but you know, rebuilding the infrastructure, we can start just using more modern development tactics just to move faster and ship more. So that's, yeah, we, there's definitely questions around financing it because we've spent all of our profit on building the app and we have some subscription revenue, but it just does not touch what we've spent. And so.

1:11:22Hal Zeitlin: I'm trying to decide what I want to do with it for the rest of this year, I think with time and energy I'll sell some more enterprise subscriptions, which is really what's needed to help finance developers because developers are relatively expensive.

1:11:33Janne Parri: Yeah, I have heard the same thing. That...

1:11:36Hal Zeitlin: We like it works out and it's not crazy money, but it's still like it's it has up.

1:11:45Janne Parri: Wondering if I...

1:11:45Hal Zeitlin: Thank you for letting me share. Yeah, it's definitely, I don't know why and how to get more people using form Connector. But I really do feel like compared to the other alternatives, it's just like, it's all right there and it just works better and faster and quicker. And it's built into all the Webflow APIs and all the limitations that comes with that.

1:12:08Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah, I've been there with a small client and I'm like trying to decide that am I gonna do a little Zapier like automation for such a small thing, do I host the automation in my account or do I do a account for the clients and that is a struggle and I believe that many folks know that but they just do not know a better way to handle that. That's the age old problem, isn't it?

1:12:39Hal Zeitlin: And the thing is that people don't want to pay for stuff. People pick Webflow because they don't want to pay for WordPress plugins too. And so I think too, it's like we've spent all this money building the app. And the reality is like all of us Webflow people, we're kind of cheap. You know what I mean? We don't want to. And it'd be great to get more users and everything too though. And so I think our play was really just getting tighter in the enterprise space, building a name for ourselves there. And it's been successful. You know, we want to build out some more spam features, but I just need to figure out the financing part for that. Because I think there are some enterprises that would pay the higher enterprise license, which is what we really need to finance the app. And so stay tuned. Yeah, fingers

1:13:17Janne Parri: Hell yeah.

1:13:18Hal Zeitlin: Crossed I can keep spending the money, but also it's like it's time to save money in Candid Leap and not just like spend it on whatever I want.

1:13:25Janne Parri: This kind of brings us back to the start that why do we need to cater the enterprise clients? It's because they will pay all the cool features that trickle down to us, cheap, freemium users.

1:13:39Hal Zeitlin: Yeah, and there's even people that spend good money too. I think one thing I want to share that I think is really fun is I love going to Webflow's job postings and seeing what they're saying there. A lot is revealed that you would never know or see. So I'm not breaking any NDAs right now, but if we go here... It's like the first thing is here on this job post, it says website experience platform, which is we all know that phrase, right? Webflow has been using it for like a year when they launched like optimize and analyze. Now you go to here, this localization manager at Webflow, we're building the world's leading AI native digital experience platform, DXP. This is the Adobe Experience Manager. This is the Optimizely. This is the Sitecore. These are like the bigger enterprise. And so here I've never seen Webflow publicly say DXP or AI native DXP, but like this is like

1:14:31Hal Zeitlin: In Boston this year, I would not be surprised if they're going to come out and start saying this. And so that's why I also, want to talk like, you know, and the DXP essentially is like, they sell you everything. It's like, they sell you, it's like the asset management and running your campaigns and the personalization and the Adobe. And so this is why I'm trying to be ahead of the curve. And, really resource and learning to like, when these buyers who are used to spending hundreds of thousands of dollars.

1:15:01Hal Zeitlin: Million plus on a DXP, how can I be an educated salesperson and build a team that, and again, there's going to be a limited number of customers that are going to be higher value that Webflow is going to have, but how can we as a business and as people be selling a DXP experience that is more accessible? There are people that aren't spending that money but still want to buy a DXP without spending a million dollars on Adobe. And so that's really where I'm seeing the future that Webflow is validating right here of where things are going. And that's why Webflow Cloud is something I'm excited about and how we can build these components to give the best marketer experience for a DXP. That's my, thank you for letting me show my hidden research

1:15:40Janne Parri: You

1:15:41Hal Zeitlin: Into Webflow.

1:15:43Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah, that sounds so fascinating. And definitely there will not be that many clients at the start, but there will be fewer service providers able to do that as we have talked that it really requires a certain level. But I'm wondering what does the AI native mean in that context?

1:16:06Hal Zeitlin: AI native. Means, I mean, look, Webflow just went real, like real time, just went live. So like now we can have different people in Webflow at the same time working. It's like when we rebuild our Webflow app and I'm just projecting, I don't, I don't know if any of this stuff is true. When I build our Webflow app, our head of engineering at form Connector is like, how? Okay. Imagine we have one developer building this app here. This developer having this app here. Imagine. We have this agent here building this app, this agent here building this app and shipping it. And so now that there's real time and we can see different people working around, I think AI native is gonna mean what does it look like to have one of those people on the top right with the face be an AI? Because Webflow currently has limitations with APIs and how things work. Or like, for instance, like if you make a new form, you have to publish your site for the data API to pick it up.

1:16:59Hal Zeitlin: When you're using the MCP server, you have to use that bridge. But I think it's like as Webflow is investing more and doing more, I think AI native is going to mean that they build out their infrastructure stronger so that using AI prompting and AI tools and AI workloads we're seeing in engineering, it could be going into Webflow and building things, optimizing things and all that there. And so we're already seeing AI native for optimized for like the AI optimization testing. And yeah, who knows what else is coming next and on the priority list, but I'm really hoping that we can start seeing like AI agentic experiences that actually work and aren't just lies at like all the AI companies

1:17:36Hal Zeitlin: Are like, yeah, AI. Yeah. But, sorry for being harsh there, but like, you know, everyone's saying AI. So it's, and it's harder to deliver it much easier to say, right.

1:17:47Janne Parri: Totally. It's good to be hard for the AI things.

1:17:50Hal Zeitlin: ⁓ I'm Webflow. I'm definitely biased. I'm going to own it. I'm totally team Webflow. ⁓ But I feel like when I sell and talk and sell Webflow, it's like I'm trying to convince people not to use Webflow sometimes because Webflow is that strong and their product should win. And I don't want to be sales. ⁓ They need to be like, this is the right move for us. And that's why I'm excited. Like Webflow here, can see this assets. ⁓ building a, do know what a dam is? Digital asset manager.

1:18:16Janne Parri: Actually, I do not know what that is.

1:18:18Hal Zeitlin: So images, videos, PDFs are scattered across tools and teams making reused governance and insights hard. So you can't reuse an image from the CMS and on a static page. It's disjointed. If you upload a PDF and you can't host it on a Webflow URL, and if you want to swap it out, you can't do that. And so here, where is your 21 team building a startup within a startup? Again, I'm not breaking any NDAs or anything here. This all is public here on the website. It's always fun and cool to see what Webflow is doing. So, yeah, AI DXP. Be ready.

1:18:50Janne Parri: Yeah, this will be interesting to see if everything comes to life. Yeah. Exciting. I guess at some point I'll have to let you go, but before we go to the ending sections, is there still something you want to nerd about or? Tell to the listeners watchers of the show

1:19:09Hal Zeitlin: Yeah. I'll say like if you consider yourself an intermediate developer and you want to become an advanced, more enterprise capable Webflow developer, please reach out. I'd love to learn from you and regardless, feel free to reach out. And because I do want to build out that resource this year to help people, but like you should already be playing with Lumos excited about Lumos. You're not doing that's not really like the launch pad we want to build. And yeah, I just love to learn about your goals, your challenges, so that I can build a resource that people want to use and can use. So ultimately there can be a larger talent pool to hire from that we as an agency can afford to hire too, versus hiring like 10 year senior Webflow developers. Like we just, we can't hire those people and they're great. And some of them charge more than us, which is always hilarious when someone's like, yeah, I want to charge this. Like, well.

1:20:03Hal Zeitlin: You're charging more than we're charging. How can we do that? So, but yeah, super interested in, yeah, I hope that we can build out that resource and really show what true enterprise component development looks like in our eyes. So we could be delivering more value to clients. And that's my closing statement.

1:20:19Janne Parri: Beautiful. And if there is people wanting to contact you and maybe follow you, where should they go?

1:20:27Hal Zeitlin: Shoot me an email at candidleap.com. That's the best place.

1:20:31Janne Parri: Cool, what?

1:20:31Hal Zeitlin: And you're welcome to like follow me on LinkedIn too and all that stuff there. But like, you know, I get a lot of, a lot of DMS and stuff there. And if you want to stand out, an email is always the best place to get in front of me.

1:20:42Janne Parri: Email is the way to stand out. That's something.

1:20:44Hal Zeitlin: For me. For me.

1:20:45Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah, totally. Okay, we have to do last section.

1:20:48Hal Zeitlin: Totally afraid, but

1:20:49Janne Parri: We have been nerding out in a such way that this feels like so off topic and out of context, but. You seem to already know what's ahead so I will get you or give you a Finnish saying that I will translate to English and your job is to know or guess what it is about. So what does it actually mean? Are you ready?

1:21:16Hal Zeitlin: Yes, and my hands are up here. I'm not using any AI technology to cheat. Though I wish I did.

1:21:21Janne Parri: That's good, that's good. So this is a quite simple one. In Finnish it is saada rukkaset and in English it is to get mittens. So usually this is in the context that I get mittens from someone else. So what does it mean when I get the mittens?

1:21:48Hal Zeitlin: It means to borrow something from a friend. It's like you have dinner with someone and there's leftovers and they're like, hey, take home some leftovers in my Tupperware, give it back to me later. I have something there. You're giving the bins, they need it's cold, and you'll give it back to them later. Maybe not. Am I close?

1:22:08Janne Parri: No, no, you're

1:22:09Hal Zeitlin: Yeah, I had a feeling.

1:22:10Janne Parri: So far away. But that's a good like logic and good like a good guess. Definitely. Because this has no like proper logic. I could have given you a little more context. Actually, I will do that. This is usually a thing or I get the mittens from someone that I have a crush on. So could that help you?

1:22:34Hal Zeitlin: You get the mittens, it means that you find someone interesting as like a life partner. Is that what we're getting at?

1:22:45Janne Parri: No. Yeah, my little hint did not help you at all.

1:22:47Hal Zeitlin: How could it be anything else if you get the means

1:22:50Janne Parri: The mittens, to get the mittens means that you get rejected from or

1:22:54Hal Zeitlin: NOOOO-

1:22:55Janne Parri: By someone who you have a crush on. So if you ask someone out on a date and you get the mittens, so you get rejected.

1:23:02Hal Zeitlin: Get them in. I'm gonna use, I'm gonna start using that. It's gonna happen here.

1:23:06Janne Parri: Yeah, beautiful. Okay, Hal, thank you so much for nerding with me and sharing all the stuff about enterprise clients. All the components and webflow apps and forms and such. This has been a blast. Thank you so much. And for all the listeners and watchers, we'll see you in the next one. Bye.

1:23:25Hal Zeitlin: All right, keep it real. Bye, everyone.