New AI Opportunities& Hybrid Roles

0:28Janne Parri: Okay Finn, so you are a Webflow partner but your portfolio side is done with Framer. So what's that about?

0:37Finn Dollimore: Yeah, so Framer was a tool that a bunch of my friends were getting really into, two of my friends in particular. And they were just like, you got to try this new tool because this portfolio was built a couple of years ago, kind of getting a bit old now. And Framer was pretty like, not really new, but it was kind of coming. It was in that year that just Framer absolutely exploded. It was over every no code YouTube channel. Probably most of you can remember that. And so I tried it and the site that I tried it on was just my own portfolio. And opinion, I kind of think Framer is the tool I would choose even over Webflow for just a design portfolio for a few reasons. I think Framer generally is a bit fast. It's more performant than Webflow in my experience. Like my portfolio loads pretty quickly and

1:25Finn Dollimore: I was quite happy about that. But of course you could also use Webflow. Just depends what you want to build in. But it is true. And I was building in both Framer and Webflow for a time. But I do like how my portfolio came out. And there were certain things that I was able to prototype, like animations that were so different than the way you would do it in Framer is completely different. Than what I was used to in Webflow. It was like a cool mental exercise. It felt almost like using Figma prototypes to create some of these animations. The one I'm thinking of specifically is like the MacBook screen animation. There's like this section, is like my, like Finn's MacBook. And there's like the kind of task or like app bar at the bottom. You hover, brings up a pop-up. That was kind of fun to create in Framer.

2:11Janne Parri: Yeah, that is an exciting tool. But if there is a young person thinking that they should start doing websites, maybe designing and developing websites and they are seeing that many people use Framer, many people use Webflow. What would you advise to them which to choose or should they just do both maybe?

2:33Finn Dollimore: So if we're talking today, like right now, if you're listening right now to this, it's a pretty controversial topic to be honest, one of the, like our industry is being disrupted quite a lot by AI and my opinion on the situation, and it's just an opinion because the truth is no one really knows what's gonna happen with AI coming in. But I was just at a cursor event today where there was a cursor workshop. I know the cursor ambassador for Brisbane, the city where I'm living and part of the workshop was like, let's vibe code a product or website. And pretty much everyone's just like one-shotting these amazing landing pages and tools, that kind of thing. It's pretty scary. So if I was like starting out today, I don't know if I would go into no code. I think I might go straight into doing

3:20Finn Dollimore: Development with Claude because it's kind of unclear about where no code is going to be left in terms of the AI industry because to be fair right now it's easy it's faster to build a website using Claude than it is with Webflow. Just as a disclaimer I haven't used Webflow as like MCP I haven't ever vibe coded with Webflow so I'm not sure too much about what its capabilities are but I do know what you can do with Claude. And I mean, I'll just ask you a question. Like, what was the main reason that you got into Webflow in the first place? Like what brought you to Webflow?

3:55Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah, it was probably hatred towards WordPress or something like that. Yeah, the ability to do a fast loading visual site that respects like the code. So that was probably something that I was looking for. And obviously, yeah, those not new things are great. And there are people like having some success with basically vibe coding, but the one thing, well, I haven't tried that extensively, but my sense is that you can get a beautiful site out of those tools. But then the maintenance is one thing to solve, especially if you have a client that you need to hand off that.

4:43Janne Parri: So do you have any insights in that?

4:46Finn Dollimore: Yeah, definitely. And I can talk about the use case that we're using at Antler, for example, because when it comes to vibe coding sites, you bring up a really good point, which is, okay, you one shot a really cool website. That's great. But then you need to train your client. Then there needs to be some kind of platform or CMS setup that allows your client to run manage, update their own site and out of the box, you know, what you would get from Claude or lovable or one of these vibe coding tools. It isn't always prepared for the client and you're exactly right about that. So this is really where a no code tool is still going to be super relevant. So I can get into like the setup we have at Antler a bit more, cause I guess kind of the way I would position myself as a Webflow developer is more of like, and this is just the last two years. I've been going down like the enterprise route, which is, and I want to talk about that later.

5:36Finn Dollimore: But basically at Antler, we have multiple Webflow users across the company and they don't really have technical knowledge of how to code things or how to use GitHub, that kind of thing. So that's when Webflow comes in and kind of saves the day in that you can train them on the CMS and the way that I do that is with Loom videos and that allows Webflow to scale throughout our company to have more people using it. So... That's kind of the answer to your question there is how Webflow would come in and do a better job than a vibe coding tool, for example.

6:09Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah, I'm excited. We're already diving deep into the actual use cases and such. And yeah, we have mentioned a bunch of my favorite tools like Claude and Loom and... Well, obviously Webflow. But we have to do little intros before we dive any deeper. So my name is Janne Parri. I'm your host today and I'm a Webflow partner all the way from Finland. My guest today is Finn Dollimore. Finn is a senior web developer Antler, is a huge globally operating VC firm. But you might recognize Finn from his web design and Webflow related YouTube videos. He's also a Webflow partner, a public speaker and a truly well traveled man. So Finn, I get the sense

6:58Janne Parri: That in the past you have done more of those like web design projects, but you have been slowly drifting towards the more technical roles. Is that true? And how do you see that progression?

7:11Finn Dollimore: Yeah, it's a good place to start because I can kind of give an overview of how my career has gone up until this point. And the place where I got started was Webflow. And for the record, I'm still in Webflow every day now, so that hasn't changed. But the way I got started was fully no code with using Webflow. This was before AI, so if there wasn't something that Webflow could do that would need a custom piece of code, I was literally like, I would have to go online and try and find code to copy and paste. Like that was sort of around like COVID basically. So I was doing Webflow development and web design. But in the last sort of couple of years since I've joined Antler, I joined a more enterprise company to work full time. And before that, I was only freelancing. I spent first couple of years of my career working with clients.

8:03Finn Dollimore: Making lots of mistakes, doing bad design, bad development. When you do your first few years in any industry, I feel like those years are like, you're just finding out what you enjoy doing and you're sort of cutting your teeth, as you might say. But after I joined Antler, it was really this time that I had to work full, this opportunity to work full time for one client. That was really where I felt I became like a real person. It's kind of sounds weird to say like I was, that's where I found my time to really put a lot of effort into

8:36Finn Dollimore: Learning what I do and trying to understand, okay, well, what does it mean to be, you know, a good Webflow developer? What does it mean to be easy and pleasant to work with? A lot of that came from freelancing as well. But in the last two years that I've been at Antler, it had, they've been very formative years for me. And so to kind of go back to your initial question was, no, I'm making the shift towards more of a technical non-webflow role. Yeah, so over the next year or so, I'm going to be pairing a lot of this vibe coding with my Webflow. I know vibe coding is a bit of a bad rap. It sounds messy. It sounds ugly. They're like pretty much most developers these days are vibe coders. Like I work on a team of developers at Antler.

9:16Finn Dollimore: And we're basically an AI first development team now. Well, the developers do everything in Claude, AI writes all the code. This is how it's going to be at most software companies. And what this means is that if you're a Webflow developer and you have a curiosity about building something more than websites, like applications, there's a really big opportunity right now to expand your skillset. And you don't have to ditch Webflow, it behind. It's more of like, think of it like this, you could offer a package to a client where it's like, they need an application, but they might need a marketing website to also market that application. So you could even get clients to build small apps for them and then launch a Webflow website as part of your package, use a template or something, or find a way to sell that in a way that allows you to make good money. My brother's doing this as well. My brother literally did about one year of coding.

10:08Finn Dollimore: Went full time into doing development with Claude and he's just like a software engineer now and he'd like uses Claude to design, to develop, to do everything. So there's this massive opportunity and he wasn't even a Webflow developer. Like he was just learning some basic coding courses. So if you're listening to this right now and you're like, I'm a Webflow developer but I don't know how to through Webflow you already know about HTML, CSS. Pages, like what performance is, you have this very holistic foundational knowledge of the web that is going to translate really well into app building. Now the reason why would you want to go into app building over websites? Well, the first reason is money. You can make a lot more money building apps because think of it this way. The website only exists because of the app, because of the product.

10:59Finn Dollimore: And this is one of the first reasons why I wanted to start getting involved in product development and design is that my brother who was, you know, he'd been working less time in the industry. He was getting equity from his clients. You know, he was getting like a cut of the company because he was the developer building the software. And I was like that, like something just clicked in my head then I was like, hang on. So there is no way I would get any equity building a Webflow website for a client. Like they'll pay me maybe even a high hourly

11:30Finn Dollimore: Rate potentially, but no one's going to give you a cut of the company because you built a website. But if you build the product, you have a massive stake in the company. And also when times get tough, the people that get cut are usually the marketers and like the marketing site. The product is the last thing to go because that's what brings in the money and that's the reason why we're all working together. So that's the reason one, if you are building websites, there's a very good reason to get into product because of the money and of course equity scales. So you can potentially be quite wealthy one day if one of your clients does well. The second reason I want to get involved with more technical stuff, more product is because

12:13Finn Dollimore: It's interesting. Like, if you think about what a website is, it's mostly information, displaying information. Of course, you have some pricing calculators, you have some tools, you have some advanced functionality, but largely a website is there to communicate and to display information. And for a while, that can be very satisfying because you can get very creative about... You know, using things like GSAP, making beautiful animations, and there's lots of cool ways you can convey information. But product building is different in the sense that you're building a tool. You're building something that has user accounts, a backend, you have functionality and logic that's built in. And when I started building my first few apps as part of my coding course that I did, even before I was using AI, that was a really exciting time because

13:00Finn Dollimore: Once you can interact with the product, you can do stuff. It calculates things. You can save data. You can track data. It's pretty awesome. And it feels really exciting to build a tool rather than just a website. Anyone right now who's listening to this and you do Webflow, maybe you know a bit of code, you can seriously get involved in the product side of things as well. So yeah, I think, do you have any thoughts about that? Do you disagree, agree?

13:24Janne Parri: No, I totally agree that there is a huge, like opportunity. Obviously, it's a scary jump because apps are like, way more out there in a sense that websites are this like, small little sandbox with clear boundaries and with apps, you can do all sorts of things. So it's a scary thing to start like offering those as a service. Obviously, you should try it out before offering those services. But the second hurdle is that, yeah, anyone can open cloud or lovable and start white coding. But the people who get the most advantage of those are the people who already know how to code. And they are just outsourcing, the typing of

14:14Janne Parri: Code in a sense. So what's your, what's your like thoughts on how should people like, if they see the opportunity, they want to like, grab it, capitalize on that. How should they like approach learning a part of this puzzle?

14:31Finn Dollimore: Well, to just caveat what I'm going to say now, I'm very positive about AI in the sense that I trust AI quite a lot, maybe more than I should. I think AI is really good at what it does. You see a lot of people kind of talking bad about AI and saying it's a terrible designer or it's a terrible developer. Even if that were true now, at the rate that it's progressing, six months down the track, it literally triples intelligence. Okay, maybe, you know, I should get a more accurate number there, but basically it's like exponentially getting more intelligent. So one thing that developers are doing now is that you build your app, right, with the current best model, Claude Opus 4.6. By the time 4.7 comes out, all the mistakes that 4.6 made, you can run an audit.

15:19Finn Dollimore: On 4.7 and it will fix some of those mistakes. So as you can see, like every few months, the AI is getting significantly better that you need to worry too much about. Do I know? Because I want to bring your question into this, where should you start learning right to actually start doing this stuff? Don't get too hung up on learning. Like especially code syntax, like you don't need to write code anymore... What is still relevant now? Is more like architecture. Understanding how your app should be ⁓ set up in terms of the tech stack. But even that, you can put Claude in plan mode and tell it what you want to build and it will already decide the stack for you. So my response is actually even if you don't know anything about software, if you plan, you go in plan mode long enough, you're telling Claude what result you want.

16:10Finn Dollimore: As long as you understand what product that you want to produce, Claude is going to take care of the technical stuff for you, which leaves us in a very strange scenario where products and software used to be expensive because it costs a lot of money to build. That's completely changed. Software is cheap to build now. What is difficult is deciding what to build and how well you can market that. So this is really, and this is a big thing for Antler as well. Like, you know, I work for a venture capital firm. For anyone wondering why it's called venture capital, it's basically, it's an investment firm that partners with founders at a very early stage. Know, Antler wants to be the very earliest, the very first investor in that founders company. And because if you invest earlier, there's potential for more, like you can make more.

16:58Finn Dollimore: Return on your investment if that company does well, So now investors are in this position where a founder might have built their own product and they're not a technical founder. So it adds a lot of confusion into the mix as well about all these products, they might look good on the front end, but are they set up well on the backend? But ultimately I think even AI can fix its own slop eventually if you just run the next model and it can fix the old model stuff. So yeah, that's kind of where I stand with that. But I know a lot of people will disagree with that say AI is terrible. And they're entitled to think that if they want.

17:31Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah. And as you said, things are just going to get better. The pace might vary. But we probably all agree that it will get better. So in a sense, would be good to get to stay ahead and, like try to try to know about these things, at least in theory. But what do you think about the visual side of like AI work? If we talk about design, maybe app design or UI design, do you think that is in a good level right now? Or do people still need to like design or

18:12Janne Parri: Find some workarounds or yeah what's your thoughts on that

18:16Finn Dollimore: Man, I love this question. It is a super exciting question and time to be a designer right now. To be honest, AI does not have a good track record with design. I mean, we've all seen the same gradient that's become a meme now. I mean, just look at my background is basically, you if you see that color, like, you know that it's been vibe coded. So I recently, began to research a lot more into AI design because I have this quite controversial opinion that Figma isn't really doing a good job of things. I'm not sure about what you think or anyone else who's listening is thinking, but by now I kind of expected Figma to have led the way in terms of like, they've really gone like, here's how AI and design are gonna go together. And...

19:02Finn Dollimore: I just don't get the vibe that they've figured it out, to be honest. This is kind of a side note, but actually last year I was invited to apply for a job at Figma. I spoke at an event in Melbourne where I met a guy who was a very senior product designer and he eventually messaged me on LinkedIn a few months later saying that Figma's looking for a designer advocate in Sydney. Would you be interested in applying? I know the person who's hiring. I think you'd be a great fit. So when I heard this, was like, I was like, wow, like I could work at Figma. Like this is crazy. So I was very happy at Antler, but you know, when Figma, you know, has an opportunity to talk, you got to talk to Figma, right? No

19:41Finn Dollimore: Designer would turn down this opportunity to have an interview. So even just for market research, I accepted just to reach out. And I was talking with the hiring manager. And it was clear that in this role, I would have to leave behind development and go all in design, but not even doing the design work, like consulting these like, I don't even know if Figma did this, but Figma has like the enterprise clients that pay for the enterprise plan on Figma. And part of that Figma offers like consulting to them on their design systems, which is quite interesting. So that's part of what a designer advocate would do. Also some community-based things.

20:18Finn Dollimore: Ultimately I decided to not proceed any further because I wanted to go all in on development. And I was like, I love design, but I think development, even just Webflow development is it's really fun to build things. So that was a side note. And the way that it's really, what I foresee happening is that everything is going to be designed in code. So currently. If you're using Figma, just the old fashioned way, drawing frames or even using your UI kit. Once you've built this beautiful design, then some developer has to go and turn that into code. And that takes

20:52Finn Dollimore: A lot of time. This is like if you've built an app or a landing page, you know, this is what I was doing when I was first starting as a web developer. I would get a Figma file with 10 or so pages. I would build it from the ground up. And that would take me a week or two. And that's just not okay anymore. Like right now the workflow needs to be here's my design and Figma. Push a button and it maps directly to code or even better. You're designing with code components. This is what I want to get into.

21:24Finn Dollimore: Basically, if you have a tool that, the thing that you're designing in it is actually a real React components, a real piece of code, then you can actually export that code directly to the code base, or rather export that design directly to the code base, which completely removes that developer handoff. And this is where the role between designer and developer is going to start to blur a bit... Right now, and I made a post about this on LinkedIn last week and I made this kind of controversial post saying designers are in danger. And some people had some, you know, differing opinions about it. A guy, Andy, who I know he also creates content in the Webflow space. He disagreed and he was like actually having specialists. He would prefer to hire in his agency, someone that just does design, someone that just has development and leverage a specialist in each role.

22:12Finn Dollimore: And think that is really good advice, especially if you're already established in your industry. But right now, if you're getting into design, you need to be looking at what's happening in the market with the lines between developer and designer blurring a bit. And if I was starting out now as a designer, I would be doing a hybrid career where I'm doing design, but I'm also a front-end developer. Because that ties into what I was saying before about these tools that you design in code. A great one that's an example is paper right

22:44Finn Dollimore: If you go to paper.design, you'll see an example of this tool that allows you to design with code. And then that way you can deploy directly to the code base and maintain both sources of truth with the design tokens. That right there is quite complicated. If you have a Figma file that has a bunch of design tokens, it needs to match your development environment so that when you send designs, you know back and forth that it's from the same source of truth So I'm kind of starting to ramble here. But what I want to do I would summarize this is that the lines between design and development are blurring and eventually what we design in figma or paper or subframes a great one is just going to be code components on a canvas

23:28Finn Dollimore: Because what Figma produces right now is just frames. It's not actually inherently code,

23:33Janne Parri: This is, this is like exciting. My mind is blowing a bit right now because you like planted this idea that as you said, Figma is just like drawing stuff, but what if there would not be any like tools like exporting Figma designs to some other platforms if the integration was there. To begin with and we have seen it with like auto layout. So it kind of tries to bring some development logic into your designs. But what if there was like more of those and whatever you design would be basically ready for deployment. That would be awesome. And as you said again, that would also

24:19Janne Parri: Kind of disrupt the usual roles of designer and developer. Yeah, that's a big nut to crack at Ponder.

24:30Finn Dollimore: Yeah, I can leave one more kind of a closing thought on that topic. So what I said was now if I was getting started in this industry, I would choose a hybrid role. So before it was okay to, I'm just a designer or I'm just a front end developer. Now with these AI tools, you can become very good at multiple skills because you don't have to learn so much to become good at them now. Like you spent so much time learning design. And how to use Figma or how to write code by hand and all the syntax. But now AI can handle a lot of that heavy lifting for you. So for you to become to a pretty decent level in any kind of skill now with AI, the bar is actually lower to be good in a way. So this opens up opportunities for you to start pairing two career skills together and becoming, being able to offer a lot of value to a company. To give myself as an example, when I'm

25:22Finn Dollimore: When I first started out, I survived. Put food on the table by being a developer and a designer. Because if I was just a designer, I wouldn't have got barely any clients. Pretty much 80, 90 % of my clients were all Webflow development clients. So that's how I survived. And when I was joining Antler, I wanted to offer as much value to my company as possible, right? So they only needed a Webflow developer, but I said, look, I also have design experience so I can design. And I also have content creation experience. So I've also made internal videos for Antler and done video production, video editing for them. So this is one of the best ways to future proof your career. If you want to have that peace of mind that I'm going to have a job in five years, or I want to be paid well, I want to have a flexible lifestyle is learn like two or even three skills that go really well together that makes you unique because

26:13Finn Dollimore: Even just with two skills, a lot of people have the same two skills. I'm a designer and a developer, but if you're a designer developer, content creator, that already is feeling quite different. Or maybe you're a 3D developer who specializes in content creation as well. Like you can pair all these niches together and make yourself this kind of standout candidate. And often that's why people will hire you because they've, they found you different to everyone else. And it's really that standing out that's going to help you convince companies to hire you really because companies hire you because not just because you're interesting, but because you offer them value. So if you have that interesting skillset, but they're like this person can really offer us a lot of value in terms of, you know, doing this set of services, the chances of you getting hired goes way up. So where do we land with designers? I see there's two routes. You can go.

27:06Finn Dollimore: A designer who's also a front-end engineer or you can go I'm a designer and a product manager. Now that role product manager a lot of you will be familiar with it but if you're not basically in a tech company the product manager is kind of like just the project manager on the tech team they decide which features get built so that you can attract new users on the platform but also retain current users you know they're basically in charge of the product thinking, what do we need to build the product into to make money? So there's even that business side of it where you're thinking about how to build this and what users really need from the product. And here's how I frame this. If you're a UX designer, right? So if you're a UX designer, you like understanding the user, you like understanding people and the way things feel to use, then I really think becoming a product manager designer is a really good role for you.

27:59Finn Dollimore: If you're more on the UI side, you like front ends, that's really going to put you in a good place to go into becoming a front end developer. So if you look inside and ask yourself, what kind of designer am I? That's quite a good way to pick which route you go. And you can do all three of them. I'm doing all three at Antler right now, pretty much. I'm going to be participating more on the app development going forwards. And that's going to be also from interviewing users, deciding, you know, what features might get built and also building those features, designing them as well. So there's really a lot of opportunity out there to be, to set up the career that you want exactly the way you want to now.

28:38Janne Parri: Yeah, we live in exciting times and I'm totally with you. Those like combinations, like unique combinations of different fields might be very valuable and might set yourself or anyone apart from all the other candidates. But there's a weird thing that might happen, especially for the Webflow folks. So as you mentioned, I too started with designing and developing sites back in the early days that was the thing that designers can like develop the sites and when Webflow like developed it's developer oriented features my like clients also grew and I found that I

29:20Janne Parri: I do more and more of those technical things, but there's a chance that I might go back, try to like take back the design role because of these AI developments. Or I could go with the, with the front end thing that you mentioned, but a lot of, a lot of big decisions on that part. And we haven't even talked about much of the content creation thing. So you had this video about like specifically for webflowers, like there's a specialist role for just webflow development, the full stack development and content creator. So could you go through those a bit and what do you think about those roles?

30:06Finn Dollimore: Yeah, so this video I made about six months ago and the video is basically about how I would approach web development as a beginner. And I recommend getting started with Webflow. Now AI is sort of changing that, you don't need to start with Webflow anymore, but it's also good to understand Webflow. The part of the video that you're talking about is this point at about one year into your career, if you're enjoying Webflow development and you're enjoying building things on the web, there are kind of these three long term career pathways for Webflow people that I see. And this is just, of course, my opinion. You can do whatever you like. But the three that I mentioned, if I can remember them, is firstly, the specialist Webflow developer. So if you love Webflow and, you know,

30:51Finn Dollimore: An example of this would be Timothy Ricks, know, guy that's doesn't, he doesn't need to be in Webflow anymore. Like Timothy knows how to code. He's super advanced, but I think he just loves Webflow and he's built a really strong presence online about being a Webflow expert. And, you know, he's one of the best in the world. So. If you love Webflow, you can become the specialist developer. You can work on really big Webflow enterprise sites, or you could do, for example, complex animations like GSAP and that kind of thing. So if you like Webflow, you know, that's a long-term career path. Be careful though about with AI and to see where how Webflow is going to react to AI. Could Webflow be replaced by AI? Potentially.

31:36Finn Dollimore: If we can solve that problem of having the site being editable, that really smooth client onboarding process, if you can get a vibe coded site that's like that, then Webflow could be in trouble. Anyway, back to the career pathways, senior Webflow developer. Then the other career pathway is you can become a full stack engineer, which is, okay, you're now going to be building apps. You're going to be doing the full stack. Building tools, getting equity in companies, founding your own companies. Like really this opens up so many more doors for you. If you're looking at a really fulfilling career where you want to build a really long standing product, you want to really leave your mark on the world. I think this is a great pathway because what you're building is inherently a lot more valuable in terms of the potential to change people's lives. You're building a tool, you're building a software company, right?

32:26Finn Dollimore: And developers, full-stack developers are the backbone of every software company. And you can be one of them. And as a Webflow developer, you are very set up to be a full-stack developer because you already understand the basics, like I said before, HTML and CSS. All you gotta do is learn a little bit of JavaScript, but then again, AI is gonna handle that for you. So if I was, honestly, if I was in that situation now, that's where I'm going, to be honest. And the final one is what you mentioned, the content creator. This would be someone like Arnau Ros, another friend of mine. He does Webflow, he's a designer, but his main model is content creation, where he has his online school and he makes YouTube videos, he's a teacher. This is also an extremely strong career pathway because you have very good scale.

33:15Finn Dollimore: With creating content. And this is why anyone should create content. You can only talk to X number of people per day before, I mean, I'm an introvert, so I lose social battery very quickly, but with a video, a piece of content, thousands of people can see that in one day. And if you just look on like a LinkedIn post, for example, how many impressions it might get, that in a sense is an opportunity to talk to over a thousand people in a day sometimes. I think my highest video on YouTube has got like 17,000 and there's no way could talk to that many people even over like a year or something like. So my point is creating content is a way for you to reach really high levels of scale. And that's why a of people in the web industry have done that. Know, Payton, you've got Finsweet, pretty much everyone who...

34:02Finn Dollimore: Even people that make a lot of money already go into content because it scales.

34:05Janne Parri: The content creation is interesting. Obviously it takes a lot of time and you kind of want to have some sort of topic that you know about. And then there's the same risk with the Webflow specialist thing that what if something happens and we get an awesome AI solution that is not Webflow. So for example, this show is centered around Webflow. So that in itself is a risk. I know that but still, I'm like doubling down on Webflow because it's such a clear

34:40Janne Parri: Niche that it does not need like explain whether or like if I just made a web design or website podcast like that's already quite general and then there's the AI stuff if I made a AI podcast well I do not know too much of AI but all the all the things that could be about so in a sense it should be niched but it's again at the same time a risk. Any thoughts on those things?

35:11Finn Dollimore: Yeah, I think for Webflow to survive AI, it needs to become one with the AI and kind of go along with it. It's very clear that the trend or the way things are going is that things are going to be built with natural language, i.e. You prompt a tool with text and the computer does the complex thinking and figures out how to build what you want. With Webflow right now, I the whole reason I got into Webflow is because it was a more accessible way to build websites. And I find I knew if I could learn Webflow quicker and build websites with it, I could start making money faster and kind of get into the industry faster. And so now with AI, it's actually the opposite. It's slower to build in Webflow because AI is quicker. It's quicker for beginners. It's even quicker for a complete beginner to build

35:59Finn Dollimore: A webpage who doesn't know anything about coding or websites, then me using Webflow basically, if I'm building from scratch. So what Webflow needs to do is they need to integrate a way of prompting Webflow to build. And I know what some of you are thinking. They're like, this already exists, the AI site generator. What I'm talking about is a more robust feature, which actually has the context of your current code base. Please comment on this if you're on social media now to like totally rip me to shreds if you want. I don't have a lot of context on how powerful the Webflow AI site Builder is. But from what I can gather, if I was to get that on Antler's website, it won't be able to spin up Lumos components for me. It won't be able to basically fix bugs ⁓ in the page. I don't think it's able to do that yet. Whereas Claude...

36:45Finn Dollimore: Code can go to any code base in the world and find the bug fix it in no one minute 10 seconds sometimes who knows so Webflow just needs a way to bring this into Webflow and what you would have probably is like your boilerplate so your starting project whether that's the Client-First cloneable or the lumos cloneable that would be a starting point and then you would just start probably the AI I'm curious to see what Relume is doing Relume is relaunching something apparently. I've seen, do you know anything about the Relume 2.0 that's coming out or?

37:17Janne Parri: No, no, I just know what you probably know that they are cooking something and they are in a build mode right now. But whatever they are cooking, I do not know. I would imagine that might be more like open towards like whatever platform you are using. But I do not have anything any facts on that.

37:38Finn Dollimore: Yeah, I think that Webflow this year at the big Webflow conference, like surely they must be launching the web, like the ultimate Webflow natural language, AI site builder that understands your current site and can build. There's, I mean, your Webflow site is just code, right? So you can already connect, you can already connect Claude to your Webflow website. But again, it's a very early stage tool. So it's just basically faster to do it with a normal code base that Claude's super familiar with already. So that's where I stand with Webflow and AI. Think if they don't launch this year, like a natural language feature to really get vibe coding and Webflow going, then it would be very dangerous for Webflow not to do that.

38:19Janne Parri: Yeah. Yeah. And I had Matthew Munger here who works at Webflow and well, he didn't like spill the beans. Did not say anything specific, but he said that he thinks that Webflow is in a good position to, well, come up with something or use AI. So I would say that is exactly what you are saying that they will come up with some sort of natural language feature, hopefully, but they do have all other things. Kind of feel that there might be some pruning that should be done. Like there is the, what was it? Like AI site builder, which is basically the starting point for your project. And you are right that.

39:05Janne Parri: You wouldn't be able to use that on a current site build. And then they have the app gen, that is the vibe coding thing. Webflow cloud. There is no AI there, but you might be able to host something there. So all sorts of things and yeah, it might be good to cut up. Clean that a bit and make it all work together. But if we go towards the competition the alternatives we have talked and mentioned the vibe coding thing and how people are able to whip up a quick site or a even quite beautiful site nowadays but there's the control thing and yeah do you see any other problems that might

39:56Janne Parri: Might like keep people in the well more traditional website platform like Webflow.

40:03Finn Dollimore: Do you mean problems in terms of like limitations that.

40:07Janne Parri: Yeah, limitations, whatever needs a client might have.

40:11Finn Dollimore: I think the biggest, and maybe I misunderstood your question, but I think in terms of what might keep a developer just using Webflow is a bit of complacency. You're not, it's very easy to just shut out what's happening, like the big change that's happening right now with AI. And I was doing this as well. Like I wasn't using AI for anything really. I was prompting ChatGPT to ask, what should I have for dinner? But you know, like I wasn't really using it to its full potential, right? I think we've all done that asked, what should I eat for dinner tonight? So I think I've had this really big shift in me the last two, three months where I've gone, I've realized like, crap, like this changes everything. Like what is happening with AI right now is

40:56Finn Dollimore: I mean, it could get very dark in the sense that humans don't have to work anymore. Lose this existential crisis of what do we produce? How do we produce value anymore? So I think the biggest danger and the biggest reason someone would keep working with Webflow and not embrace anything else is just they don't understand how fast AI is progressing. And they're just hoping that Webflow is going to be able to keep up with it or design a solution to future proof them. But that's dangerous because that's putting the future of your career in the hands of Webflow, which as great as Webflow is, I love Webflow, there's still another company that could go bankrupt one day. Like who knows what's going to happen, especially in this AI industry. So what I would do is even if you feel very safe right now, start exploring, start diversifying, build a couple of apps to just see how you like that and just keep watching.

41:48Finn Dollimore: The news about what tools are coming out, staying up to date. If it's a lot, you could build an AI tool that crawls all the latest AI info and compresses it into a small little bite-sized chunk for you. Again, you're just still using AI to improve your life. Because it's a lot to keep up with the AI industry. But if you don't do it, you might miss some opportunities. I have a question for you, actually. Sort of shifting away from AI and back to Webflow for a second, what frameworks are you building with for your client sites?

42:15Janne Parri: Yeah, that's one of my favorite topics. So right now I'm doing my first proper builds with both must and lumos. So for the longest time I used clients first, but I've said it on the podcast Client-First hasn't been updated for a while. I know that there is some sort of beta cloneable out there. I have tried it. It fixes a lot of the problems, but it's in beta. Wish it would come out and Relume was a big reason why I used client-First 2. So if they would update that too, I might give it a new try. But so far I'm liking all the cool stuff that Timothy has built into Lumos, Corey into MUST. Those both are quite cool. I'm not sure which

43:10Janne Parri: Which one is my favorite I will probably have to do one or two projects more with both of those. Must is in a way a bit simpler, lighter maybe but then again Lumos has all the cool stuff too and I maybe even maybe I might do some sort of weird hybrid thing my own like startup project where I pick like the my favorites stuff from both of both of those but I get the sense that you are a lumos guy. Am I right?

43:40Finn Dollimore: Yeah. So currently the Antler's site is built in Lumos ⁓ and I picked Lumos for a very specific reason. Because when you're looking at your frameworks, there should be a reason why you use them. And the reason why I picked Lumos for Antler is because we needed a framework that was going to scale across our company that would allow non-technical people to interact with the website. So Antler has, you know, over 24 locations worldwide, different offices, different languages, cultures, and some people are technical, some people aren't. And in fact, most of the people that are working on the website or adding content to the website are marketers or scouts looking for founders. So we needed a system where we can have everyone working together on the same website that was able to use the, you know,

44:28Finn Dollimore: The components basically like the foundation of Lumos is components. And once you start understanding component based development and Webflow, it really changed everything for me at least like everything in Lumos is a component. And that's why it's kind of scary because when you open a Lumos project as a beginner, it's like, how do I build like, how do I put something that isn't a component into here? And it's like, no, well that heading is a component. And that div is also a component. And it's just like every single thing you build with as a component. And at first I was really confused like why does everything need to be a component? But once I'd built everything I was like, I get it now. It's because you can use the properties panel and you have all it's so easy to customize literally everything you can remove top and bottom padding. You can change background colors. You can use like it's all based off rich text. So you can format and

45:21Finn Dollimore: Highlight, do lots of smart things with, you know, text as well. So Lumos really gives you the ultimate flexibility in an enterprise company to have high usage of the website without having to do lots of training. Let's still need to do training. I'm training a guy currently who is based in Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia, I think. And he's a marketer from a marketing background, so no dev experience. But I'm just literally teaching him how to copy components from a one page and put them onto new pages. Like, so if he needs to build a page for someone, like he just needs to pick the right components, copy paste, update the content. And now you have a marketer who can build pages. For me, that's massive because I'm the only web developer at Antler like for the website. So that's a massive

46:05Finn Dollimore: Workload to just have all these requests from this, you know, global company through the website. So now we're training this guy up to help me work on the site via components. If it wasn't for the components, I to teach him how to use classes, how to HTML works, all these things and components just remove all that complexity. So that's really why you should use Lumos on your more enterprise client projects. And there's probably benefits to using master as well that I'm not aware of. The benefit of using Client-First is that it's

46:36Finn Dollimore: Very, it's literally the opposite of Lumos. Lumos changes every month or two, like, or at least when I was building the antler, when I was migrating the website, was like every month there was a new update and it's just like, my gosh, this is constantly changing. And that's great because it means when you build with Lumos, you're always building with the most up to date system for Webflow at that time. Cause Timothy will update. Lumos with a new Webflow feature as it comes out. The benefit of client First is also in a sense, its weakness is that it stayed the same for pretty much the last few years. But what that means is a company like Relume can build their product around it. Relume wouldn't be compatible with Lumos because Lumos is always changing. And so you couldn't have this kind of component system that, or basically Relume's entire product is, you know,

47:25Finn Dollimore: It wouldn't work if the components were always changing. So I guess that is my two cents right there.

47:31Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah, yeah. You're absolutely right. I'm not sure what's going on with Client-First, but I hope that they update that. And with must, I believe that it's built on a similar like goal that everything is a component. And the client, the marketer does not have touch any of those classes. So you can build quite robust layouts with the ready-made components that are there. That's great. I'm not sure. In a way, Lumos feels like a bit more advanced. There are a lot of different features. But at this point, I get the sense that you kind of can get to a similar

48:18Janne Parri: End goal with both of, both of those. But yeah, that's the big, discussion, like, well, components, they are the future. They are necessary for the scaling, but do you like build a more closed components or open components that clients can like build themselves? So do you have an opinion? On that or how do you handle the components in Antler site?

48:47Finn Dollimore: Yeah, it's a great question. So you bring up a relevant topic in Lumos, which is these open and closed components. And I mean, it's very hard. It's easy to show rather than tell, but basically an open component is one where you can add new bits of UI into it. You can drop in new headings. It's an effect. It's open to be customized with new elements. And then a closed component is literally just like you have what comes with the component. And you just customize it as it is. That's at least my understanding. And I was thinking about this today when I was working in Webflow because I was training this colleague of mine about Webflow. And I realized that when you go through the page, which is like, I call it the component buffet, just like this one page with every single component

49:29Finn Dollimore: That I've pre-built for locations. And he can go through it and just copy and paste. The component, like some are open components, some are closed components. And I'm like, I'm to have to explain this to him. I wonder how I'm to do this. Because sometimes he'll click on a section and it's a closed component. So it just selects the whole thing. But then sometimes he'll click on something and it will select a component within it from an open component. It must sound so confusing to non-lumos people, it's a really good point. Basically, think the more you can train people, the more

50:06Finn Dollimore: Time you can spend with someone to get them up to speed with using Lumos as a non-webflow developer, open components do make more sense because they're more flexible, right? But if they're very quickly just jumping into Webflow a few times a year or something, closed components, there's less that can go wrong with them in a way. And we also got to remember that components aren't just for non-technical people, they're also for us as Webflow developers. So yeah, like for example, like one component we have is a timeline component where there's like a heading on the side with a button and we've got these, it's actually a Relume, one that I converted into Lumos. And basically I realized that well, in this timeline, some people want to have more, like more sections than others, right? So I couldn't really make a closed component because that would mean that pretty much everyone had to use the same three or four sections on that timeline.

50:55Finn Dollimore: But what if someone wanted a lot more? Well, what I did is I just made an open component that has a slot and that accepts a little timeline section component. So then they can just copy and paste in as many of those into the open component. And that way they can have a longer one or a shorter one. So open components are also more flexible if you're working as an actual web developer as well. And the properties panel, like it's also what I use. As web developer, if I want to change the background color of a section, I click the drop down, go theme dark. Like it just speeds up my workflow as a web developer as well. Not just the non-technical people. Another really cool thing about Lumos, it's a utility based class system. This is something where you might have heard of Tailwind CSS before. Basically.

51:43Finn Dollimore: The idea of a CSS system where it comes out of the box with all of the things you need, padding, margin, text size, also fluid text in Lumos is really cool. But when you get Lumos or tailwind, you have out of the box all these classes that you can just use. So you don't need to add the CSS properties, you just add the name of it and it automatically gets padding for. Is, you know, that's a certain amount of padding you can use. And whenever padding four gets updated, if you did want to update it will update across the whole site. You're not creating custom padding for sections. Every section uses the same padding utilities, and that just keeps things more scalable. It also is just faster to build with CSS classes that are already pre-built for you. And so that comes with Lumos.

52:30Finn Dollimore: Overall Lumos will start preparing you for a full stack career because what do we build with in full stack development? React a lot of the time right and that's a completely that's basically where the whole idea of component based development came from was from react and the one of the most common style systems for applications is tailwind So you have tailwind on a react application is an extremely common part of the stack that's literally the same as Lumos. You have a component-based system that runs off a utility CSS class system. And both together are extremely powerful. Yeah, I think Lumos is a really good system, not just for building sites and for developer experience, but also for upskilling you to potentially go on to become an application developer.

53:17Finn Dollimore: If you know Lumos, you're going to understand how Tailwind works basically and how the concept of a React component is going to be familiar.

53:26Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah. Lumos is totally awesome and it prepares you for a lot of those concepts. Webflow itself teaches you HTML, CSS, logic and those things. And with Lumos you get to the utility classes, you get a bunch of variables and you get the idea how variables can be used. As long as you go through and make them clear to you. Yeah, if one is like thinking that they wanna like go to the highest levels of webflow builds, Lumos is probably the way to go. Again, must is out there too, that's great. It might be a bit lighter, but Lumos is one to watch and I believe that

54:14Janne Parri: Timothy has said that he might be easing a bit with all the frequent updates there was one thing I was just like trying to figure out how to properly use the grids in Lumos and just like the other week and went to watch some tutorials Timothy's videos and they were already like old the system has changed there are like those what are those component no variable modes with 12 column grid and so on yeah yeah that is that is totally a thing that people should check out where you about to say something

54:54Finn Dollimore: Well, I had a thought that this is an impact of building with Lumos is that when you build your site on Lumos, like Antlers site, for example, that I've migrated, I migrated it right at the end of last year. And so Antlers site isn't on the current most version of Lumos. It's on 2.1, I believe. And when 2.2 came around, there was actually some really important updates and I was like kicking myself like if I just waited another month before starting, I was still halfway through the build by then. So it was frustrating as a developer. Was like the new grid component came out where you can use the variable modes and you can basically use the drop down to basically, you know, customize a lot of those columns. The way that we're doing things on the current site is not the current way.

55:44Finn Dollimore: That isn't necessarily the end of the world. Whenever a developer will take over my role at Antler or work on the site, they can still access the Lumos documentation for that version of the site. It was never like, people think that somehow because there's a new version of Lumos that the last one was bad. At one point that was the best, most recent version of Lumos,

56:05Janne Parri: You

56:06Finn Dollimore: But then some new features got released in Webflow and then Timothy updated it. But it doesn't mean that last one isn't any good. Mean, pretty much like the biggest deal I think for like in terms of client sites, like Timothy built Anthropic site on Webflow. That is massive and

56:20Janne Parri: Yeah, that's wild.

56:22Finn Dollimore: Like completely wild and it was actually one of the selling points that when I was talking to Antler and my team about, want to migrate this Webflow site and I want to use the Lumos framework. The devs were asking, what is Lumos? And the software developers, software devs are very used to frameworks and there's different libraries for things. And so they were asking me these questions. But one of the things that I think I said that really might have won them over is that anthropic site was built on Webflow. And that's a really massive selling point that any one of you can say in your sales calls, like, OK, why should I choose Lumos or Webflow? Can say, well, and like the biggest AI company right now, pretty much, one of the fastest growing AI companies is using Lumos and Webflow. So all of that to say, it doesn't matter if you build your site in Lumos and Lumos gets updated.

57:11Finn Dollimore: It's still a great site. It's still a great framework. And you can integrate those newer features in. That gets a bit messy for me with the custom code because you already get that boilerplate code from the cloneable, right? But then it's working out, well, when I this new code, do I have to remove some other code that is redundant now? Maybe AI can help you with that. But it's not always straightforward to put in that new functionality.

57:36Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah, that is true. You kind of need to know what is in the code embeds and so on. One thing still on this Lumos slash components slash framework topic. I like just realized when I was building those components in one of my new projects, like those open components, it kind of... Is the same with Lumos, I realized that there's a lot of like planning and things you could do just like how you plan which things are closed components which are open and how you like name things in order for it to be like actually usable for someone else. So how do you

58:25Janne Parri: Approach like those do you like plan the naming scheme? Do you change anything in Lumos or anything like that?

58:35Finn Dollimore: Yeah, this is a great benefit of Lumos is that you don't have to think about this too much. And I mean that coming from like a Client-First or like where you're naming the CSS classes outside of a component. It's like, you've got to think, well, how would the client know this CSS class and to add the CSS class with Lumos components, what we need to do is put the name of the component that goes in that slot on the slot. So. For those of you, just like as a refresher, if you wanna put elements inside a component slot, they need to be other components. So it's like components within components. So what you would do is you would build the open component kind of skeleton, which if I go back to my example from before is the timeline component. The timeline sort of shell is its own component, has like a bit on the side where you can stack bits of content and there's a heading on the side. And as you scroll down the page,

59:25Finn Dollimore: The heading is sticky and the content scrolls past, right? Each of those content blocks that will scroll past need to be put inside a component slot. So the question is, well, how do we set this up so that it's really easy for someone to work out how to work it, right? Well, the natural thing is you put the name of the component that's supposed to go on that slot on the slot. So you go add or paste. Timeline Segment, for example. And so that literally they read that and go, timeline, okay. And then there's a box timeline Segment. Okay, so then they go Control K timeline Segment, they type that in, and then it appears and they go Enter, and it just goes bloop, and it just appears there. It's like, that's so satisfying. And that's what the experience should be like for someone who's trying to work it out. Because not everyone's going to understand the framework from the get go.

1:00:17Finn Dollimore: But if you can name things in the right way, you can make it easier for them.

1:00:20Janne Parri: Yeah. Yeah. And I believe that Webflow could do the whole like a component list, the component properties UI a better. I do not have like ideas how that would work. Well, there is the components canvas that just rolled out. It's good for like building those things. But like if you have a blank canvas, it's hard. Hard to start like adding those components and so on and like actually finding the components you want. But do you think that there could be little UI changes that would make it easier?

1:00:57Finn Dollimore: I don't know. Think you could always, I find that when Webflow changes a piece of the UI, it just throws me off. Like the other day, like I was like one of the most common parts of Webflow that I use is I switch from design into build mode. So when I make a Loom video to my client or to like someone at Antler, they're on a marketing plan. And so they don't use designer mode, they use build mode. So I always record my Loom in build mode so I can show them. From what they would see basically. And you should just click the dropdown and switch between them. And then one day the dropdown was gone and I was like, what the hell? Like I can't switch into build mode anymore. And I went online and I posted a question on the Webflow forum about it. Someone had already done it. And then now if you just click on the top left, like the main menu W button, it can go switch role. And I was like, okay, well.

1:01:52Finn Dollimore: That's like where it was before, but it's behind another menu now. And so I find that when Webflow changes these things, it can throw me off. So no, I don't have a massive opinion about how they could make components better. I think it's pretty decent, to be honest. Framer has their own component system, and I think it is also very strong. I like how they have done their components, too. But yeah, not a super strong opinion from me about the UI for components.

1:02:17Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah. But well, you are obviously using the Lumos extension that closes the tabs in the component properties. So that's one thing that could be native in the properties panel, for example. But yeah, I want to, I want to like, change gears towards more like soft topics, but do you have still something to say about UI or coding or these hard topics?

1:02:41Finn Dollimore: I think we can go into soft up because I'm keen to explore this as well.

1:02:45Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah, it's always great to nerd out the framework stuff never gets old and it's always evolving but I'm curious especially about your like speaking gigs So how did you end up doing? Doing like those speaking engagements and do you still do those and if someone wants to do those, how should they approach it?

1:03:10Finn Dollimore: Great topic. So I'm actually going to be at an event in two days. I'm not speaking as like a keynote or anything like that. Someone reached out to me on LinkedIn asking about an AI, like how we're AI, whatnot. And I said, we're switching to an AI first work thought antler. She had some of our, know, basically one of the strategies that we're going to be using is basically having a ticket gets created for like a bug fix and that will automatically be fed through this workflow where it's like ticket comes into Slack, goes to Claude uses that as a brief to build a fix for that feature or a fix for that bug. And then it will create a pull request and basically ask to merge it to the code base. Gets reviewed by a developer. And then that way you can kind of automate your bug fixes with just AI, which is really cool.

1:04:02Finn Dollimore: So basically, this isn't just for Antler like everyone is starting to do this now. I shared that process. I gave some value in terms of like, hey, here's what we're doing. And then she said, hey, look, we're running an event. Do you want to join a panel? I was like, okay. So that's just like a real world example of how you can get a speaking gig is if that person believes you have some value to share, then they might just invite you to their event. At this point, I didn't even know there was an event. She was just asking me a question. I was like, you know, sometimes I, you know, will help people. They ask me things, but don't block my inbox, please. Yeah.

1:04:37Janne Parri: You

1:04:38Finn Dollimore: So, okay. Back to your question, how to get speaking gigs. Well, first, let's talk about why you might want to get speaking gigs because it comes down to social proof. If people see that you're speaking on a stage, it could be like a picture of you on a stage talking with no one in the crowd, but just like you holding a microphone, you could just, you could stage it. It would still make you look like you have something useful to say or that you have a reputation. So it really comes down to this, that if you speak at events, people going to naturally see you more as an authority. The truth is there are so many webflow developers and

1:05:14Finn Dollimore: Designers who are better than me. I'm not even that particularly talented but because I have spoken at events a lot of people will believe I am you know world-class or really really really good already talented but that's just the illusion of being on a stage right and having a microphone in your hand it almost plugs in the same way to YouTube videos if someone sees you talking on a video it builds authority that's the word I'm looking for it builds authority and that's a really key part of the sales process. If you're applying for a job, whether that's full time, like me working at Antler or with multiple clients, they really want to feel like you have the authority to make good decisions for them and offer them value. So that's why you should want to get speaking gigs. And it also gives you lots of visibility. So if you do get invited to a speaking gig,

1:06:02Finn Dollimore: Make sure you get photos and videos of you there. I've asked someone to come to the event, just take a picture of me on the stage basically. And I'm be with other people there, it's just a panel. But it'll probably go on my portfolio one day, or it's just, it's in the photo bank so that when I'm building a page in my portfolio or I'm making a LinkedIn post, I can use it in some way. It's very, very useful. So. How can we get speaking gigs? I've pretty much got all of my speaking gigs through my YouTube channel. So if you create content, that's how people can discover you. And obviously speaking, right? You're talking, you're speaking just like on a video. If someone connects with the way you speak on video, they're like, well, maybe this person can speak at my event because they know how to speak. They also have an idea of

1:06:46Finn Dollimore: Know the vibe you have, people can vibe check you from watching your videos. It's quiet to vibe check someone from an email. But what I found when I was freelancing was that a lot of my clients weren't I didn't need to sell them too much because they had seen some of my videos and they were like, okay, I kind of like Finn, I just want to find the right price. But I already know I want to work with him. So get into content also really helped my sales process. So biggest tip, if you want to get on stage and do events, it's a great idea. Start making content, start sharing content. And you could even do what you're doing, like start your own podcast or start your own event that you're going to speak at. And because people will want to come into your event if they can get visibility. So if you can create some kind of event that's going to bring people together, could be a meetup. You can kind of scale that eventually and start getting bigger names in.

1:07:35Finn Dollimore: And then you speak, you might be hosting the event, for example. So I'd just like to give an example. One of the speaking events that I got, one of the biggest ones was at, I flew to Melbourne from, I was in new Zealand at the time, I flew to Melbourne to partake in the conference that Ryan Haywood was running. He's like the main frame, one of the main frame of guys. And so there was a web design workshop. It was quite funny because it was sponsored by Framer, but I didn't know that. So my talk was on Webflow or like Webflow things. I was like, that was maybe like, if I had known it was sponsored by Framer, maybe I wouldn't have mentioned Webflow so much. So I hope that I didn't kind of spoil it for Ryan in that way. Because straight after me, the Framer guy was

1:08:21Finn Dollimore: Giving his talk about Framer, is quite funny. But no, it was all good in the end. So that was the web design in person meetup. And then there was this front row conference, which was a live webinar that I was speaking at kind of like this. It was online. So I went there to do these two talks and Ryan had, he just emailed me and he said, look, I've seen some of your videos. I'd like to get you to come to this event and I made the effort to go there because it's worth its weight in gold. Any footage of you at an event is really builds a lot of authority, builds your personal brand. You should always do it if you can. Did I answer your question about how to get events?

1:09:01Janne Parri: Well maybe we could riff about like how to get the first event. Well you mentioned like the content is obviously a good thing and you kind of have to have something to start the conversation and give some value. There should be probably some sort of topic that you are known for. Would you agree?

1:09:23Finn Dollimore: Yeah, I've actually got a good story about this. This is a great, this is, I'm glad I remember this. So one of the first podcasts I went on was with one of my clients, my ex clients. This is a couple of years ago now. And he had, he had a business and it wasn't a podcasting business, but his business had a podcast. And I didn't really take much notice of that. Was like, okay, we're going to be doing this new site and part of that site is going to have the podcast CMS. So I was like, okay, I'm to build that out. And then it got to negotiating the price and he undercut me a little bit in the price that I wanted. And I was like, hmm, I wanted X amount. He said, look, X is my top. He wanted to get a good deal. So I was like, okay, well, how can I make this work? And I had this great idea and I was like, I was like, will accept the lower price if I can guest on your podcast. And

1:10:12Janne Parri: You

1:10:13Finn Dollimore: He just said yes. I was like, I was like, holy shit. I was like, we only tend to think of value in terms of money all the time, but value exists in so many other ways. One really great form of value is visibility. In fact, what, where do businesses spend a massive part of their budget on marketing? What is marketing? It's just visibility. So really visibility is money is visibility. There are, I would encourage anyone listening to think what are more ways that I can trade in value with my clients or my employer that go past just money because there are some times where your client might just not have enough money to pay for, you your price. Think about other ways they can pay you. And one of the great ones is visibility.

1:10:59Finn Dollimore: So this is what I did without knowing it, is I said, hey, look, I'm willing to do the site, but I want to go on your podcast. And then I did go on the podcast and it went well. He was asking me questions and his podcast is interviewing startup founders from Silicon Valley. So a lot of those people that went on have built companies worth tens of millions of dollars. And then in amongst them, there's just Finn Dollimore, this Webflow developer guy who hasn't built anything, but just asked to be on the podcast and made this trade. So that's kind of a funny

1:11:30Janne Parri: Well.

1:11:31Finn Dollimore: Way to get it potentially.

1:11:32Janne Parri: Yeah, that's a good story. Obviously, like some people do not like the visibility thing as a payment, but that advice usually comes from the stand that visibility is the only thing that the person gets. But when you already have money and you are not in a tough situation that you have to pay the bills tomorrow, you can like think of, otherwise you could get the payment. And obviously, again, there are different types and amounts of visibility, like your podcast example was probably very, very good for you. But then there could be a small mom and pops shop that wants to put you on their Instagram page for the whole.

1:12:20Janne Parri: Like website payment that might not be that good of a deal. But one topic I want to pick from there was the meetup thing, like hosting your own meetup. That could be like a good like short code or a way to get recognized, especially in locally. I have talked this thing about this thing too, on the show that we do not have a proper meetup in. In Finland, but hopefully at some point I get something out of myself and a couple of friends. Yeah, do you have been around the world? Have you seen like many meetups and what do you think what makes a good meetup?

1:13:00Finn Dollimore: Yeah. Well, community events really are a big part of the Webflow industry. One of them, when I was at Webflow conference, I think the word community was said so many times I was about to pass out, but it was just, one of my favorite events I've been to in the Webflow community, aside from the Webflow conference was actually the Finsweet meetup in Barcelona. I still wear that Finsweet t-shirt. To bed, it's my pajama top, the free t-shirt that they gave out, because it was really comfortable. If Joe is listening to this, that is like one of the most worn t-shirts I have. But yeah, so I really enjoyed that Finsweet event because, you know, we spend all day working, right? And at the end of the day, we want to go to events sometimes to learn more about

1:13:47Finn Dollimore: What we do to learn new skills, but ultimately to just make friends and have relatable moments. And, you know, I had a call with the product manager at Antler today and were just having this talk, not even about like skills, it was just like, isn't it so annoying when this happens? And he's like, you get that too. Just like when you can say something to someone else and they work in a similar role to you can kind of connect, right? So a lot of the times that these events happen, there is the aspect of the technical side where you're coming to learn or teach something, but there's also the side where you just want to make friends and with people who do what you do. So this is, I've seen events used in a few ways. So there's like the Webflow meetups. They've been done in lots of cities around the world where like a Webflow partner can just do an official Webflow meetup and get a bunch of people together in a cafe.

1:14:36Finn Dollimore: Framer was doing them like Ryan Haywood he's a cool guy to follow if you if anyone's looking at content or doing this kind of meetup thing I think he's doing a tour of Europe where they're going through a bunch of cities to teach Framer I'm pretty sure that they do it like a cafe or in some kind of event place and they just bring people together designers who are learning frame. So you could also run your own events and you know build kind of a personal brand that way as well. But I haven't done that myself, so I'm hesitant to give any tips about it. But the event today, like literally right before I came home to do this podcast, I was at a cursor AI event who was one of my friends runs. Yeah, the event went really well and basically just got a bunch of people in the same room who were interested to learn about building products with AI and...

1:15:27Finn Dollimore: Everyone was having a great time having, know, Fanta, Coca-Cola, pizza, just building stuff. And it was really, really fun. So I think events are also a great thing to do if you want to build a community and build more of a personal brand. Yeah.

1:15:42Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah, that is, that is totally true. And I feel like nowadays when we have all the things happening on the internet, there's a different kind of value that you get from an in-person event. But, yeah, I'll have to let you go at some point, but I still want to ask you have mentioned personal brand a couple of times. What do you think? Where is your personal brand heading or where do you try to direct that.

1:16:10Finn Dollimore: Ooh, great question. I've got time for a couple more questions if you have others as well, but the personal brand one is a really interesting topic. I've been really confused recently, like, I'm gonna be honest.

1:16:22Janne Parri: Me too.

1:16:23Finn Dollimore: Like, just with my career and what kind of content I should be producing. I mean, if you look at my YouTube channel, I've posted in the last year, barely, maybe four videos, I've barely been posting because I've really been rethinking like what I'm posting about. One thing is tutorials are kind of dying because you can ask your AI to give an like fix your exact example or you can ask it your exact use case. So instead of making a YouTube video about how I, how you can build this filter system with Finsweet. Well, now if your AI has the context, it will tell you how to do it, but for your exact use case, right? So it's almost like

1:17:04Finn Dollimore: If you do a tutorial now, there's way less demand for that. So I've really been rethinking what kind of content do I want to produce? What kind of brand I want to produce? And I've landed on a type of content that I was very inspired by a another friend of mine, Huey, who's this extremely, I remember pronouncing his name right, Huey. He's from Vietnam, but I him here in Australia. This insanely talented person or like a fantastic developer, designer and content creator. And I was thinking for a while about making more cinematic case study type videos. And then he launched one and I was like, that's exactly the type of content that I want to become known for. So I've taken a break from content over the last year, but I'm about to ramp up content again, getting more into producing.

1:17:51Finn Dollimore: Not so much a high volume of videos, more quality, less videos, more quality, more cinematic. And they won't be tutorials in the sense like here's how to do this really specific thing in Webflow or on code. It's going to be more like a story. Like here's how I approach the design process. I'm going to do I'm to build this app for a fake client, but I'm going to make it really cinematic and creative, almost like a movie. Put good music to it. And if you want to watch a really good example of this, it's one of Hue's most recent videos. It was a case study for an architectural firm and it's just absolutely really well done. So that's kind of the way that I want to take my content in the future. In terms of my personal brand,

1:18:35Finn Dollimore: I really don't know. Like, your brand serves a purpose, right? For me, that was just getting me hired at a company that I wanted to work at. And that's happened with Antler. So I think I've ultimately achieved my personal brand goals to get hired. And I think now it's just becoming good at making cinematic content and really going into this new role, which is becoming an AI software engineer, which is really the pathway that I'm going down. And so making those videos about AI is very different because when you prompt an AI, anyone can do that. So it's not really useful to make a video about. And so I said, can you make the button here? Can you make it look like this? It's like, anyone can do that. So that's not really good content anymore, showing them technical things.

1:19:17Finn Dollimore: So now the content is going to be around how good of a storyteller are you? So now I'm going to go more into story focused content, showing my like here's what I would do if I was getting started in content creation now. What I would do is I would do fake client projects and I would film it in a really cinematic way that shows my design thinking, how I approach problems. You don't have to worry too much about the technical stuff. Just show the way that you think, the way that you work and what your values are. And that's what's gonna really attract people to wanna work with you. Before...

1:19:48Finn Dollimore: You would show technical things to kind of attract clients who are looking to do, how do I do this in Webflow? I Google that, I find your video. Okay, hi this guy, because he knows it better than me. Well, now I can ask Claude and Claude isn't going to show you a video. It's just going to tell the person how to do it, right? So now it's going to more story and entertainment based content, which is now going to be my new focus.

1:20:09Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah. Again, there's lots to unpack there. Firstly, I have seen those huge ears. I will put the link in the description to find the guy. I have seen his videos and they are awesome. When I saw the first video, I was kind of like, okay, now I cannot get this out of my head and this is like the bar I should reach for my videos. I kind of... Would love to do more videos like regular old YouTube long form videos, not like the podcast, but just like, as you said, more story-based videos. And I kind of feel what you were probably saying too, that in this world of and time of AI, what is still relevant are like the

1:20:59Janne Parri: Stories, the opinions and the personality behind the content. Yeah, tutorials might be done hopefully someday. We do not even have to ask the tutorials from the AIs because everything can be just done by the AI, but we will probably always be interested in other people's opinions. So that's quite a safe bet in my mind, would you agree?

1:21:22Finn Dollimore: Yes. And if you, if you post a video that's about the way you think you're the way you approach problem solving, these are topics that don't go away with time. It's always, it's a timeless piece of content. If you talk about here's how to build this specific setup and Webflow, there's a chance that in a year's time, that's not going to be relevant anymore. And ideally your videos are an investment. You put in a lot of effort into making a really good video. You don't want it to be losing value in a year's time. You want it to be, you know, retaining its value, still getting views. So that kind of content that it entertains, that shows how you think in an engaging way. And when you build something really beautiful and cool, that's the kind of content. So don't be afraid to jump in and build fake projects for clients. Film it like a movie. Tell a story of how you, why you made that decision. Make it dramatic.

1:22:13Finn Dollimore: You do a bit where like, I don't know, you snap your pen or something, you throw your, like, just don't be afraid to make it kind of a bit funny or a bit different because that's what keeps people interested. And it's cool.

1:22:26Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah, and then there's the aspect of short form videos like nowadays quite a lot of like small tutorial small tips are like perfect for short form thing it might not be a good idea to do a long form video about that because the short form clip would get more reach and well if it's gonna like be a short lifespan video anyways you could like make it quicker but yeah there's so many so many things to consider content-wise too okay Finn I know that it's evening back there's one weird section at the end of

1:23:06Janne Parri: Episode but before we go there if people want to check you out see your videos maybe even contact you where should they go

1:23:15Finn Dollimore: Sure. I can go to my website, finndalamore.com. That's kind of a good starting point. And if you're interested in my videos, then you can go to my YouTube channel. I started a second YouTube channel that I'm probably going to delete at some point. But if you type my name to Google, there'll be two channels and I'm going to be going back to my main channel. It ties in exactly what I was saying before. I was making sort of a more technical video, I made a Webflow and map box cloneable and I made a video about it. So if you're building something with a map, feel free to check out my video on that and as a free cloneable. Yeah, so my YouTube channel and then my social media that I'm most active on professionally is my LinkedIn. So you can also just search for me on LinkedIn. And yeah, that's where I post videos from time to time. I'm going to be more active on my YouTube channel. I'm going to be posting

1:24:05Finn Dollimore: Probably hopefully a video every like one to two months, which sounds like a long time, but they're going to be more cinematic videos, like really well thought out. So

1:24:14Janne Parri: Hell yeah.

1:24:15Finn Dollimore: I'm to spend more time into making content. And then I think on LinkedIn, I'm going to be posting more just like thought pieces. Like I posted one last week. So if anyone listens to this, it'll probably be a few months in advance, but you can check my LinkedIn for some kind of more opinion. Conversational types of content and videos.

1:24:33Janne Parri: Yeah. Actually one question about LinkedIn. How do you feel videos perform in LinkedIn? This is kind of a selfish question, but because sometimes I just post a selfie with a short caption and that does like wildly better than any of my video clips and such. So do you have any insights on videos on LinkedIn?

1:24:54Finn Dollimore: Yeah, for me, it's hard to tell. I don't post enough to really track it. And if I was tracking the data, I would probably have more information. I feel like the videos that get the most, well, the posts that get the most content engagement, I post on a Tuesday. So if you post it at the end of the week, people will be on LinkedIn, but generally, I find the post is getting likes for about three, maybe four days afterwards. So if you post on a Tuesday, that means it will get probably the most engagement possible. But on a Monday, people are starting work. So they're generally checking LinkedIn less, I think. To go back to your question, are videos some way better? I've kind of thought, I've seen people say that text is better for LinkedIn.

1:25:39Finn Dollimore: I just post videos because that's how I prefer to communicate. I will do the video first and then I'll write out the post based on the video. But the video is always my primary form of communication because I'm very slow at writing and I'm more of a talker. So yeah, that's what I would say. And it's good that your selfies would do well as well. Maybe I should try that.

1:26:03Janne Parri: Yeah, every now and then it's good to post some sort of selfie. Okay, towards the last section, do you have any idea what it would be about?

1:26:14Finn Dollimore: Like quick fire questions maybe.

1:26:16Janne Parri: That's a good guess, but no, this is great. It will be a surprise to you. And

1:26:21Finn Dollimore: Totally surprised.

1:26:22Janne Parri: What follows is a funny little Finnish section at the end. So I will give you a Finnish saying, I will translate that to English. And your job is to tell me what it what does it mean, basically. So are you ready for that?

1:26:39Finn Dollimore: Well, my name is Finn, so I might have some kind of, you know, unique advantage, I think. So.

1:26:45Janne Parri: Yeah, I'm hoping for that. So yeah, your saying firstly in Finnish is kuin perseeseen ammuttu karhu. And in English that would be like a bear shot in the ass. So what does it mean if I say that, okay, that person is like a bear shot in the ass.

1:27:04Finn Dollimore: Can you say it in Finnish again?

1:27:08Janne Parri: Like a bear ass

1:27:10Finn Dollimore: I speak some languages, but that was very, very difficult to say. Bear shot in the ass. That is funny. It's funny how every culture has like these sayings that mean completely nonsense if you look at it objectively, but because you're from the country, know, a bear shot on the ass. Can you give me five seconds to think about this?

1:27:29Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah, no worries. But I can give you a hint that this is quite straightforward. So there is not like big hidden meaning or weird logic behind that. So hopefully that helps.

1:27:40Finn Dollimore: Well, I got to use my critical thinking. My critical thinking is severely diminished because of AI right now. I'm already reaching for the world to like, well, I would think about it like this, the bear shot in the ass, the bear is very powerful. It's big. It's like very scary, but he got shot in the ass because he was outsmarted. So he got shot from behind, right? So is it when you take out a really big, don't know, like a competitor or someone who's strong? But you did it from behind, like you did it sneakily.

1:28:10Janne Parri: That's quite a good

1:28:11Finn Dollimore: Got no idea.

1:28:13Janne Parri: Logic. But yeah, it's even simpler than that. It basically means that someone is angry or irritated. So they are like a bear shot in the ass. I would imagine that if

1:28:24Finn Dollimore: Alright.

1:28:25Janne Parri: You shoot a bear in the ass, they would not be happy for that. So that is just

1:28:32Finn Dollimore: Awesome.

1:28:33Janne Parri: A funny little finish thing I have to do at the end.

1:28:39Finn Dollimore: I'd love to visit one day. I've got a friend of mine, Johannes, I was flatmating with him in Barcelona a few years ago, but he's from Helsinki. And one other finished thing I'm wearing this, maybe you can tell me how to pronounce this. Do know what this is?

1:28:53Janne Parri: Is it the aura ring? Yeah, is probably totally fine to pronounce it in the English way. They would probably prefer it, but if it was pronounced in a straight Finnish way, it would be Aura. Yeah. Yeah, you are good with the rolling R. That's the thing in the Finnish language that tricks quite many. But okay, Finn, thanks so much for being a guest on the show. This was a blast, a great nerdy episode. And for all the listeners and watchers, we will see you in the next one. Bye.