Enterprise, AI, andWhere Webflow Is Headed

0:20Janne Parri: Okay, Nathan, so you are in Webflow. So could you please tell us what is going on with AI and Webflow right now?

0:29Nathan Huening: Yeah, that's the question on everyone's mind, isn't it? There's a lot of discussion. We're trying to figure out what does a successful Webflow look like in an AI world. I think there's ⁓ kind of like in Avengers where, ⁓ you know, Dr. Strange is like, there's one path here out of 50 million or something, you know. ⁓ I think about how there's this future where Webflow can leverage all of its strengths and bring the benefits of this workflow. And it sounds to me, like from what I hear from leadership and some of the product work that's undergoing, some of the product work that's happening right now, that we're getting closer to that future. And so my view, and to keep it really simple, is ultimately everything that you can do in Webflow from clicking a button,

1:22Nathan Huening: So inside the designer, inside the dashboard, everything that has a UI surfaced element should have an API. So I should be able to hook in. And this is something that a lot of people have been pushing for many years, is that we should expose more and more. When you see the designer apps, we didn't used to have those three years ago or four years ago, that you can actually be inside the designer and manipulate the canvas and do these things. And that's that same. Initiative of exposing that API so that you can hook in programmatically inside the dashboard, I can programmatically create a new project. I can create it from a template, you know, just all from the command line using the API. So what this means though, is that effort has just been accelerated. So if you think

2:05Nathan Huening: That everything inside the tool should have an API exposed, that means an agent can then act on it. So at that point I can say, make these changes, do these things. The flip side of that benefit is, anything that you expose an API for to an agent, a human can do too. So ultimately, it's a win-win. It makes the product better if you're not using AI, and it makes the product better if you are using AI. And candidly, this is something we should have been investing in more for years anyway.

2:35Nathan Huening: And so I think it's just kind of accelerated that to the point where if I can expose the entire surface of the product, then I'm just using Webflow at the command line, but using a chat bot instead of a terminal. And so that's, think, a key part of what's happening, a key part of why I think Webflow will be successful. And yeah, some of those investments, particularly around components. Which historically have not had an API. It's been a long time request. I am hopeful that you could create, modify components, props, same thing exposed via the API. So you're going to see some investments at the MCP level, at the API level that I think will make Webflow really valuable, really successful and candidly more fun to use in an AI world.

3:19Janne Parri: That is so beautiful. I'm for those things. What does your crystal ball say? Because if everything is accessible and we can use the MCPs and such, doesn't that change the competition and the landscape? What will be the differentiating factors of Webflow in the future if you just use? ⁓ some sort of chatbot and it can do well Webflow sites, but it can do whatever else it can do

3:48Nathan Huening: Yeah, that's an excellent question. You're right, know, everyone's right to, you be thinking about this. Like is there, I see so many Reddit, you know, posts like it Webflow's done and Webflow's over and that's fine. ⁓ I, it's always just, it's never an either or it's always a both and right. So like, I'm old enough to remember before there was an internet. ⁓ And so like, internet comes along. There's no more books. It was like, yeah, there's still lots of books, man. Yeah. Like her. Know, TV is dead. There's lots of good TV. So there's never, it's always additive, right? It's never replacing and yeah, things change and transform. Where I see, and let me give you like a sound bite that you can use is that Webflow is gonna become Lovable faster than Lovable can become Webflow. I'll just be candid.

4:31Nathan Huening: So like the really hard problems to solve. That have the most value, Webflow has been investing in for the last five years with its enterprise program. So you think about what is the problem you're trying to solve? What is the job to be done? And is it just, I put in a really well-crafted prompt and I one-shot a restaurant website for my client with hours and menu? Like, no, that's, we solved that 20 years ago. Like, the real problem is what happens when you have 50 people? Inside the designer. And they all need different levels of permissions and workflows and approvals. And you have staging and you have backups and you have reversals and you have SSO login that ties into your auth. You have SCIM provisioning, have ISO certifications, have SOC 2 certifications, you have...

5:21Nathan Huening: Someone that you can pick up a phone and call when something goes wrong, like those are the hard problems to solve. And if you think that's like, I have this technology that is just gonna instantly create a business, it doesn't work that way. Like the really unglamorous problems to solve is what Webflow has been working on. So Webflow is gonna incorporate the AI and guess what? We have lots of good examples, lots of good models of, hey, I would love to be able to use the agent that I wanna use. And I wanna reduce the number of abstractions. Like, why you can spin up a Webflow clone like Timothy Ricks in a couple of nights or whatever is because he's just manipulating

5:56Nathan Huening: HTML directly. And Webflow's code base is not, you're not just writing HTML, you know, inside that giant React app. Webflow's code base is approximately the same number of lines of code as Android OS. So there's a lot of moving parts here. And you know, there's like a custom programming language that we use internally. And so there's like multiple levels of abstraction, but the answer to that, I think is you need security. You need the hosting and yeah, you can say, I, yeah, I use Claude Code or codex or whatever. And then I just deployed over cell from GitHub. And it's like, yeah, it's fine, man. Let me know when PepsiCo calls you up and says, hey, we're going to run our next campaign on that setup.

6:38Nathan Huening: They're gonna laugh you out of the room, my friends. So yeah, so it's fine at a certain level, a certain scale. But I'm reminded of in 2015, the VP of technology at Netflix. Know, back then Netflix was just sending DVDs by mail. And he was quoted as saying, yeah, like we're gonna become HBO faster than HBO can become us. Like we're gonna invest in original programming. And then HBO is gonna try and become a streaming, you know, and yeah, they solved the hard problem. Of the streaming, it turns out that the original programming part, you know, we got Hollywood, man, I can call up a director, you know, so, just ask yourself, what are the problems that you're trying to solve? What is the business value that you're delivering? And I think just in terms of like, yeah, I one-shotted some rounded corners, that's not a problem that clients are trying to solve, man. So yeah, I think that there's no future that Webflow doesn't.

7:28Nathan Huening: Succeeded this because we've got a lot of smart people working on this that are using this in their personal lives you know, we're all using it at home. We're all using it in our you know, like I have three apps that I'm working on right now just for fun because I can and so we're bringing all of that you know into the product and there's a lot of directives at leadership, you know to make sure that we are up to speed individually as a company as employees, you know So yeah, that's sort of like a ramble II high level overview of what the future might look like in terms of Webflow's role, but there's room, that's a big table, man. A lot of room for everybody.

8:01Janne Parri: Oh, yeah. Yeah, totally we're getting deep. Before we go any further, I guess we have to do little intros so my name is Janne Parri and you are listening to webflow and friends podcast and today my guest is none other than nathan Huening so nathan has been a web developer since 2007 he joined webflow in 2021 he actually has one of the top 10 oldest Webflow accounts. So that's something and ⁓ These days Nathan is on the enterprise team. He has helped to start the ACE program He has worked with the biggest clients Webflow has so Nathan to my understanding your role is a lot more than just talking with big clients. So do you have a official title and what are your

8:55Janne Parri: Responsibilities at Webflow.

8:57Nathan Huening: Yeah, my official title is lead Solutions engineer, which is a chunky mouthful that doesn't describe anything at all. The title solutions Engineer, or sometimes sales Engineer, and you can run to LinkedIn and search it, is pretty common for like SaaS companies, technology companies. When you have a sales team, the sales people you hire might be really, really good at sales. And they can... Because a sales cycle can be like some of mine are six, 12, 18 months long and 30 people got a sign off and legal and it's a huge deal, and these are people who really good at this. But they don't know technology. They don't know the product. They don't know web development. So at Webflow, like a lot of other companies, the salesperson that we call an account executive partners with a subject matter expert.

9:44Nathan Huening: Or like a consultant that we call a solutions engineer and this person is technical. And so I come from a web development background. A lot of my colleagues come from a web development backgrounds, but a of my colleagues were SEs, that's what SE is, solutions engineer, and SE at Adobe, at Figma, at Dropbox, at Stripe, at HubSpot. So a lot of these companies have this role and it's like a partner team thing. And so we both go in. And the, you know, the AE is sort of calling the shots, but like when a company comes along and says, hey, we're thinking about adopting Webflow. We're to be replacing site core or Adobe enterprise manager or WordPress or Drupal or Contentful, whatever it is. What are some of the downstream implications of that? Am I going to have to fire people, hire people? How long will it take? What about these other integrations that need to come into here? Like we're using Salesforce and.

10:33Nathan Huening: Like what's going happen and a lot of the people you're talking to are themselves not very technical and they have a lot of fear. Is my, you know, my entire business runs on this website. It's like, I'm going to break. And so you kind of navigate that journey with them looking for potential pitfalls, technical pitfalls, you know, making sure they're sourcing it appropriately. I make a lot of introductions to our Webflow enterprise partners because they're like, yeah, we'd love to move this within the next six to 12 months over to Webflow. So I'm recommending Hal from Candid Leap or I don't know who other enterprise partners you've had on your podcast, but we have a network and enterprise partners bring us leads. We bring them leads. It's a real nice kind of back and forth. And so we can help each other's business grow in that way. But in a very broad strokes, the solutions engineer is like the technical resource in the room when you're trying to figure out if Webflow is a good fit at scale for large companies.

11:21Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah. I'm obviously curious. We started with the AI. Does the topic of AI like surface in those tables? This is a big thing for enterprise clients.

11:31Nathan Huening: It's weird, there's no middle grounds with enterprise folks with AI. It's very much polarizing... So I can just tell you, in the last even two weeks, some of the conversations I've had, some of them are like, we love Webflow, we want it, we'll sign ⁓ next week, but you have to guarantee there's no AI anywhere in the product, nowhere touching anything. And you have to sign this waiver that says there won't be any if you... Find out that there's any IE or breach of contract and we're, big trouble. ⁓ A lot of companies want nothing to do with it for all sorts of reasons. ⁓ Others, ⁓ I literally last week got a conversation. Like, I got a special budget for new ⁓ software acquisition, you know, like new tools for, guess these companies are huge. Janne, mean, like they're, know, it's, I mean, can, some of the logos I can probably share companies you've heard of, right? Big international companies.

12:19Nathan Huening: And they're like, I basically, if it has AI in it, I can buy it. So like, tell me what AI exists in Webflow and I can just buy it. So it's very much these two polar ends here. So part of, and it's really interesting too, because it's like my job, again, like my salesperson colleague, you doesn't know the product the way that I do. And so I'll be like, okay, if you wanna know how AI. What it looks like in the product. Like, well, so there's the AI site builder, there's the generator, there's the AI assistant, the design assistant, there's localization when you translate, that's using AI, machine language. If you want to, our AI optimized tool, like if you're doing testing personalization, uses machine learning. So it's sort of like, I'm walking you through all the different ways that the tool incorporates it. And once we sort of stepped back and looked at it, we're like, geez, we actually have this in a lot of areas of the product that we sort of didn't even realize.

13:10Nathan Huening: And then that's where some of the branding of like AI first, know, like everybody's adopting that same kind of, I remember when Airtable did it. And I was just like, everybody's eye rolled. It's like, oh, come on. It's a spreadsheet, man. But it's like, you know, there's a game you got to play in Silicon Valley and it's kind of unfortunate. And we can talk about, talk about that if you want to, but yeah. And the Webflow, the same thing. A lot of us were just like AI first. But anyway, it's a new world and we're all figuring out how to navigate it together.

13:40Janne Parri: Totally. Everybody through the small to the biggest players. I'm kind of interested about those enterprise clients because I live in the smaller, clients. What are like the main things that big companies. Come to Webflow and what is the competition looking like at that level?

14:01Nathan Huening: Yeah, excellent question. So I'll say, let me give you a quick high level answer first and then we'll drill down into the particulars of why customers choose enterprise and what that looks like. I would say probably the genesis of our enterprise program, was in 2020, there were no salespeople at Webflow for the first 10 years of the company, maybe more. 15 years or whatever. And that's because like Slack, you just, go to the slack.com, you put in your credit card, sign up and Webflow sells itself. Slack sells itself, right? There's a tipping point where the Slacks, of whom I have many colleagues that came from Slack, you know, Airtable, Notion, Figma, there's a, like, you reach a certain point where you kind of have to go enterprise.

14:48Nathan Huening: And we can talk about why that isn't what that looks like, but it's a, it's a common trajectory. In Silicon Valley, they call it product led growth companies, PLG companies, where it's like, you have this retail and forgive me, like what you know of his Webflow, we call either like the self serve, like you go in and you just put in your own credit card. Like, don't know when help no salesperson helps you check out. So it's self-servable retail and then like that enterprise kind of level. And so it's a common pattern, right? Like what flows not unique in this. And let's say that you are, I don't know, Campbell's Soup company. And somebody, you hire somebody and that person used Webflow personally or at the previous company and like they want to spin up an initiative for like a campaign or landing page of a subdomain or something. And then like Campbell's IT infosec or whatever is just like, wait, whoa, what is this unapproved tool here? Like we did not say this was okay, like, you cause that's very common, right?

15:44Nathan Huening: And they're like, we like it and if we need to use it has to go through a whole vetting process. And man, some of these companies, they're just like, they're grilling us over the details of our security practices internally and our this and like, is my data gonna be secure? And so a lot of where Webflow Enterprise came from was people like the yous and mes, because I was a Webflow developer for many years, like, bringing it with us into companies. And then the companies, the huge companies, Dell Computer or Yahoo or whatever, being like, is this? You weren't approved to this. Then, now we have these, like who do I talk to at Webflow about this? And Webflow's like, we don't have any, like we gotta

16:26Nathan Huening: Find somebody to talk to this person, right? The VP of technology at whatever company. And so they have a lot of requirements that are very typical at that scale, right? So they're like, well, I need to know that you're, have these certifications, I need to know that I can use my SSL cert, I need custom headers, I need uptime guarantees, because right now Webflow, if it goes down, sorry, it's a bummer, but other companies, no, no, no, I need a contract that says if it goes down, I get a refund, that kind of thing. So these are all things that then just, okay, I guess we got it. We can either, at this point, just decide, no, we're just gonna not go after those.

17:02Nathan Huening: Customers or we do go after them, but then it's going to require all of this internal building of finance teams and security and we have to scale up whole new product team. So you reach that inflection point, have to decide, are you going to go after that? Because it's coming. People want to use Webflow at these large companies or not. And of course we decided that, yeah, we're going to go after it. So that's kind of where it starts for a lot of these companies.

17:25Janne Parri: Definitely want to know.

17:25Nathan Huening: Sorry, I didn't answer your question of like what they're actually looking for. You want me to still finish that?

17:29Janne Parri: Go on, go on.

17:31Nathan Huening: So a good example, again, think of Webflow as like, it's you working in the tool and then you hand it off and they have one or two people that are making the updates in build mode or editing the CMS or whatever. But some of these companies, man, they're like, I'll need 60 seats, because we're going to have that many people working in the tool. And as you know, for many years, Webflow was a single use. You want someone else to have design control, you got to hand it like a hot potato. That's not gonna work, man. So, you know, it's like, obviously the multiplayer, like the real-time collab, that was, you long time coming. And that's not enterprise only, but there are a lot of enterprise only features around things like page branching, where it works more like conventional software development, where I branch off a page, I do my development work. And then if my teammates are publishing, my work doesn't go live. That's really important for them.

18:20Nathan Huening: There's approval workflows where it's like, need to flag Janne to go and look at my work before granular access controls. It's like, can publish to staging but not production. I can publish to these collections but not these collections, these pages but not these pages, these little cows but not these little cows. So a lot of that really fine-tuned granular stuff, most retail folks, they just don't care. I just don't need it. And because I don't need it, I don't wanna pay for it. But if you do need it... You will pay for it, but man, it's expensive to spin up all those features that maybe only five or 10 % of your customers need, but for them it's non-negotiable, like they have to have it. So that's where you have to be like, yeah, like we'd love to create these features for everyone, but man, they were expensive to develop and Janne doesn't care about those things. But some of them filter their way down to self-serve, right? And that's the hope, but so collaboration, to answer your question, collaboration, know, a lot of people in the tool, enterprise solves that, security.

19:13Nathan Huening: So the fact that like we have these certifications like SOC 2 type 2 compliance is an international certification it's very very expensive to maintain. It's a whole company level. It's like how I use my laptop every day I could be in breach of SOC 2 compliance and so that's you know that again but if you don't need it, why would you need to pay for it? But it's very expensive and then again like that I say the people to like when you're an enterprise customer you get a dedicated human being that's your account manager that you can literally just slack Anytime you get dedicated enterprise support. You go into a different queue at three in the morning when your site is down, like, you get like a, an uptime guarantee. And then you also have like a technical resource, like a Webflow expert who will do audits of your site, performance reviews, best practices. Cause there's a lot of wrong ways to build a Webflow site. So you want to make sure that you are doing

20:00Nathan Huening: It well and succeeding and stuff. You know, software is cheap humans are expensive. So the fact that you get like dedicated human resources is a big part of what enterprise customers want. But again. You don't want to pay for that. So that's how that all goes.

20:13Janne Parri: That is so fascinating. I definitely want to know about why companies go towards this enterprise playbook. But before that, I kind of want to know how are those enterprise plans or workspaces structured? Are they always totally custom, just handpicked features, or is it on off if you are on the enterprise plan? You get all the features or what are the boundaries of the enterprise plans?

20:45Nathan Huening: Yeah, that's an excellent question. So at the workspace level, there's like a enterprise flag. So there's some differences there. And then at the individual site within there, cause you know, we have some enterprise customers, no joke, like a scale thing where they have 2,500 sites. And so again, like that's not a common problem. I think it's something that we can solve for and we can do it really well. Particularly because now with a lot of the investments in the shared libraries, particularly where you can have a components library and then you can promote it or share it to the workspace level that other projects can consume. And now with that auto push where you can make the change and automatically do it, that's solving some of our customers that are stupid high scale. That's a real thing. There's not really any site core doesn't solve that. Adobe doesn't solve that. WordPress doesn't solve that.

21:36Nathan Huening: So there's a lot of ways, architecturally even, that we approach this work. But to answer your question, so I would say for the most part, it is mostly like an all or nothing thing. Like it either is enterprise or it isn't. That individual site is or it isn't. And then there's some like, at the margins, you can kind of turn some things on and off, but for the most part, it's like a binary, yeah.

21:55Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah. And have you ever had a situation that a big enough client asks for a new feature and you start building it for just one client. Could that be possible?

22:10Nathan Huening: That's an excellent question. Not really. Me, as a solutions engineer, part of my job is when I'm on a call and it's either a new prospect, like not yet an enterprise customer, or it's an existing one, they'll say, we wish Webflow worked like this, or Sanity does this, can Webflow do that, or whatever. And I'll either say like either no we don't or we can't or it's like you can but we need this like third-party thing you know we can figure out a way like my like solutions engineer my job is to like I find a way like whatever I need to do to whatever pieces I need to put together. I will find a way that's the solution, but ultimately it's not like a one-off thing it's like I will log that as feedback like this customer really needs I'll give you a good example one thing that's been coming up a lot lately for me is I have three four five six seven projects

22:56Nathan Huening: And the CMS items are locked into each one. Well, I wanna be able to update a CMS item in this project and it updates in these three others. So sort of like shared libraries, but content not designed. So now we're thinking like, can we have this idea at the workspace level of like a shared DB? Something like that, right? Where it's sort of like all of the projects can sort of consume it. No joke, Janne Parri, like three times in the last two weeks that's come up. Four times maybe. So each time it does, I log it in Salesforce and then that goes into whatever confluence or Atlassian. And so basically every quarter, the product team will meet with someone from the sales team and be like, hey, let's review the product gaps that are coming in. And product development's really, really hard. I don't know how many of your listeners have either been PMS or wanna be PMS or worked with them in other companies, but choosing what to build, when, for whom.

23:48Nathan Huening: What to include, this is really hard, and believe me, when people bitch and moan on Reddit, we read every word.

23:52Janne Parri: You

23:53Nathan Huening: Like on Twitter, like, ⁓ I guarantee you, whatever complaint you have, someone's gotta get it to the product manager... To the PM, you know, like who's in charge of that pillar, and it makes them sad, you know, so, be nice, be nice to people. But the, ⁓ you know, ultimately, there's so many signals. So like the product team is like, okay, three times over the last year, we got this request, or, 50 times and we lost deals because of it. Like because we couldn't do components inside of a rich techs field like Sanity does, we lost these three deals worth $5 million or whatever. And so it's like, okay, it justifies this investment, but you need to have enough signal. And then there's like, you know, so there's that category of feedback. Then there's of course, you know, people on Reddit, then there's the ACE program are constantly submitting feedback. And so you have to like take

24:42Nathan Huening: All of this input and then try to decide, okay, how do we prioritize this? There's only so many engineers, there's only so much time. And you know, it's a complex software product and there's a lot of moving parts and so you do your best. It's a lot of really smart people who really care about the product, really doing their best. And I know it's frustrating for us internally too, sometimes the pace of development and the particular priorities, but because everybody has their pet. Like I have a list as long as my arm. If I could wave a wand, I want Webflow to fix this. Like one thing

25:08Janne Parri: You

25:08Nathan Huening: In particular is why don't we have like a native sorting and filtering feature? Why can't I, you know, it's just like, gotta use like JetBoost or Finsweet or you know, whatever. But you know, everything you work on is one, something else you're not working on. And that's where you just, you gotta try to use your best judgment.

25:25Janne Parri: That is so true. And as you said before, Webflow has gotten quite complex. So that's a huge code place. And I sometimes forget how many features there are. I'll be doing something on a designer and then I just remember, there's the localization or the optimize thing or whatever. Realize that someone has to make all of this like work together so there's a complexity that I can just watch in awe we kind of

25:57Nathan Huening: Yeah, and that's common. Again, it's really easy to like, can just Claude Code a thing, but it's hard. It's a complex product. Hard. And to be fair, there's a of legacy code that everyone's paying down tech debt. If you're like a Webflow clone, like DivHunt or Ycode or WeWeb or WebStudio, I there's dozens of these, right? Yeah, you don't have all that. You get to start fresh with modern. Tooling frameworks and stuff and so yeah, that's always part of the mix.

26:24Janne Parri: Yeah. Yeah. But we kind of, skipped over the enterprise playbook. So, is it true that big companies, like favor the enterprise clients from the perspective of us little guys, often seems that way, but obviously there's the positive side that sometimes those features can trickle down towards, but why is that and is it true that the enterprises are where the game is at?

26:54Nathan Huening: That's an excellent question. So I will give you some inside baseball here and kind of pull back the curtain

26:59Janne Parri: I'm

27:00Nathan Huening: And reveal why Silicon Valley makes these enterprise pivots because the short answer is they have to, whether they want to or not. And I'll explain why. Think, and again, and I didn't say this at the outset, let me just be clear so it's recorded that I'm not speaking for Webflow. I'm not Webflow leadership. All of my views represent the views of a single person. I'm in the company, so I'm privy to some conversations that I obviously can't disclose or share, but. Ultimately, I'm just sort of looking at the outside as you are. But that said... I will say there's a lot of enterprise customers are more profitable. I'll say that. And so it means I can staff up whole new design, development, engineering teams that I couldn't otherwise do. I can make investments. I can swing for the fences, big bets. I'll give you an example. I think our acquisition of Optimize, of Intellimize two years ago, the company Intellimize, which is now called Webflow Optimize.

27:47Nathan Huening: Our testing and personalization tool is best in the world. It is better than VWO, is better than Optimizely, it is better than A-B-Tasty, it is better than whatever Framers trying to cook up. We have a joke internally that you can easily know what Framers roadmap is. Just look at what Webflow released 18 months ago and you'll know what Framers roadmap is. But the idea that whatever number two is a distant second. It's been very profitable, successful. It unlocks a lot of opportunity for our community. Like Webflow practitioners and designers who make a living with Webflow, it's like, okay, you launched the site and it's like, now what? Just some content edits? Like, no, you can now staff up a CRO team and have like a retainer where you are managing their, cause you know, testing and personalization is not an exam that you pass. It's a garden that you weed. Like you gotta be on it all. So I just opened up some revenue opportunities for your agency that you didn't have before.

28:39Nathan Huening: Right? So there's no universe that Webflow makes an acquisition like that with, you know, a bunch of people paying 40 bucks a month. So, you know, the fact that now you could use that inside of Webflow is part of that. Localization again, I think our localization approach, compared to all the things, other competitors, I think is best in the world. I think it's best in class. You may not agree. That's fine. I've used a lot of them. They're mostly terrible. But for what, for like two years, you know, we had the largest engineering team at Webflow. Was the localization team working on that product to make it a native first class. And it has touch the APIs. Has to, we have to have support articles. Need Webflow University. I mean, there's a whole, every time you create something, it's this whole cascade of things that have to happen. All the salespeople like me have to know, hey, what is this new product? Like literally Janne every single week, there's people whose job, it's called enablement. It's their full-time job to be like, let me find out what engineering's releasing this week.

29:28Nathan Huening: And then try to communicate to the salespeople what it is and how to sell it and what it works. I'm just like, I'm so far behind me. I can barely keep up.

29:35Janne Parri: You

29:36Nathan Huening: And people ask me, oh, what if we made this announcement for the MCP updates? I was like, oh, shoot, yeah, got, okay, what are they? Now I have to demonstrate

29:42Janne Parri: You

29:43Nathan Huening: It on a call tomorrow. So the pace is pretty blistering, but the point is that enterprise paid for that localization team. And now you can, yeah, it's limited. You can only do so many locales and whatever. Like, so yes, to your point, enterprise pays for a lot of stuff that us folks get to use, you know, like at the, at self-serve level. That said, the real truth of the matter is that the moment you take VC cash, your fate is sealed. So you see all these articles on TechCrunch and I would close our series A, our series B, our series C. If I give you $10 million,

30:17Nathan Huening: I don't want $11 million back. I want 100 million. I want 200 million. I want 10X, 20X. And so if you think of regular actual businesses like a restaurant, maybe that your family runs, and it's like you, after you pay your employees, your expenses, your taxes, whatever, you take home at the end of the year, let's just say $200,000 a year. It's a good business. You make a comfortable living. You can just keep making 200,000 a year for the next 10, 20 years. Why do you need to grow? Quarter after quarter, month after month, why do you need to open five, 10 more restaurants? It's preposterous. There's no reason that a business has to grow or it dies. But we're conditioned to think that's just how businesses have to be. Well, no, they don't. But the reason they have to is because when I give you $10 million, five, 10 years from now, you either, you have an IPO, you have an exit, you have an acquisition. So now, the question is, what do I need to do to make myself attractive as an acquisition target?

31:11Nathan Huening: What do need to do to make me valuable on the open market? So that if you buy shares in my company, you get dividends every quarter. Well, then you have to grow. So now you're making decisions for the product, for the company that you probably wouldn't make if you were just happily making 200 million a year as a company and just paying your employees. So if you're Jason Fried and you're 37 signals and you were profitable from day one, and I've been reading Jason Fried since 1999, back when they actually made. Websites for clients well before, I remember the blog post that announced Basecamp 2005, I wanna say. There are like 30 people, they make 300

31:45Nathan Huening: Million a year, and he's like, we don't have enterprise, you buy our thing, you don't buy our thing, I it's fine. So there's a world where you don't have to do that, but like I said, the moment you take VC Cash, sorry man, your Asana, your Slack, your Airtable, your Notion, that's all it goes. So like it or not, you try to feel like, can we then take these dollars and make the product better for everyone? And I'm always advocating internally as an employee, as a user and fan and admirer of Webflow since day one, literally, like you mentioned, I created my Webflow account in November of 2013. That was the year they incorporated, right? So I've been following the company

32:21Nathan Huening: For a very long time, even before I was an employee here. And I love the company, I love the product, I love the leadership. I think part of why... Webflow has succeeded in the way that it has in a way that a lot of the clones haven't that we mentioned there's a lot of these is because their value prop their marketing message is hey, it's Webflow but cheaper and that has no power to stir men's souls, know, like there's no magic in that like when Vlad talks about the Amazon driver who was peeing in a bottle to hit his quota? You probably read articles about that

32:51Nathan Huening: Who was like teaching himself web development, nights and weekends using Webflow U, and now is making a living supporting his young family with Webflow, that's what we're here to do, man. I'm not waking up in the morning to make money for shareholders. I'm waking up to create a set of tools that empower people to have their voice heard. If you wanted to publish your art, publish your words, publish your music, and you don't know web development, and the only way to do it, to find that audience and connect with people at a human level, is to know how to make websites, then that's what I want. That's the end, the means we can talk about. But if your whole marketing message is the means, oh, it's like Webflow, but cheaper hosting, it's like, man, it's not what we're here to do. So that's my feeling. And know, Vlad's fundamentally a decent human being, and that decency flows through the company. It's not like a...

33:40Nathan Huening: Dude bro, tech culture, know, kind of Silicon Valley, step on each other to climb to the next rung. Like it's good people, it's collaborative, it's supportive. And I think the community that emerged around it reflects that fundamental goodness that lot of places don't have.

33:55Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah, that's good to hear. And about those Webflow clones, I would say that it's usually a bad strategy to be the cheapest one or compete with the price. But one detailed thing, I'm not sure if you are allowed to tell, but again, what does your crystal ball say? What features might... Trickle down from the enterprise plans to the self-serve plans like next.

34:26Nathan Huening: .. Let me think of I could disclose. Let me say this. I think the best answer to that question is, my God, we have a pricing and packaging director in the company who's like every single day reviewing like, know, how do the workspace plans, and I agree, it is very complicated. Everybody knows that we're working on it. Have a huge team, like a team, like we have a smart team of people working on it trying to figure out how to simplify it, how to make it better, how to make it more cost effective, whatever. I don't envy that team. I'm glad I work on the team. But I'm always

34:55Janne Parri: You

34:55Nathan Huening: Thinking like, yeah, what things that we're working on that are intended to be enterprise only can work their way down? And I think just the short answer is, I think you'll be pleased that things that were intended to be enterprise only won't be like the real time collaboration was initially gonna be like enterprise only and then now it's, you so. So I think as a company, it seems to me that it's like the goal is let's make this more available to more people. We do need levers. Like I need a reason for you to upgrade to enterprise. And so it's like if everybody has everything that doesn't work. But I think my feeling is you can err on the too restrictive side of that. You can always release something enterprise only and then open it up later. You can't.

35:42Nathan Huening: Do the reverse. So if you're gonna make a mistake, do it this way. So I'll just say, I think a lot of new things that are coming, I think more things will filter down than have traditionally. What they are specifically, I won't say, but I think everybody's gonna win. And again, I sell enterprise, but I'm like a Webflow community member. I want self-serve to have everything. I don't want any gates at all. Like one side of me, the other side of me wants everything to be enterprise only, because then it makes it easier for me to sell. But my feeling is, when I sell an enterprise contract and I bring a partner in, if we release it for self-serve, then everybody gets it. Enterprise customers get it too. They get to use it. And so it's just that tide lifts all boats kind of thing. So I'm always advocating internally, can we make this, can we release this to everybody?

36:29Nathan Huening: Or even like in a limited way or whatever kind of thing. And again, I'm glad that's not my job. It's so hard. And you gotta kind of be revisiting it all the time.

36:37Janne Parri: Yeah, but it was just actually today. I was doing some work in the designer and I saw that this my client or actually two employees of my clients and I was just so grateful that the multiplayer thing has become like present. We were waiting for that one so long, but yeah, now it's here and now we can forget the past and so on. Nathan,

37:00Nathan Huening: Yeah, it was overdue.

37:01Janne Parri: Nathan, another possibly tough question. I'm not sure if you have been so to speak enabled on this one, but Webflow acquired the video platform that I do not remember the name.

37:11Nathan Huening: So yeah.

37:14Janne Parri: So. What can you tell about that? Will you do with that?

37:18Nathan Huening: Yeah, so I'll gently correct you. Not a video platform, although everyone thinks that. It's called Vidoso, which is maybe a little misleading, but it's more like Jasper. Do know Jasper AI? It's like a writing tool. So here's where, and this circles us back to the very beginning of the conversation in terms of what is Webflow really going to offer and what people really want. Who want AI is reliability, consistent outputs, because it's non-deterministic. I can give the same prompt, identical words to the same agent and get completely different outputs every time, right? So this is, that's not gonna work. Like you need to, I need to know that if I have this input, I have this output, right? Well, that's not what AI does. So part of where Webflow's, I think value proposition comes from in this world is,

38:11Nathan Huening: I need a context, right? Like if I'm in Claude and I'm saying like, you know, create me whatever thing, like what is it drawing from as far as a design system? Like what components, like where do the variables live? Where do the, like how does it know that? Like it doesn't know anything about anything. And so the idea that I could do the same things that I'm doing now, but inside of a tool that has my components, that has my variables, that has hundreds of pages of content that it can scan for. Editorial guidelines and voice and tone and you know, so it's like I need those guardrails, those bumpers, like you're going bowling and you got those gutter bumpers so the ball can't, you know.

38:48Nathan Huening: That's what Webflow is where it's like, yeah it's fine but it's wild West man and that's not, companies can't rely on that. It's not repeatable, it's not predictable. It's great that it empowers you as a lone wolf to go make cool stuff faster for people. But companies don't love that man. They need control, they need guardrails, they need guidelines. So this acquisition that you're saying is in the same way that we're investing in the design part of create a section for me that looks like my other sections, that uses my variables, that uses my components, that edits my existing component, know, like that, all that is coming, right? And it's, you know, it's getting better every day. Now it's the same thing, but for words.

39:27Nathan Huening: So if I'm in the tool and I

39:28Janne Parri: Mmm, okay.

39:29Nathan Huening: Need to basically say, hey, our company sounds like this, our marketing copy, our voice and tone, it's basically like, it's the copywriting piece for which people make full-time livings. Writing, like go to apple.com, look at their headlines on a marketing page. Apple has a very distinct, very well acknowledged way that they write about things. And all of their outputs, right? So the idea that you could have inside of Webflow, this repository of what does our words sound like so that every time I prompt a write me a something, there's a context. Draw from this bucket of guidelines so that my output is consistent, is predictable, is approved. So that idea, whether it's design me something, write me something,

40:16Nathan Huening: Whatever, so the Vidoso play was actually about the words. And Jasper is a successful company, that's their whole business model. So it's sort of like acquiring that and then pulling it in as a native first party tool. And I think that itself is a signal, and were all surprised. I learned about it the same day you did. I did not know

40:32Janne Parri: You

40:33Nathan Huening: Anything about it at all. But that sort of is like, yes, AI is useful, it's valuable. We have to figure out what it looks like in team workflows, but it is non-deterministic. We got to have a context that we can sort of, it's like having a skill inside of Webflow that then it can refer to. That, so think of it as like skill, a skill for like a markdown file for writing copy. That's how I think about it.

40:58Janne Parri: Nice yeah i was way off with that one that i remember just reading that thing

41:02Nathan Huening: I was too. But yeah, no, I'm telling you, seriously, I got Slack messages from my colleagues like, what is this? Do we have to demo this? Are we gonna get a question? I was like, my God. I'm telling you, it's nuts, man. It is wild west out there. Yeah, and our teams are releasing stuff so fast right now. And yeah, I have to keep up all the time. Like I literally look at my calendar. Literally, as soon as we finish here today, I have a training, an hour long training with. I don't know, 75 people. And this is the new single page publishing that was just released. So like you want to publish a single page, you don't have to publish the whole site. And locale specific access control. So again, just this week, we released single page publishing, which three years ago, yep, Vlad told me it was never gonna happen, it was impossible.

41:45Janne Parri: You

41:45Nathan Huening: And then locale specific access control. Again, I have a huge, I sold a deal last year. Huge deal, one of the top three largest of the company. They're localized in 36 languages, Janne. So that's really complex, right? So what that means is I've got people in Belgium, in Finland, in South Africa, in whatever, and they log into Webflow and they have access to the entire site. It's like, no, man, I just need you to have access to the Malaysian pages. So that level of control, again,

42:17Nathan Huening: It's just most people don't need that. If you don't need it, you just have to pay for it. So that's where enterprise is like, okay, yeah, you can have it, but it's more expensive, right? So that's where we try to split that difference. So from an enablement standpoint, man, I got an hour long thing I gotta learn

42:30Janne Parri: You

42:31Nathan Huening: How to demo that.

42:32Janne Parri: Yeah. Well, your training is still ahead of you. I know that listeners and me too need to know that is that single page publishing just for the enterprise clients or would it be for all?

42:44Nathan Huening: Great question. Let me let me look it up. It literally was there we have a channel in slack called released and that's where the you know that whoever the product manager is so that inside baseball people care about this but like for every like product or pillar there's a product manager a PM and this is like your quarterback. Geez. That's an American football reference this is your captain. I guess right sorry. It's an international audience

43:05Janne Parri: You

43:06Nathan Huening: You know who's like sort of, essentially think about it like this. It's like, I have an idea for a feature, and whether it's because of from like, know, input from sales team or input from ACES or, know, so like this product manager who owns this feature, you know, components or localization or whatever, you know, will pitch to their leadership, I wanna develop it in this way, leadership approves, and then it's like, okay, now I staff up my team, I need a designer for the UI, I need a front-end engineer for the React app, I need a backend engineer for the, so. So that PM leads that team of people and then, know, like alpha, beta, the whole thing in the release. So then in our release channel in Slack, then the PM who like owned that thing will then like talk about, oh, hey, released it's out in the wild. And so it says, okay, it's enterprise only, I'm sorry. But you know, yeah, so release and rollout, April 8th was yesterday, available on enterprise plans, this was enterprise customers, yeah, so.

43:59Nathan Huening: Man, I hope that makes it to sell. That's a good example of like, I would love for this to be an everybody thing. And maybe it will be. But I can't say, right? So yeah, that's enterprise only.

44:09Janne Parri: We'll see. We'll see. There's something yeah, still about the AI stuff this again goes towards more philosophical stuff and predicting the future but what do you think? Will will we in the future, will we have like tools that have every AI feature in them or will we have like just these LLMs that can integrate with every tool

44:41Janne Parri: For example, will Webflow build more like native AI features or will it be more open, for example, the

44:48Nathan Huening: Good question.

44:49Janne Parri: MCP and so on?

44:51Nathan Huening: Just like bring your own agent versus use the one that Webflow has? Is that kind of what you're saying? Okay, yeah. That is a good question. I don't know that Webflow even knows the answer to that yet. I will say that, again, my personal view, I've always thought that Webflow succeeds when we let people bring their own tooling. So that's just my personal view. And I'll give you good example. So with localization, there's a lot of translation management services out there. They manage your translations across lots of things. Well, I don't want Webflow to be your TMS. I don't want to be Localize or Weglot or Smartling. I mean, there's scads of these, right? If you've done large-scale localization projects, there's three to five of the big ones that people use all the time. So rather than compete in that business, it's like, no, let me just expose an API.

45:39Nathan Huening: So that you can just hook it and bring your own. And so part of the question is what business do want to be in? Part of it is how do we make it more valuable? But for me, and I'll give you another good example, and I feel like I can say...

45:49Janne Parri: You

45:50Nathan Huening: So we just opened an office in Argentina ⁓ and the job postings are all like a lot of really really good talent in Argentina I don't know why that country specifically a lot of top Webflow talent in Argentina And we're hiring people who like have ecommerce background and my guess is and again, let's making any predictions here you know, we had an ecommerce, you know, there is an ecommerce thing in Webflow That's not that useful. What would be more useful is like similar to localization expose an API bring your Shopify, bring your Stripe, bring your Chargify, bring your Checkout.com, bring whatever you're already using and just let it hook in. And then Webflow becomes the universal front end to whatever kind of backend system you want. And if you're already using it, great. If you wanna change it later, great. You're not kind of locked into these things. So I've always felt that could be a category defining victory for Webflow is to like...

46:41Nathan Huening: Like let people just bring their own tools. So if that localization pattern, if that e-commerce pattern continues, then it seems to me that it would be about, as again, I'm talking earlier, if we can expose more and more of the surface of our tool as APIs, then you can kind of BYO agent, like bring your own, whatever you want to use. And I think that there's a lot of value in that, particularly at the self-serve level, because... I can swap out Gemini versus Claude, you know, whatever. And again, like your previous guests, I'm watching some videos saying like, yeah, I would use Webflow if I could bring my own agent. But you know, again, that's a real self-serve thing, enterprise customers don't want to do that. The less enterprise customers have to integrate, like the better, because that's one more enterprise contract I got to sign now. So now you're saying I got to go to Claude and get it, you know, they're just like, no, just give me the thing and let me use it. Like I don't need like the best of the best.

47:32Nathan Huening: I got KPIs I gotta hit this quarter. So it's like the needs are very different at those two different levels. But I think as a product, I think the future, if I had to give a crystal ball is, I think it's gonna be more APIs, bring your own tools. That's what I would guess. That's what I hope anyway.

47:47Janne Parri: Yeah. Okay. You got my hopes up with that e-commerce thing. Hopefully I do not need to cut that one out, but yeah, have been for long saying that it's kind of a missed opportunity because there are a few, a few things that could, make it relevant for so many, smaller clients that do not need, for example, the huge Shopify experience or something like that. But still on the AI topic, what about in general, people are like scared of AI and what it will bring with it or destroy with it. So how do you see in general, what should we think of the AI?

48:25Nathan Huening: I, excellent question. I will give you my contrarian take on the spectrum of booster versus doomer. I'm a doomer. And so I think, I think in some levels that's, and I'll explain why. How many times Janne have you heard people, cause I remember back in 2015, 2016, everything was on the blockchain. Everything was crypto. We have lots of crypto startups. Using Webflow to publish your sites and if you went to an investor team, VC and like, you put crypto in your pitch deck, here's $10 million or whatever. When's the last time you heard someone say, oh, the future is a blockchain? I haven't heard that

49:03Janne Parri: Yeah, it's been a while.

49:05Nathan Huening: In a while. I've been through a lot of boom and bust cycles and I know what they look like. And you said that I've been a developer since 2007. I've been a paid developer since 2007. I made my first website in 1999. So I used tables and spacer GIFs and the whole thing. And so my feeling is it smells a lot like an inflated bubble with too few dollars chasing too few value. Think the bubble will burst. This is not a guess. This is a 100 % certainty.

49:40Nathan Huening: The market is overheated, it will burst. What the future looks like, we'll see. I think unlike crypto, unlike Bitcoin, this AI actually has value. Like it actually does useful things. All my buddies that were like, oh, you gotta get into crypto, guys. It like I just ignored the whole thing, start to finish, didn't lose any sleep. And then 2022 FTX, Sam Altman Fried. It's like, man, I'm so. I don't wanna say I told you so. And so it's like, same thing with AI. It's like, I will take no pleasure in being right about this. But if you look at the numbers, if you look at Anthropic, if you look at OpenAI, if you look at Perplexity, if you look at the data centers, and I will happily supply notes in your YouTube channel here that you wanna go read some stuff, this is not sustainable. My prediction is within 18 months, OpenAI won't exist as a company.

50:29Nathan Huening: It'll be completely bust or it'll be absorbed by Microsoft. And so when you ⁓ burn $300 billion to make $5 billion and your costs are only increasing because the models get more expensive and the GPUs become more expensive and you need five more data centers and now you're scraping the slop that you created into the models and like an incestuous kind of loop here. So the models are in some senses degrading

51:01Janne Parri: You

51:01Nathan Huening: In meaningful ways. Eventually the Microsoft and the Saudi Royal family and SoftBank are gonna get tired of lighting hundreds of billions of dollars on fire with no path to profitability and the market will correct. So my advice to you and everyone who's worried about this is, plan for a future in five to ten years where there is no AI, there is no model that's available from any company that you can use in your product. What would that look like? I take the Jeff Bezos approach to this. When I saw him give a talk where he said, know what, Amazon, we don't chase fads. We ask ourselves, what are the things that your customers will always want?

51:43Nathan Huening: He says 10 years from now, no one's going to want a smaller selection on Amazon. 10 years from now, no one's going to want slower delivery.

51:49Janne Parri: Mmm, yeah.

51:51Nathan Huening: 10 years from now, people are still going to need to know how to use HTML, CSS and JavaScript to make websites, to put words and pictures on a screen. Those are web primitives that no one owns or controls, including Webflow. People are still going to need to know how to make websites five years from now and to bring their favorite tools. It's not going to be AI five years from future state where the whole world changes, I'm telling you, AI will be a footnote 10 years from now. We're all gonna look back and be like, wow, was, that was some crazy times, man. We certainly got ahead of ourselves there. So be temperate, be measured, be moderate. Don't freak out. I've seen this movie before. It always ends the same way. Happy to provide numbers, but there is no way that these companies...

52:34Nathan Huening: Can continue operating like this indefinitely. And so, we'll have to see what happens when Webflow, there's no company offering a model that we can even license to put in our product. Are we gonna train our own data? Webflow's not gonna spin up data centers and start, like that's not our business. So this is coming. I don't know if it's six months or a year or two years, but there's a future where it's like, man, you're back to coding by hand again, so plan accordingly.

52:55Janne Parri: That's fascinating. Like, do you really think that it would get that bad that we will have no chatbot, no LLM commercial out there that anyone can use?

53:07Nathan Huening: No, my actual prediction is there is a lot of, again, here's the thing, we've been doing machine learning since the 1960s. Like this, we call AI is not a new technology. Like generative AI, yeah, sure. Like, so create me an image, write me some code. Like these kinds of things are our novel, right? Are they worth $200 billion and torching the, I haven't even talked about the environmental cost here or the emotional, the people who are killing themselves from open AI chatbots like, we need to really think about what's going on here, but in the race to evaluation, in the race to dominate the market or whatever, it's like, maybe there's some real value here that we can have a measured conversation, but like, Microsoft already changed the name of Office to Copilot. Slow down, man.

53:51Nathan Huening: Nobody wants this stuff, and they're already rolling it back. I can give you article after article. Nobody wants this slop, right? So the demand isn't there, the market isn't there. And so I think, yeah, we could have talked like adults about, yeah, this is kind of cool. This is a marginally useful way to speed up my coding workflow. But we didn't have that conversation. Instead, we rushed it like as soon as crypto collapsed, the VCs needed somewhere else to slosh their billions of dollars to get their, you know, 100X exit or whatever before they thought kind of what was actually happening. So I think the answer is that there is a there. There is a technology where

54:27Nathan Huening: We could be doing training. The scale could be small enough that maybe Webflow could be having its own model. Because people are doing models on their own laptops. You can train on a MacBook. Some of the Apple intelligence stuff is on device, on the iPhone. So I think there's a future where there's smaller models that don't suck up every last liter of water in the American West. To power the data centers that do offer like value utility, but it's like more measured. Again, when in 2001, I'm not old, right? Like when the original dot com bubble happened, know, worldcom and pets.com, I can't remember this man. And it was like, it all went bust. But what happened was they had laid fiber. Like they had part of all the money that was circulating around, they put in like ethernet, like in a way that would never have happened. And when it all went bust,

55:16Nathan Huening: All that fiber had been laid, that high speed internet, so that the next generation of companies could build on those speeds for like video startup, like YouTube wouldn't exist if there hadn't been that infrastructure investment that went bust. So when this all goes bust, the question becomes, what will we pull from the ashes and what kinds of things can we build on it? Again, I will take no pleasure in being right about this, but this is the fifth time I've seen this. And if you're reading Cory Doctorow, if you're reading Ed Zitron, it's all there, man. I hate to say it. You don't have to be a genius or an economist to see that. Make hay while the sun shines. If you're working at Anthropic, if you're one shotting stuff for clients and making a killing, great. Put it away, invest it in durable assets, because that money is not gonna last. So you need to figure out what the future's gonna be.

56:02Janne Parri: Yeah. Yeah. It's always fascinating to try to predict the future, especially now that it feels like the pace is so, so fast. But yeah, at some point, I need to let you go. But I want to end on more positive stuff. So let's bring it back to the enterprise stuff. And, us like Webflow partners. If there is a Webflow partner who wants to take a step towards the enterprise level to become an enterprise partner, what would your advice be for them?

56:36Nathan Huening: Yeah, excellent question. It's become much simpler to grow. And I really been impressed with the team's investments in like the partnership management piece. Cause this is really the bread and butter of Webflow. Like my personal view is that Webflow's actual customer is you. It's the agency. Like Webflow is not software for making a website. Webflow is software. For people who make websites for other people. It's final cut, it's not iMovie. So a lot of the, like I want it, again, candidly, personally, not speaking for the company, I want Webflow to be the best that it can be, not for the person who's like, wanna spin up a website over the weekend, like use Wix, use Squarespace, use Weebly, like we've ceded that market and justifiably so. So I think that the ways that Webflow, speaking earlier about how,

57:27Nathan Huening: This API first kind of approach, ⁓ I think is like the right strategic model. Think investing in practitioners is the right strategic model. And so whatever makes Janne's life easier, whatever makes all the ACEs, all of our partners all around the world, whatever makes them happier is the right investment. Like it's real easy. So now ⁓ our partner team is growing all the time. The number of webflow partners is growing all the time. I'm not. Up to speed on the different levels. Cause I think it was like certified partner and then enterprise, I think you keep changing it. I'm not sure, I'm sorry about that. But to become an enterprise partner, premium,

58:00Janne Parri: Yeah, that's the premium partner at some level.

58:04Nathan Huening: It's hard for me to keep up with all of you. Honest. And I work here, right? The enterprise partner program is pretty simple. You bring an enterprise contract to Webflow. So let's say that your business is growing. You can be a single person. It doesn't have to be a large team. We have a lot of enterprise agencies that are just one person, right? But you bring a lead to us. And you're like, hey, I've been working with such and such a team. I recommended Webflow. They can only use the enterprise flavor. I've already learned that this is not gonna work for them. So can you help me with this? And a lot of it is like, we know how to sell Webflow.

58:45Nathan Huening: At that level and I think that a lot of the training that we do is like, let me teach you how to be successful selling Webflow better. I want you to close more deals, I want you to close higher deals, more profitable deals, better deals. I want you to do less work for more money. And honestly, sometimes it's so weird, Janne, like again, like I feel like I could teach, you know, like an agency to be like, yeah, you're competing at like, you know, this tier, you know. $10,000 contracts, $50,000, $100,000, half a million dollar contracts, whatever. A lot of times you're doing the same deliverable, but you're getting paid $500,000 for it instead of $50,000 for it. Then the difference is

59:24Nathan Huening: Just how you pitched it and to which company. That's where it's like, there's a lot of value in being an enterprise partner, right? So you bring us a lead, it closes. We get an enterprise contract out of it, you pass an exam. That's basically, found, I had to research it before I came to this call. Like that's sort of the whole thing. And then you're in our network and then you get a lot of resourcing and training. Like enterprise partners get access to beta features before anybody else. They get enablement, like we're talking about. Like, these new features, how do you sell this? When you were like, I don't know. And like, I'll join you on a call. You want to win that big deal? Call me up, man. I will join the call with you. We'll sell it together. I'll bring all of the resources to the company. I want that contract. You want that bid.

1:00:02Nathan Huening: Like let's partner together. So all of my last biggest deals, I'd say at the enterprise level, and we kind of tier it a little, like we have tiers of enterprise customers. So there's like, if you're, I forget, it's like below 200 employees, 200, a thousand, a thousand plus, I forget exactly, but, you so we sort of specialize internally with like company size based on how we kind of resource it. Cause even within enterprise, as a monolith, there's a lot of variation, right? But ultimately it's like, at my level, I'm at the biggest, of the biggest level, I would say eight of 10 of my last deals, we identified a partner early. And so it's not like, well, when we close this, let's help you find somebody. And maybe I'll make three introductions and you pick one or whatever. But it's sort of like, okay, now I can say, Janne will be the one setting up your design system. Janne will be the one doing so. And you'll be working with, as soon as we close the deal.

1:00:50Nathan Huening: Know, Janne will be on that initial onboarding with the Webflow team and you know, and so it, we close a lot more deals at higher amounts when we co-sell with enterprise partners. And so we go out of our way to help each other back and forth. So I would say it's worth doing. You know, you do need to bring us a contract. And I think there's, is there like a, you have to do a certain number over a certain number of years. I don't, I don't actually know those things, but. But it works great. And I know you've had plenty of enterprise like Hal is a good friend of mine from Candid Leap and he's amazing. I've co-sold several deals with him and he's one of the brightest minds on the planet. Absolutely blown away every time I work with Hal. I just adore him. I pulled Michael Wells in. You had him on. I had a deal and I was

1:01:32Nathan Huening: Way out of my depth with this complex reverse proxy. And he's in new Zealand and I'm awake at two in the morning, know, chatting with Michael. But we got it over the line and it's, you know, now it's a case study. So I just love working with the community. I love working with partners. I manage the ACE program, which I don't know if we have much visibility in public than what that is, but I love my job. I wake up every day. I have such a good time. I love my colleagues. I love the product. I like leadership. I like the community. Think Webflow community members are like among the most loyal, smartest, you know, and every community, like every product has its.

1:02:08Nathan Huening: Like Figma, you're a figmate. Notion, you're a notino. Airtable, don't what a table feels like, but you know, Webflowers. I say Webflowers, I think it's more charming. But I think the Webflowers are just the best of the best, man. They're just such good people. I'm pleased to get to work with them.

1:02:23Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah. We could actually talk a little bit about the ACE program. Back when Matthew Munger was on the show, he kind of like teased, told a little bit about that, but I believe that you were starting that group. So what is that and how did it start?

1:02:41Nathan Huening: Yeah, what an excellent question. So ACE is an acronym for Advisory Council of Experts. It was sort of a joke or like a lark that we, so Corey is one of the top visual designers in the world. Corey was a longtime brand designer at Webflow, some of your favorite Webflow.com pages, some of the most impressive work we ever did, you his team led. He was here for five years, we're very close. He and I would complain. To each other privately all the time about all the ways that we wish Webflow would evolve. Because we use Webflow, we love it. And the loudest critics are sometimes your best fans or whatever. So we would say, I wish you did this, I wish you did this. And so we found ourselves frustrated even internally in terms of how do we get these product improvement ideas to the people who are making the product. And know, Webflow is a big company, So I think we just complained loud enough and long enough that

1:03:34Nathan Huening: That we got like executive sponsorship to be like, yeah, okay, well we'll spin up a team. Like, well, you know, quit your moaning and like put your money in your mouth or whatever. And so we looped

1:03:42Janne Parri: You

1:03:42Nathan Huening: In Matthew early, you know, so the three of us were kind of thinking through like, okay, what does this look like in practice and within Webflow. And here's the weird thing, Janne Parri, and this, I probably get in trouble for this. Like if you've worked at a large SaaS company, like a software company, like Webflow can hire the best in the world. Like our product designers came from. Apple or Dropbox or Silicon Valley, it's a tough market, right? But you can hire the best product designers, the best brand designers, the best engineers in the world, and you can have our pick, right? But these are people who, as well as they know Figma, as much as they know React, as much as they know MongoDB, know, whatever infrastructure stuff, they're not web developers. They don't themselves live in Webflow and use it every day. They don't make websites for clients using Webflow.

1:04:26Nathan Huening: So they might say, well yeah, I can make this feature. Is this what you want? Is this what's good? Like if I asked Janne or a community member, give me your top 10 things you could wave a wand and make Webflow do, or you change it. If I asked 200 people, I'd probably get the same seven out of 10 answers. Like, I wish I could do this, I wish I had multi-user, wish I had, you whatever. But like, how do you, and to me and you, it's like, obviously, yeah, well obviously we need to have this feature. Like, yes, obviously I need to be able to group my CMS fields into folders. And then like we're here like a. Obviously I need to be able to do these things, you know, but these are not things that the product team necessarily knows because they haven't been using it for 10 years like we have. So the idea was that let's identify within the company the practitioners of Webflow, either came from the community or user or whatever, and get them closer to product to say like, are, of all the signals that we get for how to improve the product, how do we make sure that we're really indexing on the right problems to solve? So we have internal aces, like, you know, people who use Webflow at Webflow.

1:05:21Nathan Huening: Giving lots of direct product feedback to the product managers and engineering teams, but then also this external cohort. So Matthew runs the cohort of experts in the community who then formally get onboarded into this, basically like a Slack channel or several Slack channels, where it's like they get access to beta test features. They can talk directly to product managers. And so, closing that gap between like what is the community, like what do we really need to be doing to improve the product and the people who are making it, that's hard to solve at any company. And so as a program, it's fundamentally about can we get that a little closer together? And a lot of the development in last two years candidly, I think has come from, has been the fruits of that program. Like I think you'll hear a lot of people say like what flow's kind of lost in the wilderness for a while, but like in the last maybe 18 months, two years has really started.

1:06:11Nathan Huening: Who knows there's lots of reasons why but I think part of his because we've formalized some of those processes of can we get that reddit complaint? Closer to the team that's actually responsible or whatever and kind of work on it and stuff and so it's been a lot of fun working on that and kind of like Intermediating between that and again like an eye roll at the enterprise level because I sell it every day like I'm hearing all to my colleagues are hearing all the time like, we need Webflow to do this. And a lot of the times, the things that the enterprise customers will ask for are things that the community has been asking for a long time. So if I can tie this enterprise complaint to a common complaint, then I can get resources to get it on the roadmap. Because you know, got to staff up a team and work on this stuff. So that's sort of my role internally is can I link the enterprise requests to the community requests and then hopefully get some momentum on that.

1:07:06Janne Parri: That's so nice. Yeah. I can just imagine how hard it is to pick the features to develop next. Okay. There's one little weird section at the end, ⁓ before that, is there anything still on your mind that you haven't told us anything about AI Webflow roadmap, ⁓ whatever. You wanna tell to the listeners.

1:07:27Nathan Huening: Yeah, I think you're going to see continued investments in this. Think that most of our teams internally are thinking, how do we make the best product that we can? What does that look like in this world? We listen to all of it. We are incorporating all that feedback. So if you've had a frustration with Webflow, we probably share it too. Encouraged to see how much investment is happening. I think that you try things, they don't work. You try something else, you see what works. So like AI site Builder is evolving in some meaningful ways. You'll see, to become more useful, the MCP update last week was a huge update. We're gonna be exposing an API for components, so you can kind of make those, assemble a page from components, rather than like raw HTML.

1:08:11Nathan Huening: So I think there's a world where you can have everything that you want that you're doing right now at the command line, at the chat interface level. But even like Julian on your podcast was saying, it's like, I got Vercel and I got Claude and got Codex. Got, know, so again, you're just assembling something from parts, right? Like this is a challenge even for the individual practitioner level. So I think there's a world where you can create a comprehensive solution. For hosting, for security, support, for context, for design system, for bring your own agent. There's a world where you put this ingredients together and you bake a fantastic cake. I think Webflow is positioned to do that better than anyone in the world. It's gonna be hard to get right, but the pieces are there to sort of have everything you want with the guardrails, with the deterministic output, with these things. So I'm really...

1:09:00Nathan Huening: And whether this is a 2026 thing or 2027 thing, I'm not sure, but like everybody's working on this internally to create like the best thing that we can without losing the core of what makes Webflow so great. So what I like though is that this is not like a distraction or like a diversion. I think from the core Webflow, I ultimately it's just like, how do you go from being 10X more productive visual coding to a hundred X more productive using AI? It's the same heritage. You know over time as far as like what Webflow does for people and I think like I can see the product in my head. I'm just like man if we had that it'd be so awesome. You so I think that like everybody's working on this at the speed that we can but it is a moving target like nobody's got the right answer but I think

1:09:43Nathan Huening: That whatever we do in the next six months, Framer will do 18 months from

1:09:48Janne Parri: I'm getting excited. Hopeful for future. But okay, Nathan, if someone wants to check you out, maybe follow you or even contact you, where should they go?

1:09:59Nathan Huening: I don't I deleted my LinkedIn. I deleted my Twitter. I don't have any visibility anywhere. I guess Email me. It's just first name dot last name at Webflow So yeah, I don't I don't have a good answer for that I may I may have something in the future, but for now, yeah, just do it all fat write me a letter I'll give you my home address. You can put in the post. Yeah, we'll have an old-fashioned correspondence

1:10:19Janne Parri: That would be nice. Do you happen to have fax machine?

1:10:26Nathan Huening: Oh, absolutely I do. Yeah, who doesn't have a fax machine? Yeah, it's 1987 in the HQ here.

1:10:34Janne Parri: Yeah, are you active in the new Webflow community platform? Can people find you there?

1:10:40Nathan Huening: No, not yet. Yeah, I would like to be. I might be soon. Managing ACE right now is sort of my biggest extracurricular kind of thing. So I'm not active there yet, but I'd like to be. Yeah, but no, I'm not hard to find if you wanna find me. Well, no, maybe I am hard to find, yeah. Yeah, but yeah, just ask questions. I'm always happy to help. I think that what's interesting, or what I've learned, is that some of the people doing the best and most interesting work in the world have no presence anywhere at all. That's what sort of surprised me. The best woodworkers are not on YouTube. The best programmers are not on YouTube or whatever. So there's all kinds of interesting people doing interesting things out there that are sort of hard to follow, but I don't have anything to sell.

1:11:21Nathan Huening: I don't have any community to build. I have no career ambitions. I don't

1:11:25Janne Parri: You

1:11:26Nathan Huening: Have anything to gain from a following. I'm just here to do the best work that I can.

1:11:30Janne Parri: That's nice, that's nice. Okay, towards the last section, do you have any idea what it could be about?

1:11:36Nathan Huening: Oh yeah, I'm so delighted to try and guess what this Finnish expression will be. And actually, Janne, let me tell you too, when I first joined Webflow, I remember early on there was like a visualization or something inside where it showed where all the different Webflow employees came from. And it broke it down by country because it's obviously a big international company. It should come as no surprise that number one, more people came from the United States than any other country. It shouldn't surprise you that number two was Canada. Can you guess what the number three country, meaning the next most employees came from this country out of all the other countries in the world? You'll never guess in million years what it was.

1:12:14Janne Parri: Like I have to guess Finland. There's no other guesses.

1:12:17Nathan Huening: It was Finland. Yeah. I was so shocked. I couldn't believe it. Was like, wow, of all the countries in the world where we have employees, that was in 2022. I don't know if it's still true. It was then. It might still be true, but I was like, wow, the Finnish people, right? There's something. I got some talent there. There's something about that. So yeah, I say that as a prelude to whatever the expression you're gonna give me.

1:12:40Janne Parri: Yeah, I'll give that in a minute. But I have like, experience of feeling that the webflow did not like, get going too fast in Finland. So it took time, but now I would say that it is like present and people actually know the platform. So yeah, but okay, towards the Finnish saying. So I will give that firstly in Finnish and then translated to English and your saying is and in English it will be to lift a cat onto a table. So what does it mean if I say let's lift

1:13:14Nathan Huening: That's so great.

1:13:18Janne Parri: The cat onto the table.

1:13:19Nathan Huening: First of all, in any of your podcasts and interviews, has anybody ever gotten it right in the whole history? Oh, okay.

1:13:24Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah, there has been some maybe easier, maybe more logical stuff, but yeah.

1:13:29Nathan Huening: To lift a cat onto a table, okay. So just thinking through implications, like is it like the effort involved, like because cats are hard to grab, so there's something about a task maybe, or like something about it being a cat, and how finicky they are, and how it's gonna jump off the table immediately, so it's like the futility of your effort. Like I'm trying to think of what this might be. I'm gonna say to lift a cat onto a table is to try something and fail because as soon as you put the cat down it just runs off. How's that?

1:14:02Janne Parri: No, that's a good logic. That's my usual comeback. Bye. Yeah.

1:14:05Nathan Huening: But it's never logical, right? That's the problem.

1:14:09Janne Parri: So to lift a cat onto a table, it basically means to speak straight to bring up a difficult subject. So you might have something like, let's not beat around the bush or something like that. So let's pick the cat on the table and talk about this subject. Yeah.

1:14:21Nathan Huening: Okay, yeah, right. Put a cat on the table. I love that so much. Well, when it came to the AI bubble, that was some cat on a table there. Get it to you straight here. We need to think about this. But I love that feature of your podcast, and I've been enjoying so much watching these and learning from some of these folks. So you're doing great work. Please keep it up. Big

1:14:41Janne Parri: Thanks so much. Yeah.

1:14:42Nathan Huening: Fan, yeah.

1:14:43Janne Parri: I'll do my best. I will take a summer break that I have promised myself and my family, but yeah, I'll do my best. So Nathan, thank you so much for being a guest and all the listeners, watchers. We'll see you in the next one. Bye.

1:14:58Nathan Huening: Cheers, a pleasure.