We're Harsh Because We Care

0:21Janne Parri: Okay, Matt, so I've seen you on the Webflow Partners Slack channel and you are very active there you are both hyping the product and also instantly telling if something bothers you So let's not beat around the bush. What is your biggest beef with the Webflow right now?

0:38Matt Evans: My biggest beef, I think my biggest beef with Webflow is oddly, it's not a technical thing... It's not a platform thing. ⁓ It's a communication problem. We all got into Webflow back in the day and it was this new shiny tool. And we remember the days of Pixel Geek ⁓ and, you know, Webbay. And there was a lot of community members who actually worked for Webflow. And it was a very thriving, open place. And I feel probably the last 18 months, two years maybe, I think it's almost shut down a bit. It's become a little bit more private. There's been obviously a move towards the enterprise elements and enterprise is always done behind closed doors. And I feel that the communication with the community, even at the community, I feel is just falling off a cliff a little bit.

1:26Matt Evans: It's a lack of voices. Think you've got like Matthew Munger, who's out there doing podcasts and he's very active in sort of the private Slack channels. But other than that, I don't see people engaging with people who use the tool. I loved episode with Nathan just last week where he was on there chatting. Was like, I've engaged with Nathan.

1:51Janne Parri: You

1:51Matt Evans: Loads in the Slack channels. He's obviously a very clever guy. He's right in the middle of Webflow. He knows what's going on. He has really nice formulated opinions. And now he's talking to everyone else. And it was such a refreshing take. I just I feel like that common side thing is not coming across. I know Vlad, everyone has a soft spot for Vlad, know, as a founder. If you've met him, I've met him a couple of times at different conferences and events and he's such a nice warm guy, but obviously Uber intelligent, but he, had that, like a little bit of more visibility, I think. And I just think recently other than maybe a few scripted, I wouldn't say scripted, but a few sort of lined up videos, maybe that were, you know, they're a bit more controlled. Think, yeah, it's just a lack of communication with the

2:42Matt Evans: Community at large, think. That just, you know, when we've got AI now coming down the road very, very heavily, it just, it spooks people, you know, like, the whole idea is, you know, it doesn't matter what walk of life you're in, if your, if your government doesn't say anything, organizations don't say anything, or your company doesn't say anything, people fill the gap with rumors, and sometimes negativity, and I think, I don't know, I feel like there's a lot of little fires burning, some of them bigger than others. AI is coming to eat everyone's dinner. Everyone feels a little bit worried because we are Webflowers. We build on Webflow. Clients come to us because we're experts in Webflow. And when there isn't that voice that almost is there from the company, feel like it just makes everyone a little bit nervous, a little bit anxious, a little bit... Are they going to...

3:33Matt Evans: Hope, are they going to release stuff that helps me? Should I jump ship? Should I go and use another tool? Should I, and I'm sure we'll get into it, should I invest more time in learning this new AI way of doing things? So yeah, just, think a lot of that comes down to communication. My dad used to say it years ago, and I think my granddad as well is like, communication is at the heart of nearly every problem and it's the heart of every solution. Most of us are anxious because of what we think. We're very rarely anxious when we get to speak one-to-one and one-to-many with each other. It's, you know, or as they say, it was an old telecoms advert back in the UK in the 80s was it's like, it's good to talk. And I think Webflow just need to do a little bit more of that, I think.

4:19Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah. Feel that quite many of us feel the same way like there were the golden days. And now you mentioned the enterprise thing and workflow going towards like bigger companies. But I feel that they might like realize that this is happening and they probably are trying to do something about it. Like there's the new community platform, the community fund. But yeah, then there's obviously all the hype around the new tools, the AI. But do you think that there's a chance that we get those golden days back or get new golden days in the future?

4:57Matt Evans: Yeah, I guess you can never repeat that feeling and that atmosphere that happens at any point of a journey, whether it's a company, whether it's an industry. The early no-code days were very different to the new AI-driven days. So I'm not sure you could ever get back to that, golden hour. But there's definitely things that can be pulled up. I just think there's... It's a visual platform, example. It's a visual platform. AI is coming along, but it falls down a lot on the visual side. Webflow has a massive role to play here, a massive opportunity, let's say, to step into that problem area of AI not being a very good individual sphere. But the way they did it before was it was almost like show and tell.

5:46Matt Evans: Everyone was showing. Was loads of videos. Was loads of demos. Was loads of... And, you know McGuire, the quality of McGuire and his team of what they produced back in the day was, you know, off the charts. It was really good, really engaging. That seems to have disappeared. And I think Webflow, again, just they turned away from one of their strongest suits, which is show everyone, you know, like showing people on... How to use AI is not the sexiest thing when you're doing a screen

6:13Janne Parri: You

6:13Matt Evans: Chat. Seeing a terminal running or even a Claude Code stream is not that sexy. It's not that appealing. But Webflow is sexy. It is appealing. It's visual. It's a visual medium. We're creating visual mediums. And I wish they would just get some more of their guys internally. I know they get community members to do it. There's a few paid for community members who post videos here and there. But I don't know, I think the heart and soul of it's gone out. But they could, yeah, I think they could bring it back. Think whether it's the same, it probably not. It was exciting, it was new, you felt you were on the forefront of stuff. And I think Webflow probably won't be there again. Not in my world anyway, maybe in the enterprise world, they've probably got a little bit that.

7:00Matt Evans: But yeah, I don't know if they can bring back the visual, show, tell, demonstrate, know, just do everything that used to do in a way that gets people really excited, I think. And not just fancy adverts. Like I've worked in advertising my life. So fancy adverts have a great way, a great role in storytelling. But I think they're just, there's a gap there, which is, you know, demonstrate. Like the MCP came out the other day, the beta. There's no demos of anyone from Webflow showing what it can do.

7:32Matt Evans: Just insights and that kind of stuff. Feel like they could be doing a lot more of that. And again, I come from a marketing media background. And I guess going back to that, what's my beef with Webflow? It's all about communication. It's just get people excited, be transparent, all that kind of stuff. Because once you take that away, then I think people just make their own minds up and often make their wrong minds up. Know, Nathan yesterday probably reset my opinion on where Webflow is going by a factor of two years, just by speaking and just by having opinions and stuff.

8:08Matt Evans: It was, it was really refreshing.

8:10Janne Parri: Totally, like communication is so huge. Obviously it helps if you have like some concrete features that people are excited about and something that no one else has. Those might be helpful too. But they are worthless if you don't show them or communicate about them. Hopefully we'll see more of that. But OK, before we go any further, we got to do a little intro. So my name is Janne Parri, and you're listening to Webflow and Friends podcast. And my guest today is Matt Evans. So Matt is an award-winning Webflow developer from Dublin. He runs video and Patch, a studio that does everything from marketing sites to AI-enabled SaaS products.

8:58Janne Parri: He won the Webflow Technical builder Award back in 2022. He hosted the visual Deep podcast with Ailín Tobin, and he recently has been pushing beyond Webflow with AI. So I'm curious, how has this transition from Webflow, well, if we go further back, like from marketing to Webflow, the broader service provider, how does that come about?

9:23Matt Evans: Where should I start? I guess it's a very big, it's quite a personal journey I've been on. I suppose I've always been a builder. Like, and I say that in a weird term because I don't class myself as a software developer. I'm like a builder. Just like building stuff. I've been like that since I was a kid, you know. I'd build, I'd grab stuff that's been in my dad's office, whether it's, you know, paper, pens and stuff, and I'd build something and try and sell it in the playground at school. You know, it's just, I have that's just in my DNA, I suppose. And I got into advertising, out of London in London, probably just, I tripped into it a little bit. I didn't really know what else to do. Marketing for me was,

10:08Matt Evans: I don't know, just advertising and pictures and I didn't really know how varied it was, but I got into that, it, did probably, I don't know how many years in that five or six years in that industry. Then when the set up a coffee business again, cause I wanted to build, wasn't, I wasn't mad about coffee. I just wanted to build something. And the biggest thing I was building was a subscription coffee business essentially. I. I didn't have my hands on the coffee really. I did some packing of coffee bags eventually, but the main thing was, can I build a website that can sell coffee on subscription and market it? So I needed to build, and I went on a coding bootcamp for this. So remember back in the day, I think they still exist, but there was this big push for coding bootcamps where you go and you pay, I think I paid maybe 1,500 pounds at the time, which is actually relatively cheap.

11:00Matt Evans: And they'd take you for three months. And the idea would be that you get a job at the end of it as a software developer. I kind of did that so I could learn how to build my, next version of my coffee subscription site so I didn't have to pay anyone to do it. It's a bit of a sneaky way to do it, but I wasn't really in the game to get a software engineer's job or anything like that. Yeah, roll on probably three or four years after that. After the coffee sort of it kind of took off, but it didn't in a way where I could pay my London rent without, know, having a bit of anxiety every at the end of every month thinking,

11:37Matt Evans: Oh, if I don't sell any more coffee, then you know, I'm not gonna have money to eat tonight, you know, that kind of thing. So I sort of scrambled around a bit, I started to do a few freelance website builds with people I knew. And I kind of stumbled across this idea of product manager and I like, what is a product manager? And in the middle, I saw this Venn diagram and it was like, right, it sits in the middle between the business people of the business, you the commercial people, the design and UX, and then the developers, know, it sits in the middle and tries to make sure that what's coming out from a product point of view takes into account, you know, the commercial

12:20Matt Evans: Wants and needs, the users wants and needs, and then the software, how to build it, kind of wants and needs. So I got a job as a product manager. I don't know how I got a job as a product manager. I had no

12:31Janne Parri: You

12:32Matt Evans: Experience as a product manager. I thought I was actually probably more of a product, not a designer. I'm not a designer, but a product architect, that kind of thing. But I got a product manager role. Quickly realized, well, over probably two or three other roles, I quickly realized I'm not a good manager of things. Not, you know, I don't like getting into Trello boards and Jira and, you know, having stuff moved around and being, having that person accountable to that and planning set. I don't just, I'm not good, I'm just not good at it. So the management side of things just, I don't know, it just failed me probably.

13:10Matt Evans: So, but that led me into a client who wanted to build. So this wasn't even a client. Was, no, I'll tell you what, you remember MakerPad? You remember MakerPad? It was.

13:21Janne Parri: No, I don't.

13:22Matt Evans: It was like a community forum and this guy called Ben Tossell, who is very good in the AI world at the moment in terms of information sharing. But he went on and took no code tools like Webflow, like Zapier, like make, like did a few bubble stuff. And he would build existing websites. He's going like, build Airbnb with no code

13:50Janne Parri: Hell yeah.

13:50Matt Evans: Tools. And he would do videos and they were very rough and ready. And I remember going on there and I met a few guys and I found out Webflow exists. And I started playing with Webflow and go like, wow, I don't need to code this stuff. I don't need, the design is a little bit easier and I can actually build stuff without having to pester an engineer or pester a front end person. Even though could do the front end, I just wasn't quick and efficient at doing it. And I didn't like the spinning up servers and, know, AI

14:21Matt Evans: Didn't exist. It's stupid, but AI didn't exist. And you couldn't ask anyone unless you paid them. I got into that. And then on the forum on that, someone said, can someone help us build a five-a-side football league app in, there's a client in the Netherlands that they had. And I said, yeah, let's, yeah, I'll do it. And I started off in Figma designing this thing, know, doing loads of Q and A's with the founder, right, you know, how do people use it? What do you want? What features, all this kind of stuff. And I was putting it in Figma. And after a couple of weeks, I realized that,

14:54Matt Evans: You know, when in Figma, if you've used Figma and you do prototypes, you have to join certain actions across. And there was just lines everywhere. And when the client went, do you know what? No, no, this shouldn't happen. We need this to happen. You kind of felt like, because it's all manual. I had to undo everything. It wasn't dynamic. You know, you couldn't run data through it. So you couldn't say, right, we've got 10 leagues and 50 players in each league and all these fixtures and you couldn't simulate what it looks like and all that. So I thought, I need to build this and Webflow was there and I thought, I'll build it in Webflow. And before you know it, I'm building a prototype of Webflow and happy day. I didn't have to pay obviously, because a staging account was free. And then roll on forward and I think Ben referred me to a client in America.

15:42Matt Evans: I did a couple of pages for them and then they referred me to others. And before you know it, I'm now a Webflow developer and it was, it was kind of like, I didn't plan it. I didn't set out to be a Webflow developer or a front end developer or it just happened that there was a market there. You know, I was freelancing essentially with a bit of the coffee on the side and it was, it kind of fell into it. So that led me to the Webflow and that I suppose what now is happening with all the AI stuff is now it's enabling me to do all of the stuff that I wanted to do pre-Webflow in terms of I can build stuff, I can look at the business case, I can look at the commercial case, I can look at the usability, can get behind and start playing with the backend stuff, I can engage with databases. Just this morning I was hooking up some

16:37Matt Evans: An email system for a client where it was like, you know, a user emails an admin and admin emails them back and it's all tracked and not like anything you can think of, you can now do it. And it's, ⁓ it's, that's why now I've kind of transitioned from not just doing Webflow, but doing products and trying to build products for people. ⁓ It happens that the clients I'm doing this for have come through Webflow. So I've had them as clients in the Webflow world. But yeah, that's kind of where I'm gone and going. And you know, like the stuff that Nathan was saying in your previous episode about like AI might not exist in a couple of years, you know, my

17:18Matt Evans: Heart started going because, you know, I'm, I wouldn't say I'm better, well, maybe I am, I'm betting on the idea that I have, team of programmers sitting in my office here and I can call on them at any time. I have a team of commercial minded people, have some designers, have an accessibility expert, I have all these people in my room right now and that's allowing me to offer a service to small teams who don't maybe have the funds or the expertise to build and I feel like I can be that, not so much a triage, but I can be that product.

17:53Matt Evans: Manager in the middle that not just organizes and thinks about it, but actually does it. That's really empowering for me, but also I feel like I can empower a lot of small and medium sized companies who, they don't have big budgets. They have little problems that they want to solve, but they don't want to go out and spend a year and 50,000 euros building this thing. They want quick solutions. I was speaking to a client the other day and this is a Webflow client and they were telling me how they're using AI and it was all around PowerPoints. Their biggest problem was they did a whole rebrand. Every company in the world goes through this problem. They do a whole rebrand.

18:37Matt Evans: They get new logos, new typefaces, new color palettes, new spacing, just everything. ⁓ a brand agency comes in and they do a brilliant job and they present all these lovely artifacts and mockups and then it gets rolled out and two weeks later the PowerPoints are a mess. The PDFs being created by the teams are a mess and it's not because they don't care, it's because it's actually really hard to take a style guide from one place and really apply it to another unless you're a designer or you have that mindset.

19:10Matt Evans: And so he created a little app that people can go in, sales team can go in and they can create their deck with the content and they press a button and it spits out a PowerPoint because not another format, a PowerPoint that is branded up, the spacing, the type, the logos, the colors, it's all there and it has their content in it and off they go and sell their product. It's like, this is brilliant. I wish I could, can I parachute myself into lots of different companies around here and help them navigate these elements and bring a little bit of product thinking, a bit of the rules of the game, you know, because it's not like AI is not a magic wand. It's not a magic wand. Like we can go on to how Webflow are maybe positioning some of the stuff, AI stuff as magic wands is

19:57Matt Evans: It's not a magic wand. You still need to have some expertise and experience. I feel like there's room in the market there. And yeah, it's early days. I'm not doing a huge amount of stuff on the client side with it. I've got loads of projects on, side projects. I've actually, ironically, I've got a, is it ironic? It's probably the wrong word, but I've got a Webflow app that is just been approved this morning to go live in the app stores, which I've wanted to build for a long time, but I didn't have the technical capabilities to, and I've been able to build it on my own, while having a coffee, while the kids are sleeping upstairs, early morning, late nights, watching a bit of TV or whatever it might be, just downtime stuff, made this little app, it's gone out, and it will hopefully be a good thing for the Webflow community, but it was...

20:47Matt Evans: It was AI that allowed me to do these things. I'm not going to make any money. I'm not going to, maybe down the line, it will have some monetary part of it, maybe, who knows. But the idea is it's little problems can be solved really quickly, really efficiently. And it's not about this, everyone can make a million dollar company now. It's just about, like, I speak to my wife all the time. She's a physio. And I'm like, can I come in and shadow you for a day? She's like, well, I'm a physio. You take notes. You do this. You do admin stuff. It's like, maybe there's bits that I can bring some efficiency to that will allow you to have an extra appointment in your diary every day, that kind of stuff. So yeah, I'm very excited about where everything's going. I'm just trying to make the most of it at the moment.

21:34Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah, beautiful. Was so much, so much there. Before we go to the AI tools and your stack and so on, we spend a little bit about your business. How often do you open the Webflow Designer and how you package all those other services and so on. What does your business in a sense look like right now?

21:58Matt Evans: Dear, I don't know. The management part of anything in my life is a bit like a goldfish. So I have an adult diagnosis of ADHD, which gives me some comfort in knowing why I do things how I do them. But I have almost a goldfish excitable three-day memory, let's call it. So I don't manage or position or anything like that in the business sense. Like any freelancer or agency, I have to remind it five times for the tax, the quarterly tax submission or to put money away for all those kind of things. In terms of, I guess, what I do day to day, my main project is this sort

22:45Matt Evans: Is off Webflow, but I have a couple of projects on the Webflow stuff. I literally have, if I can even walk you through now, like I will have my terminal and Claude Code in one window running tasks, and I have my Figma on one side, and I have my Webflow designer on the other, and I'm building Webflow while the agent's running, and then the agent might ask me some questions or I might need to test a few things and then before you know it, I'm back in Webflow doing. So I'm just this of this juggling act. It does mean that I don't really plan ahead. Not, you know, I don't actively, what's the word? I'm not going out and seeking business all the time or doing any outreach, which I should do. You know, I'm not doing any podcast. I used to do podcast, say with podcasts with Alian and that was a really exciting time to get my, what's the word?

23:31Matt Evans: Probably my frustration's out. It was my little time of the week for both of us and our guests that we had on. It was really good to chew the fat, as we call it. But that sometimes now happens in Slack. I might deviate off and say, I'll have a, off I go and have a little bit of a feedback session in Slack or a bit of a rant or a bit of a reply thread. As you said, like go and defend Webflow over there or go and, throw stones at them over here. Thankfully, it's in a private, I suppose it's in a private environment. That used to happen a bit more in the Twittersphere. I,

24:08Matt Evans: Yeah, Twittersphere and the podcast, I got a bit, I reflected on myself a little bit there and yeah, it's, I don't think it's healthy to be in that mindset too much of the time. Because as I said, like when you're building, especially nowadays, like if someone asks you to do like the other day, we're talking about feature and it's like, can you do it? The client said, can you do it? Yes. You know that positive yes attitude that you can do when you have a team of experts in your,

24:38Matt Evans: Within your team, let's call it the AI. And I'm not, you know, I'm probably overselling AI a little bit. There's a lot of, you know, dangers to using AI and a lot of pitfalls. But that positive stuff, I think, is where I want to spend a lot more of my time and less about the negative Webflow bashing side of things. Yeah, I don't know. I've gone off on a bit of a tangent there.

25:04Janne Parri: No worries, no worries. I remember hearing you talk about the team of experts with Julian and that kind of linked to my previous discussion with Nathan and Nathan was talking about the context relating to the Webflow acquisition of Vidoso. If Webflow could become this place for all of your business context and then it would enable the whatever AI is in Webflow to do all sorts of like own brand stuff. So do you have any thoughts on that? You excited about any of those things?

25:42Matt Evans: Interesting one. So Michael Wells, who is, I think, a very well-respected voice in the Webflow community, from the point that, and I hope Michael doesn't mind me saying this, his level of thinking, I think, is out of reach of the technical ability of a lot of us who are in the Webflow community. Webflow is brilliant because it allows, it's a layer on top of the technical stuff. And there is a small percentage that go in and dive in and reverse proxies. Even the custom code bit is relatively shallow in terms of the amount of people who do crazy stuff. But Michael is, I think, a bit of a unicorn in this space where he is in the Webflow game, but he could equally be a superstar software engineer outside of Webflow custom coding everything. In fact, he comes across as the guy who should be custom coding everything because

26:32Matt Evans: He knows everything. And anyway, we got into a thread about, I think it was about this, about he was thinking, right, maybe the clients could benefit from this sort of all-in-one location place where they can control things in a way that Webflow just helped them with all those little things that all add up to having a brilliant web presence, a brilliant visual presence, let's call it across. All the different touch points that they have from a digital point of view. I think I disagreed with him a little bit. I feel like Webflow, and it's been said maybe in the last couple of weeks is that, you Webflow is the leading, agentic marketing web platform. And I was like, me and a few people on WhatsApp groups have been trying to dissect this and what does that?

27:22Matt Evans: What does that mean exactly? Yeah,

27:22Janne Parri: Yeah, my thoughts exactly.

27:26Matt Evans: I just, you know, there's, have slogans and you know, I understand that it's very hard. Copywriting is a hard game to play. The H1 of your, you know, the H1 often is, especially of companies like Webflow, it's probably a few months ahead of what the actual product delivers. But you know, Webflow itself, feel, I in and I'm looking for these agentic marketing tools that this slogan and I don't see them at the moment. Don't see these that I guess it's the quality of life stuff that makes a marketeers job that little bit easier. And maybe at the enterprise level, you know, they've got they've just released the a kind of analyze then do

28:05Matt Evans: Sort of sort of cycle, I guess those kind of features. But yeah, I don't know. I don't think they should be. I'm very up for the open world where the tool that I use to create, let's do open graph images. The tool that I use to create open graph images will be different to the tool that you use to create open graph images. The tools might be very similar, but you know what? The client will use a completely different tool. Why? Because open graph images is, 1 % of their annual activity list, you know, the

28:39Matt Evans: Rest of the time they're making Instagram posts or then making email assets or and their tool, let's say, let's call it Canva that's brilliant at doing that stuff, you know, so they use that tool. And then you use a different tool because maybe you're a bit more of a designer. So you have a bit more of a canvas approach to stuff. Whereas I use a like open graph, image creator.com and I just upload an image, crop it, bang, off you go. And I think that's where like Webflow would be, I don't know if they're wise to jump into those individual worlds of capability. Like where does it end? Know, like, you know, that the whole T shaped idea of we people can be T shaped where, you know, you have a broad

29:23Matt Evans: Understanding of stuff that you go deep on one or maybe two elements. It's like that's what needs to happen. You're going after, I don't know, yeah, an open graph generate image generator or I don't know, maybe it's a blog, a blog copywriter or I don't know what it might be, but I think you need to use the tools that are very good at what they do and connect with them. Like Webflow do. Don't get me wrong, Webflow do. But I think that's the route that they should carry on going. Think the MCP obviously is an interesting development across the whole industry. You can have good MCPs, you can have bad MCPs. I don't know how people judge that. I haven't used enough MCPs to be able to evaluate. But I know that there's good ones, not so good ones, bad ones.

30:17Matt Evans: A lot of their focus should be about being open ⁓ and making their connections with other tools super efficient and super linear ⁓ and super safe. Like, you know, the MCP stuff is, we know AI is fraught with dangers. I think, you know, bringing AI into Webflow has to be done in a super controlled manner. Think I do not want to give my clients. AI chat where they can ask it to create a component or create a duplicate of a component or add a button to a component when it's not safe. There's

30:53Matt Evans: No version control. There's undo buttons, but they're pretty old school undo buttons. If you refresh the page, the undo starts to fall down on you. I said in the Slack the other day to I can't remember who it was. It was a product discussion about when that if the AI tool exists in Webflow for clients, they should have to put a deposit down like a retainer deposit that sent to the freelancer just in case things go wrong. It's like, right before you press, can you do this?

31:27Matt Evans: They have to pay, you know, they have to pay me 2000 euros on the premise that they can, someone's going to have to come in and fix it. Like I'll just. It'll just sit there in my bank account until it's needed, but it's pretty sure that in two days time, you're going to go, I just created this amazing thing. And then an hour later, Oh, I've messed everything up. Oh, what do I do? Help. Blah. You know, and it's so, I, don't know. I think they should focus on the opportunity, which is the visual, the visual side. Like we talked about before, like show.

32:03Matt Evans: The visual side of Webflow is its biggest asset. And I feel like that's where they should tool up and make that the best in class. Pencil and paper, I love those names because they're so generic. Those little tools that are coming out, Figma, Frame, there's so many tools that are coming out. And the biggest, at least I can see on the surface. And again, I'm not an AI expert. They seem to be the battleground of who can crack that AI, the design side of things from an AI standpoint.

32:37Matt Evans: Adam Wathan and the Tailwind guys, they've come out with a tool again that's trying to apply some of the design best practices to these tools. It's, yeah. I think Webflow are so well positioned to just be that kind of tool. Play to their strengths, play to the CMS. Even the other day I was walking the dog and we have a WhatsApp group with a few, we're not actually ex-Webflowers, but we're a load of Webflowers who are now working a lot with AI. Julian would be one of those, Alin would be in there.

33:12Janne Parri: You

33:14Matt Evans: We come up with flow ideas and one of the thoughts was, imagine you could have a little blog editor that sat on top of your Webflow CMS that knew all of the Webflow, all the CMS content that you had. So it could take a tone of voice, it could, know, the length of it, the links, it knew your website inside out, it knew your objectives, all this kind of stuff. And it would then be your, almost your blog. Article copywriter. And you could automate it and you could say, right, you know, can you write a blog about this and post it to go live in two weeks time on a Monday? Like, there, stop there. Don't start now putting in big calendar things and then Instagram posts and Twitter posts and assets and stuff. Just be just quality of life, little quality of life stuff in the domain of what Webflow does really well, I think is

34:07Matt Evans: I get like, I don't know. I'd love to be inside the Webflow product meetings every, because there's so many smart people like, you know, the likes of Nathan and, you know, I don't know many others in the HQ because they're not as visible as maybe some once were, but I'm sure there's lots of smart people in there doing some smart stuff, but I just hope that they do the. The little stuff.

34:33Janne Parri: I have a feeling that you have had your hand in quite many decisions back there in Webflow, as Nathan said in the last episode. Every Reddit post will find its way to the product manager. And as I said at the beginning, you have been very active on the Slack, and you are in the ACE program. So I have a feeling that... That they are aware of all the things. But again, there was so many things about like AI, the open nature or should the features be more like native and where should webflow go, all the things. I'm all for the more open thing that serves us.

35:18Janne Parri: Little guys if we can integrate whatever LLM we want, like with the MCP and such. But as you said, that might bring in some security concerns. Again, referencing to discussion that the bigger players like the enterprise partners might not want to do that. Like they just want to have one product. If it has AI that might be well and good. But they do not want to have to do another contract and integrate it and open some vulnerabilities. So

35:51Janne Parri: Yeah there are a bunch of stuff. I'm not sure should Webflow like play towards both of those directions. Is it either or should they just like bang on with the MCP or something like that. Yeah, what does your crystal

36:06Matt Evans: Yeah, it's...

36:08Janne Parri: Ball say?

36:09Matt Evans: Yeah, Chris, more stroke.

36:11Janne Parri: You

36:11Matt Evans: Yeah, I, the one thing I've talked a bit about is Webflow as a tool. So, you know, Webflow is often referred to as a tool or a platform, or it's a website host, you know, it's doing a lot of things all in one lit one package. And I feel that maybe there's a there's a time where it becomes more of a tool or at least a bit of it can be more of a tool for certain users. The reason I say that is like, when I, ⁓ I have it every time. I know guys like Hal have, you know, they work so hard and like, Alessia has been on recently talking about

36:53Matt Evans: How they work really hard to make sure that the system they build for their clients is really watertight, easy to use, but flexible. And I just don't think they've got that build mode. I don't think they've got it right. Think it feels like another, an add-on to the designer rather than something that's dedicated for clients and the way that clients have used that tool in their environment. You can have like, I don't know, analogy or metaphor, but, you know, I use like a little spoon to stir like the tea bag in my tea, you know? So it does that job really, really well. But it also does an amazing job at being a spoon that my eldest can hit my youngest around the head with because

37:37Janne Parri: You

37:38Matt Evans: It's not going to do a lot of damage and it's easy to hold. But Webflow is not doing that at the moment. Think the spoon is doing it. It's being the spoon for me, but it's being a little bit clunky for my son, if that makes sense. That's a really bad example. I think they, I would love to pay and I pay Claude, what do pay him? 200 quid a month to use their tool. They don't host anything. There's no dependencies. Just, I just. I just use it and I wish I could pay Webflow X amount, call it 50 quid, 100 quid per month to just use it as a tool. And I didn't have to combine it with hosting. Didn't have to have that bit of the

38:16Matt Evans: Contract. And the same with clients. Feel like they, yes, the hosting is kind of wedded to Webflow. And I understand why, because, you know, Webflow as a tool is almost, it's almost free for clients. To a certain extent, but they pay for the hosting. But what if there was like a client tool that if you had a client plan, you get this tool and it becomes just for clients and it's dedicated for clients and it doesn't have all the settings that developers need. It doesn't have all the custom code stuff. You can't open components. It just has the components,

38:50Janne Parri: Hmm.

38:51Matt Evans: The variants. The AI for it is all about building pages, not about building new components or so you have these dedicated experiences. And I'd imagine it would be brilliant for enterprise. If you've got a team of 20 marketers, using, the product team could go in and go, right, how do you use it? What do you use it for? When do you use it? How often do you use it? Like, give me all these scenarios and they have the room and the headspace to just build a front end experience that's dedicated for that use case.

39:21Matt Evans: And then you've got the developer community, which may be enterprise like the Michael Wells of this world, and then the Mies of this world, and then the Joseph Berrys of this world, who we have different needs. We have different tool sets that we use more often and less often. We can exist in one platform because we can give and take, we can use bits and not use other bits. But I think clients are so different. I think that's where they should go. I feel like that's their... Because AI is, again, that's the problem with AI. If you speak to Julian, know, Julian and the team are building Ship Studio and I don't know how they're doing it so quickly, but they're rolling out these new features. They're listening. It's small. Like, so they haven't got these big scaling issues to think about. If something

40:06Matt Evans: Goes wrong, it's not the end of the world. Like, you know, Webflow yesterday when something went wrong, it was the end of the world in a lot of people's lives. Understandably, because it's our livelihood. So I understand why people get so heads up about it. I would have been one of those in the past. I think it's hard to build really good client experiences unless you're just focused on what the client is doing. And if they do that, do you know what? Maybe they will be able to bring in a few more deeper tools for the clients. Use case, whether it's, you know, asset generation or the AI, the way that AI has the guardrails and that might be able to be tightened up for client elements where it's all about copyrighting or it's all about, I don't know, component organization or AEO or SEO, all those kinds of things. But yeah, I don't know. I feel like Webflow is trying to be everything to everyone, which state it was okay. It was okay to be that to start with, but I think

41:04Matt Evans: It's not like that anymore because what we can do, what I can do as a non-traditional developer has gone skyrocketed and what clients have to think about every day of the week has skyrocketed. And I'm not sure they can coexist as efficiently as possible when they're in the same. Front end experience, yeah.

41:24Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah. I'm totally with you. I feel that there's at least two big frictions that you said Firstly, the client building experience and the speed of building for us like Webflow Pros. I kind of have my hopes up that maybe the speed of building will get to better level with the MCPs and such. But the client building experience, I'm totally with you on that. We get excited about all the systems that we can build on top of components and such. But the end experience for clients, that is still quite like hard. Have to build documentation and do some training and so on. And I just wish it could be

42:07Janne Parri: Way easier and at the same time we as the Webflow pros, we could have all the control. And I'm not sure now you gave that idea that maybe the UIs could be like differentiated somehow. Obviously that would mean a big change for Webflow. But yeah, I'm not sure what that kind of feature. Feature would be.

42:30Matt Evans: Well, Nathan mentioned it in that last episode, which was, you know, everything that you can click on in the web should be an API or an endpoint, you know? And so that's exactly, you know, it should be a, like you have Webflow as the platform and then you have these, one of the headless experiences. So you have one front end, which is a designer front end and the other one is a, is a client front end or a build front end. I hate the word build being used for clients because we're building all the time in the designer. I'm not a designer.

43:02Matt Evans: I'm not designing. Anyway, that's for another day. It feels like that could be the way. I listened to a podcast with one of the founders of Sanity, CMS. I'll send this to you. It's really interesting. It was on ShopTalk Show, which is like a kind CSS, HTML. JavaScript podcast that's been going for years. But he was talking about the idea that you have this structured data as a base, and then you can use that data in lots of different places. And it's true. They should be this data in the middle or this platform, let's call it in the middle, and then it should be accessed through different doors with different glasses on in different contexts.

43:45Matt Evans: Because that's, you want to bring the context and the experience and tailor it to the person using it rather than, you know, like, again, we're driving in a car, the experience that my kids have in the back is so different to the experience I have when I'm driving, which is different to the passenger, you know, if my wife's driving, my experience in the passenger seat is so much different to when I'm driving. I feel more worried about, certain things. Feel safe about other things. I feel like more responsible for making sure the kids don't cause chaos in the back. But when I'm driving, I don't have those. So I think you can still be in the same platform and going in the same direction. But you just have to be conscious of the context or the position those people are coming from and then tailor it accordingly. And then you become the world leading agentic web platform, I think. But I'm not sure you can

44:37Matt Evans: Be the leading web marketing platform if you

44:41Janne Parri: You

44:43Matt Evans: Have to deal with everyone and every decision that you make has a very, is closely impact the experience of another stakeholder group or another user group.

44:54Janne Parri: Tough situation.

44:54Matt Evans: But yeah.

44:56Janne Parri: Yeah. I wouldn't want to be the person doing the decisions at Webflow's end. Do you think that there still is and will be a good use case for Webflow in the future? Like if they are going towards like just marketing teams and such, would, is there a use case that Webflow still is the best tool? What do you think?

45:18Matt Evans: I don't see why it can't be. So a lot of smart people, there's a lot of experience they have in this space. They've been doing it for a good number of years now. They have a huge client base, a varied client base, so they know what's needed. They know what the wants are. I think they're moving towards the enterprise. It doesn't surprise me. I worked in marketing for a good few years and all our clients could be classed as enterprise. I remember my first month, I was even an intern, so I wasn't getting paid. I was responsible for a million pounds worth of advertising contracts for British Petroleum, BP, the oil company. I was responsible for it. I remember calling my mom and dad up and going,

46:09Matt Evans: I've just signed off a million pounds worth of, like it's gone through me. I sent these contracts off and it was madness. So I know enterprise is where the money is. Enterprise is where the money is. It pays the bills. I feel like someone like HubSpot, again, I don't know how well HubSpot are doing, but I feel like someone like HubSpot are gonna come in and just go, we need Webflow. We're gonna tack it onto our HubSpot. Offering. Something like that. Again, I don't know the ins and outs of why they would do it if they are planning. Maybe now they can build their own platform internally. They feel like maybe have a spot on like a bank. They're so old that they can't rip up their current code base because they would call it maybe Webflower like that. Maybe the way they've built it is a little bit old school. Don't know. But yeah, they've got the talent.

46:57Matt Evans: Yeah, I just wish they were a little bit more open and I feel like a little bit more exciting with the features that they're doing. Also, maybe just go back to the, I say it's the foundations, you know, we're freelancers, we're not the foundation for the company. The foundation company are the guys who built it and are building it. They innovated so quickly and they've been through periods of, I think it was a couple of years ago, the way they've been like tiny but mighty updates. It's

47:28Matt Evans: Almost like they were like, guys, we've got this really big list, let's reduce it and we'll spend three weeks going through and just like tick them off really quickly. I wish they would take that attitude into a lot more of the little stuff because those little quality of life stuffs will feed through, it will inspire different use cases, different feedback. And then it all benefits the enterprise. The little things all benefit the big fish. And I feel like maybe, yeah, say maybe the comms to the little guys is not as strong as it used to be. I don't know, maybe that means that as was it the crypto world, they're rubbing themselves of the innovation, like the innovation seed that fueled

48:09Matt Evans: The development of lot of the features, which is the front end users, i.e. You, me, Joseph, know, Aline, used to be Julian, but not anymore, that kind of stuff, you know.

48:22Janne Parri: Yeah, it's interesting. My clients have kind of like, grown with throughout the years I feel that my business has also grown with Webflow. I'm not nowhere near on the enterprise level. But anyways, and I'm just wondering if workflow keeps going to this direction. Will there ever be new webflowers, like young people trying out webflow because the jump from zero clients to your first client, that workflow is a good platform for might be so, so high that you kind of cannot do from zero to one jump, right?

49:02Janne Parri: Right there and then. Do you think that could be a risk in the future?

49:06Matt Evans: Yeah, I think you're right. Think, you know, if you every river is powered by a load of little streams and you start blocking those streams off, you know, the river runs dry eventually. It won't happen overnight, but it will run dry. And I think they haven't been helped by the fact that AI has come around the corner. And we have insane in our WhatsApp group, we have a few a few people who are early on their journey, you know, and their questions are, I learn Webflow? Shall I go deeper onto Webflow? Or should I dive into Claude Code? Should I think about the cells? Should I start learning Astro? Should I look at React? Should I understand databases? So there's clear forks in the road emerging and Webflow just needs to make sure that they're on the right side of it. Because, you know,

49:53Matt Evans: Lovable and bold and all that. They exist and know clients are playing with these things every day and you know they're not coming to you with an email or a mood board now they're coming to you with a full-on like app that's built and yes they're not it's not watertight it's not production ready but it's it encapsulates the vision that they're going with and if they're moving from that kind of capability to Webflow at the moment, it's a backwards step. I feel like freelancers are looking at that and going, well, I can't build it with Webflow or I can't. OK, it's slightly different. This is an app world. It's not the marketing world. But a lot more conversations are happening. Like I say, I've got a Webflow client who

50:36Matt Evans: Even yesterday, it didn't happen, but I was almost going to say, look, do you want to try this with a custom build? And we'll build it with Astro, we'll put sanity CMS on the back of it. I just feel like it's one of those projects where you've just explained a use case to me, which is you write an article once a week, but you need a map, a search in there. You need really good forms that redirect people's queries to different pages and like I start to build up these things I'm going right how do I do that in Webflow could I do that on another platform and I'm yeah I was that close to and then we then we got back into the you know the marketing exec needs to be able to build pages really quickly I was like okay yeah yeah okay that's I know no

51:21Matt Evans: I'm not I'm not I'm not saying I'm not using toward code for that I'm not I'm not trying to train someone up on that So a component system works and webflow has nailed that and that kind of stuff. But it's, yeah, you're right. It's conversations that are happening. I'm say it's like anything. We have this in Welsh rugby right now. Okay. And you won't be familiar with Welsh rugby, but we had a, I guess it's like, you know, what's the national sport of Finland? Would be

51:46Janne Parri: Ice hockey, obviously.

51:47Matt Evans: Ice hockey. Okay. So you've got, you've got this golden generation. Okay, and you get we get these only in national sports is for four or five years, our top our national team was bossing it on the on the international stage. We're a small country, but we will be in the big ones, you know, and then it stopped, it stops happening, start getting beaten, and we start falling down the rankings. And it's like, where what's gone wrong? And in Welsh rugby, we're going through this thing right now, which is why did it go wrong? Why aren't our players as good as they used to be? And it's all been traced back to the funding for the schools and the academies, the people learning their craft was cut. There were less coaches, there were less programs. And lo and behold, when those people start coming into the sort of national team age, they're not as good as they were before. And it's the same here.

52:40Matt Evans: Webflow need to look after those little, the minnows, the little fish, the fish that are growing because they are gonna be the big fish. They're gonna be the ones who bring the enterprise stuff to the table in two, three, four years time and work on them. At the end of the day, Webflow needs freelancers, agencies, people to work on these projects. You need to keep feeding the energy behind it. Otherwise, yeah, so maybe. Maybe they're looking at that, maybe they're not. Maybe they're looking for an IPO and cash out and happy days and they don't care about the river

53:12Janne Parri: You

53:14Matt Evans: Drying up. I don't know, but that's probably one for another episode with Nathan or one of his colleagues.

53:20Janne Parri: Yeah, How's your junior camp doing?

53:24Matt Evans: And we are like, remember, like if you look in, if you look in the Slack channels in the feed, in the product feedback, okay, it's not, there's not a huge amount of activity there. It has dried up a little bit, but the people giving feedback are, freelancers, are independent agencies, you know, there's the odd one coming from the bigger agencies, like, you know, like Al, for example, he's very active and he often comes in with very articulated, very thought out feedback, bits of feedback. But we're active, we're eager, we're excited. We love being part of this community where we can talk to fellow people and we have offline, we have WhatsApp groups, Slack groups, all these places where we just huddle around the Webflow fire.

54:07Matt Evans: And yeah, ignore that at your peril of webflow because if that disappears, it's just not good. Everything will dry up and it will be, know, enterprise people don't talk to each other. They talk to each other in their big company. They don't talk to other people, you know.

54:22Janne Parri: Yeah. They have NDAs and they are not allowed to talk.

54:26Matt Evans: Exactly. Maybe they want to talk at the industry parties and stuff and the Silicon Valley pub on the corner on a Thursday night, yeah, they're not talking too much detail, are they? They're definitely not giving feedback on the Webflow project.

54:44Janne Parri: But I do have a feeling that Webflow is doing things with their communication and community stuff. But obviously it's not like as easy as putting money on the table or anything like that. You kind of have to get the community going and momentum and everything ties together with the exciting features and people and so on. But one very detailed question you have mentioned. Your WhatsApp group several times. Now, do you have a funny name for your WhatsApp group? The one with the Webflow Heretics.

55:18Matt Evans: It's called agentic Webflowers at the moment. Yeah. Yeah, it's not very innovative, it's kind of, yeah.

55:23Janne Parri: So... But it's agentic.

55:31Matt Evans: Agentic Webflowers. To be honest, I think it started off with good intentions and it's sort of, that name now is probably a little bit sarcastic if I'm honest because... The amount of Webflow specific talk in there is very minimal. There's lots of, there's probably a little bit of, you know, Webflow bashing every so often, but the Webflow is almost like, would you migrate off your client off to this platform or how can we do this? You know, the Webflow is there and it kind of, it's a little bit of the glue together, you know.

56:04Matt Evans: And all of us are still building Webflow sites. But the predominant thing is learning, sharing, discussing stuff around AI, you know, because it's a wild west. Like if I build something in Webflow, I can almost walk you through how I did it, the decisions made. If I do something with pull code, how like we can go on for days talking about decisions and how I came about it, what I don't know, what I do know, what the risks are. We've got guys in there who are very risk conscious because they're day to day in a more risk conscious environment or company. And then you've got guys in there who are launching SaaSes in two weeks because they can and they want to and they move so quick and they're very good at executing. It's there's probably what, I don't know, 15 of us on there and there's a few

57:00Matt Evans: You know, regular voices, few every so often voices, and then a few that just listen in. Or maybe they don't, maybe they just muted the group because they don't want to listen to all the crap that's coming out of it. Don't know.

57:13Janne Parri: I do that for all my like WhatsApp groups, even like

57:17Matt Evans: The

57:17Janne Parri: The family group. Just mute the group. Okay. You mentioned about like, the project you were about to suggest that maybe you should build a custom solution. And that like brought to mind all the all the Webflow features for like developers like Webflow Cloud, AppGen, code components. Have you given those a try and what do you think of those features?

57:44Matt Evans: Good question, it's a very good question. I'm probably going to be a little bit hypocritical here because I've probably thrown a decent amount of mud at some of the features you mentioned there without really using them, if that makes sense. The way I've always done things is I tend to, and it's a little bit of my ADHD sort of makeup, I suppose. And like ADHD is such a broad thing that I wouldn't say, I'm ADHD and you're not. In the sense of a little bit of my identifier there is, if it's urgent, I have to use it, I'll get into stuff. If it's interesting, I'll get into it. If it's basically when it comes to building.

58:25Matt Evans: If it adds value and it does a job for me, I'll go and use it. And I haven't, the AI stuff, you know, the site builder, all that kind of stuff, we've put that to one side, because that's all I think a little bit of gimmicky stuff is marketing stuff, you know, it didn't, you very nicely built and a lot of work went into, but yeah, it's not for me or my clients, but things like code components, Webflow Cloud, I can see them. See where they're coming from, but I haven't needed to use them to deliver a feature for a client. Often, it's basically the idea of, if someone said, I need this calculator, I go, okay, now I'm gonna dive into it. And I've heard code components will help here. I'll go and find out how they work, what their pros and cons are. Webflow Cloud, I used it the other day to try and

59:16Matt Evans: Pushed some docs out and it failed on me. I spent two hours on Claude Code banging my head against a brick wall trying to, and I still don't really know what the issue was. So there's a few things around it where I've just got a little bit frustrated. I can see the benefit in certain instances, but those instances I haven't really played around with yet. If I had three or four code components required in a project, I might start going, well, maybe this is a custom build after all, because the code components are custom. From

59:47Matt Evans: What I know and from what I've played around with, I think the synergy between Webflow Cloud and the main, I call it Webflow Core, like the Webflow Designer, synergies in terms of variables, in terms of classes, IDs, sitemap, redirects, whatever it might be, OpenGraph images, they don't exist in a way that makes it simple. And I feel that's again a missed opportunity. Think if you could go into Webflow Cloud and we know that Webflow Cloud isn't where people are just going in there and hand coding. They're

1:00:25Matt Evans: Building it in their own local environment and pushing it up to GitHub. If there was a way for the project to go, okay, these are the variables. Don't use anything else. These are the classes. Don't use anything else. Or at least follow the methodology of those classes. But don't just go in and build with Tailwind and come up with this new whatever it is, new variable system. The AI stuff, the AI, what's it called? Not AI sites, but the one that kind of sits in the middle.

1:00:56Janne Parri: The appgen

1:00:58Matt Evans: AppGen,

1:00:59Janne Parri: Or

1:00:59Matt Evans: AppGen, yeah. The first thing I went on, it was like, create me something. And I looked in the variables panel and it was just full of colors that, they were lovely colors, but I hadn't put them in there. They were nothing to do with the main project. Thought, come on, this is, I know that it's kind of early days, but it's those kinds of things which just disappoint me because I don't look at it again because it's kind of lost trust in it. But you

1:01:27Janne Parri: Yeah, that's tough. And I haven't used them extensively, either. So we can freely talk about and speculate about these things. I have like played around with AppGen once or once or twice. But that's the thing I understand that they have to publish these features or at least beta at some point to get feedback and so on. But they will not be like finished. Products, just like the MCP Julian was saying that, okay, he tries out the workflow MCP is that it has quite big limitations, and he never touches that again. So ⁓ even if it gets better, ⁓ you might not be aware of that. ⁓ But you ⁓ kind of have to as in Webflow kind of has to push them out at some point. So I'm like hoping that they could get

1:02:16Janne Parri: Better and maybe more like consolidated or somehow like more understandable like entity because well, I'm not too technical, but I know my way around the Webflow core you mentioned, but I'm like, what are all these like developer features? I would love to understand them better, but they are all around the place. I'm hoping that will be clearer and they will get more powerful quite quickly before people just give up entirely.

1:02:48Matt Evans: Yeah, that is the hope because yeah, you can see the potential. But again, it comes down to communication and it comes down to the visual showing off. It's like, where are all these demos? Know, I would, if I, again, I haven't worked in marketing for a long time, but if I was a content manager for Webflow Cloud or for the AppGen, I'd go, right, we're gonna release a new demo from a different angle, a different task, a different, concept, different brief, every week for the next 12 weeks. It's only 12 videos. I know Webflow have set the standard in terms of production value for their videos, but they've got so many talented people, I'm sure, building loads of stuff internally. They could just say, right, we wanted this, and we've gone ahead, and this is how we did it. Again, I know Webflow aren't into the sit down for an hour, press record, and do all the

1:03:40Matt Evans: The little, you know, the really boring, this is how it does it, wait for this, do this. You know, they're a bit more snappy. You know, I suppose McGuire's made a rod for their backs there a little bit in the way that he combined education and entertainment a little bit. I say McGuire and the rest of the team, because I know there's a big team behind him. Yeah, I think that side of things, if they put a little bit more there, even the process of doing the tasks, I think, and it's something Nathan touched on, is like people in Webflow, maybe they're not Webflowers in the way that we use Webflow. So they don't get to maybe experience all that element. But if they create those videos, like we've got this client who needs to do this, let's build it. Or we've got a, it's a calculator for solar panel efficiency that needs to go on a solar panel sales website.

1:04:31Matt Evans: Let's create it and let's drop it into our sales page. If they did loads of those, think people like myself, maybe people like yourself who don't, you have clients, you have other things you're interested in and want to build is you don't really have the time to do the trial and error element. You might watch a video for 10 minutes and go, I see how could use that. I see the opportunity. And then you just note it down. And when that thing comes along, you reach for that and you're willing to dive in a bit. For now, feels like, you know, even the MCP stuff is a LinkedIn bang video. And that and that's it. Like, well, that doesn't show me anything. It doesn't show. Like, I want to see the car driving around the track really quickly. I want to see the you know, the

1:05:14Matt Evans: The dog jump into the car and that I want to see all these scenarios because that's how I would envisage me buying and then I'll buy the car. Know, I don't show me it driving around the South African streets with sunshine and stuff. If that's just the only thing you can show me, then I, you're not, you haven't sold it to me yet.

1:05:33Janne Parri: Yeah, but i'm not i'm not too sure what's going on? With the content because just yesterday in the evening, well, it was my evening so, I was doing some work and Ended up on youtube and I saw that webflow was live. So they had some sort of live thing. Well, there was issues with audio and I just jumped off, but I feel that they are like doing something with the content, but that is just not getting through whatever noise is out there. And I believe that there's some sort of float TV starting on these days that we are recording or something like that. That might be more on the AEO, the answer engine optimization stuff, if I remember correctly, and all sorts of

1:06:20Janne Parri: Sorts of things but I remember the times when like, Webflow live stream was a big thing and I knew like about every live stream that was coming so I'm not sure what's going on right now.

1:06:34Matt Evans: Yeah, was, it was like, as we call it in the TV industry, like an appointment to view, you know, as soon as you've found out you made an appointment to view and yeah, that's sort of maybe as a weapon for them to get messaging out there has maybe just been overlooked a little bit because the appointment to view is a little bit more selective. As you say, they all have Flow TV or whatever that is. And they might wheel it out during their their AEO campaign and then it will go back into the closet and not be rolled out until the conference. Then Flow TV will come out again for three days. Because the vast majority of us can afford the 1900 quid conference fee. So we won't be watching Flow TV. We'll obviously all be in Boston because we can afford to fly there and pay the tickets because we're making so much money. But sorry, that was one of my...

1:07:27Matt Evans: Sarcastic rants, but ⁓ if you hadn't guessed, yeah, it's just, yeah, but generally, no, but generally, I ⁓ really love Webflow, the people who were there, but it is, it does feel like it's, it is a little bit like your younger brother, you know, or your kids is that you're harsh and direct ⁓ and honest because you care... And the, ⁓ When I'm not harsh, honest, and direct with Webflow, that means I don't care.

1:07:58Matt Evans: Yeah, not that they cared, that I care, that means I've moved on, you know? And it's my attention span is Webflow have done so many things for me in my career. They came in at the right point. I've met so many great people in the community. It's been so fulfilling on lots of different, know, probably more offline and out of the designer than it has been in the designer, if I'm honest. But that's, that's good. That's human life, isn't it? I feel like, maybe there's a, who knows, this time next year, maybe this Webflow conference will be the last one I tune into. Don't know. Hopefully not, but yeah.

1:08:36Janne Parri: Yeah, hopefully not because I'm like, well, luckily, I have some other things to attend this year. So I do not have to find the money for the workflow curve and the plane tickets. But I'm like doing plans for the next year. And I kind of wish to see that there would be like more excitement, some new obviously features, but more excitement in general and we could go on to a upward spiral again hopefully but we'll see obviously it's future and we cannot predict that but I'm also hopeful there's a lot of things happening but I'm also hopeful for that

1:09:20Janne Parri: At some points I kind of have to let you go and kind of I totally have to you go but but One thing I'd like to like circle back is about your business with Fido and Patch Studio and how are you like preparing for the future or are you just like how to say, winging it, trying cool stuff and seeing what sticks and so on. Or are you doing any plans for the future in order to prepare for, well, changes ahead?

1:09:53Matt Evans: I'm definitely being proactive in thinking about it, which is never a good place to be if you're being proactive and just thinking about it. That's obviously the minimum you can do. No, I say I have a few, I have a few of my peers in my network who I talk to about quite a lot, know, worried about where the, not so much worried, but worried that I don't make the most of opportunities coming down the track. Like, where is the industry going? You see all these layoffs in terms of developers being laid off and companies, quite a lot in Ireland, a lot in the US. Think freelance leads coming in from Webflow, from their platform, I've never had leads from their platform, but just generally leads are less

1:10:41Matt Evans: What's the word? I'm trying to say something really complicated, but there are less of them. I think there are more webflowers out there and less leads to go around, I think, especially as, know, webflow put a lot more effort into recruiting enterprise. So that worries me a little bit in terms of, and that's why I've probably tried to grab two hands this AI stuff... Where I can now be more of a ⁓ builder. But I know that the world is not necessarily in the day-to-day world is not necessarily talking that language yet. Don't think people go out and go, I need a new website. Let's go and employ a website designer or web agency. If I want to do social media, I go to a social media agency or an expert. But I think what the AI tools, at least from a coding building point of view, do.

1:11:32Matt Evans: And generally, guess, from automations and all the stuff that is coming out. I'm not sure the world in general has put them into a bucket and given them a label yet, which is, sometimes you need a target to go and hit. And I'm not sure the target really exists for a lot of us yet. And you do sometimes need to invent your own target and tee it up. That's a lot of cold outreach maybe. Say like when I get into conversations with people I'm always looking for that little opportunity where it's like maybe I can help you with that, maybe I can help you with that. But when you're working remotely like we've just moved to the west of Ireland, we're in a lot the connections are a lot smaller, the opportunities to meet people whether it's on a Thursday night in an event or whether they're a lot lower.

1:12:21Matt Evans: So yeah, I'm still trying to work it out if I'm honest. A lot of these WhatsApp groups and Slack and a lot of that energy goes into trying to work these things out, talk them through with people. But yeah, I don't know. I think we're all in that position where we live and die, don't we, by our last project. We're always hoping that someone comes in and when that email comes in and it's from someone you don't recognize, you feel a little bit excited because, OK, here's such a... Here's a little bit more revenue that I can maybe lean on. And I don't know, those aren't as much now. I think positioning ourselves, like web people who use Webflow are generally creative. Think they are, especially the freelance world, you're self starters, you have to make stuff happen. Things don't come to you that regularly. So I think we're well positioned to be

1:13:10Matt Evans: Have the persona to go out and get stuff and make the most of this. Just I'm not ignoring Webflow. I'm not saying I'm not going to do any Webflow projects anymore. If a Webflow project came out tomorrow, I would consider it, evaluate it like I would any other project. But really, yeah, I just get very excited. Even though Claude Code is just a stream of text sometimes all day long. It feels like I'm in some sort of teleprompter from the 1980s where it's just, you know, there's nothing to look at. It's just a lot of stuff to read and consider.

1:13:45Matt Evans: It's not that exciting. The stuff that you're building in the browser just feels like so empowering. That's where I want to move to where I can, whether it's local businesses, whether it's businesses in Dublin, London, new York, wherever, and I can be that person who goes in and just makes a little difference. You know, working with a recruitment company the other day, they all on Webflow and they needed to connect their Bullhorn CMS, is sorry, CRM, which is where they manage their candidates and people who are applied, their CVs, okay, you've gone through to the next stage, all relatively complex and old enough software, but I had to build a connection between them. I was like, there's nothing out there in the market. Make was...

1:14:29Matt Evans: Proving hard to use, AP was really hard. This was six months ago. And boom, we built it because I called code help me. And I thought, what else can I help you with guys? Like what can I help you with another part of this process? I, know, it doesn't have to be the website bit. It just can be a little other part of the process that you're doing three hours a day, three hours a week, every week you're doing this task. Can I, can I get inside? So that's, those are the conversations I want to be having. But I say, I've changed my H1 on my website to mention products and that kind of stuff. And my LinkedIn has changed a little bit, but that gets seen by probably three people a week. So it's not going to change much, but we'll

1:15:10Matt Evans: See. It's early days. It moves so quick, doesn't it? So how are you thinking about it? Because you have very different experiences, different client sets.

1:15:18Janne Parri: It's tough. It's like what you said that we are not seeing the target, the next clear target. And with Julian had talked about the cow metaphor, like Webflow being the somewhat old cow which might still be alive a couple of years, but who knows how long. And then we kind of have to like look out for another another cow or cows and yeah it's tough it's not clear and I'm not like too sure which direction I should go obviously I need to try out all sorts of AI stuff like just starting with building a website from scratch and all those things but I feel that there's a lot of like learning that

1:16:04Janne Parri: One should do like this a lot of pressure, even if it's a small thing that you are offering to your client, like you kind of want to test it out before you like offer it to your clients. Not in every case, but a lot of times I feel like AI was supposed to help us do things for us. It kind of does that, but I feel that there's a lot of pressure to learn new stuff in order to check that what the AI did is actually usable and can be offered as a service or a product or anything like that. So no definite answer answers on what I'm planning to do in the future. Except learning a bunch of stuff and trying out whatever

1:16:53Janne Parri: I get my hands on.

1:16:55Matt Evans: I think that's it. It's an open, so open, isn't it? Because your approach to thing, from what you were saying there, it feels like maybe you are a bit more considered. I would actually, I'm like a yes man when it comes to features now. Like, can we do this? I don't even think, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, we could do that. And that can get you in trouble because you can go around the houses and it doesn't work and. The team that you have in Claude, I keep calling them a team, obviously they're not, but I guess they are. I've got like four agents running right now. They give you that maybe invincibility feeling that you can do anything, you can build anything. So you just, yeah, you probably just have to sense check the size and the scale and also the risk profile of what you're building. It's like, if you're building something to link up something with a CMS,

1:17:45Matt Evans: Or publish an Instagram post because you published a post then it's not the end of the world. Like as my old boss used to say like, no one's dying today, you know? He used to say that all the time when our campaign was wrong. It was like, don't worry, no one is dying today. It's just advertising. Know, like there are situations like that. And then there are situations where, you know, people do a big campaign and the e-commerce little widget that you built for them doesn't work and they lose. 20,000 euros on their Black Friday sale date. They have different concerns and you don't want to be

1:18:22Matt Evans: Walking too far into that. We're all learning and I guess that's the plus side, isn't it? If you say yes to everything, you're going to learn whether you learn the hard way or whether you learn through success. We're still going to be learning and I think right now, anyone who doesn't want to move forward through learning is going to find them in a sticky place. This isn't going to come out in the wash in 10 years time. This is all coming out in the wash right now, like in six months a year. They say, like, I've been on calls with people who are going, who I'm going, this is my service. I want to help you solve this little problem you have in your business. They go away and they solve it because they just booted up Claude Code or...

1:19:05Matt Evans: Claude or ChatGPT and it gave them ideas and boom, they solved it. My idea isn't worth anything. My skills aren't worth anything anymore because someone else has done it. So it's all exciting times, but as long as what Nathan says, the AI is going away, as long as that doesn't happen, I'm optimistic.

1:19:25Janne Parri: We'll see what happens. But I believe that the problem is not that people wouldn't want to learn. It's just that they might not have the time to learn. Like they have all these present projects and all the other stuff in their life and they just can't find the time to learn all of the new tools. And they are tied to the old way of doing instead of like trying out new processes and new workflows and so on. At least that's how I feel it. Yeah.

1:19:58Matt Evans: It's, I remember we're in a bubble. We might think we're not, but we're in a massive awareness bubble in our industry. Like we talk about Webflow like it's, everyone knows about it. No one knows about it. I don't think my wife even knows what Webflow is or does. So it's hard to explain. It's like AI. Is everywhere because the word AI is it rolls off the tongue, it can be put into lots of headlines and all this kind of stuff. But really, how many people open ChatGPT every day or open maybe ChatGPT, Claude Code, tiny amount of. So we're still at the with the first wave coming down and we've just got to make sure that we're

1:20:43Matt Evans: Apt at riding that wave when that wave gets bigger and people are looking for solutions and help and expertise because at the end of the day every industry has expertise every task you know like we had someone come in to check our windows for leaks and drafts yesterday and they were charging a certain amount per window and we turned around like not sure we could justify spending that much on doing So I straight away went and tried to find out how do I do it myself? And I found it and I worked out it's probably going to cost me like a thousand euros in time to do it myself. So let's go and pay a thousand euros for someone else to do it.

1:21:18Matt Evans: So there's always going to be that DIY aspect and AI will go through that process of like everyone can use it. Everyone can build apps. Everyone can do this. Bolt, lovable, da. At the end of the day, it will come back to go and trust experts. And I suppose for all of us in this world, we have to just position ourselves as knowledgeable and experts because that's what we are. That's our service, I suppose, isn't it?

1:21:42Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah, totally. And my wife calls Figma, Sigma, like every time he talks

1:21:47Matt Evans: You

1:21:48Janne Parri: About it. But I believe she like knows Webflow. Yeah, hopefully. Yeah. If you happen to be my wife, please mention this part. This is also a test. If my wife is listening to my podcast. Okay. Okay. This has been a blast. We have the one last section ahead of us but before that if people want to check you out follow you or maybe even contact you where should they go?

1:22:14Matt Evans: The Fido and Patch.com is the best place. Go and click on the orange button and book a meeting in my calendar. I love speaking to lots of different people from any walk of life at any time. It doesn't have to be specifically about anything other than, you know, hey, let's have a coffee. Let's talk about the weather, you know? So yeah, Fido and Patch.com.

1:22:38Janne Parri: Yeah. And have you found your way to the new community platform, Webflow community platform? Are you active there?

1:22:45Matt Evans: I, yeah, we might be here for another half an hour if we stuck about that one now, but I did.

1:22:46Janne Parri: You

1:22:51Matt Evans: Yeah, I've been in, I've dabbled. I think I was the second best second top contributor for a week and then,

1:22:57Janne Parri: That's nice.

1:22:58Matt Evans: And I haven't been in since because yeah, I've, yeah, it's just, doesn't do it for me. Maybe it will, but yeah, it doesn't, it doesn't feel like, yeah.

1:23:06Janne Parri: Yeah, it looks sleek, but I have the same like experience. I did a couple of posts, but then all the other stuff came around and I kind of forget it. I should post these episodes there too. So that would be a good place. Hopefully that will be the new great place for the new exciting community. Well, the old but revamped community.

1:23:29Matt Evans: Revamp. Yeah, they need they need your podcast because they need some they need some value. Let's always say they need value. So go and stick your value on there and then maybe it will help them grow some sticky eyeballs.

1:23:41Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah, totally. Okay, are you ready for the last section?

1:23:44Matt Evans: I am, I am and I'm not. I don't know what the hell is coming, so...

1:23:48Janne Parri: So for anyone who is not aware, we always end the podcast with the funny, weird Finnish section where I tell a Finnish saying or an idiom or whatever. And I translate that to English. And this time Matt will try to guess what that saying means. So on. Your saying is firstly in Finnish, and in English it is roosters don't grow on demand. Like roosters don't sing on command or anything like that. So what does it mean when I say to you that roosters don't grow on demand?

1:24:29Matt Evans: Roosters don't crow on demand. I don't have a clue. My mind's working through this idea of... The other saying in English, I suppose we have, it's like someone says, jump and they say, how high? So it's almost the opposite of that. It feels like you're your own person. You're your own... Yeah, you're your own person. You decide what you do and when you do it and you're controlled by anyone else, maybe something like that.

1:25:03Janne Parri: I actually like that explanation. That is quite on point. Like if someone says the Rooster thing to you, it basically means that they or whatever they are referring to will not happen in a way that you'd like it to happen. Or someone does not do something just because you say so. So I would say that you were on point with this one. And I definitely have to congratulate this one because there has not been too many guests who have gotten these rights so that's awesome

1:25:36Matt Evans: I'd like, such a such a good little thing, because I say I'm from Wales, and we've moved my wife is Irish. So we've moved over here. And although it's English is the is the language that we all speak, the slang that is used in Ireland is off the charts. I do not know when I first arrived, I do not know what people were talking about when they were talking about stuff. And it's and I now go home to my family and they don't know what I'm talking about because I picked up so many of these things. And it's very similar is that the well, I think the Irish are even harder to understand because they have no no relationship to like there's one if I can give one to you is

1:26:24Janne Parri: Ring it up.

1:26:25Matt Evans: Is OK. So see if you can guess this is the saying is now you're sucking diesel.

1:26:32Janne Parri: You're sucking diesel so you are doing

1:26:32Matt Evans: Nah.

1:26:34Janne Parri: Something wrong like maybe it could be that you are like wasting your effort or something like that was it even close?

1:26:42Matt Evans: So it's not really, no. So what it means is that you are now going really fast. You're now going really well. So now your second diesel means that, you're up and running. You're going really fast. Like the idea that

1:27:02Janne Parri: So that was a positive thing.

1:27:04Matt Evans: It's a positive thing now. So if someone I don't know. You might show them a website on Monday and you've got one page and then you show them a website on Friday and there's like 20 pages done and they would go, and now we're sucking diesel. You they're like, you're making progress, you're flying, you're going quick. I don't know where it comes from. I think it's something to do with, you know, if you put diesel in your car, it works or you're sucking diesel out of a tank and it's only when the diesel hits your mouth that you realize that the diesel... I don't know. Don't ask me why, but...

1:27:36Janne Parri: Or is it the fact that, if I remember correctly, the diesel engines are slower to get up and running or warm or something like that compared to

1:27:48Matt Evans: Maybe. Yeah.

1:27:50Janne Parri: Petrol cars? Maybe.

1:27:52Matt Evans: Maybe, yeah, so it may be, yeah, because until it's sucking the diesel, you're going to be chugging along. But once it gets up and running, then you're... Yeah, I need to look into this myself because I don't know. Yeah.

1:28:04Janne Parri: I just happen to know that because I live in a cold environment and cars need to be heated in the winter before they get started. Okay, now

1:28:11Matt Evans: Yeah, I'd imagine, yeah.

1:28:16Janne Parri: We're just rambling, but thank you so much Matt for being a guest and for all the listeners and watchers. See you in the next one. Bye.

1:28:26Matt Evans: Thanks, Janne. Bye bye, bye.