Layoffs, Meetups & Community

0:24Janne Parri: Okay Chris, so Webflow layoff news broke out last week and you were hosting the London meetup on the same day. How was the atmosphere in the room?

0:36Chris Skitch: Well, yeah, the timing. It was it was obviously unexpected to everybody. We announce our meetups we plan them months ahead really, but they get announced two weeks beforehand and guests lined up. And in fact, after let's see, six months of knocking on the door of the new EMA EA office in London literally like a ten minute walk from where we do the meetups. My office in Shoreditch Old Street there in the city. I've been talking to the guys there saying, hey, come along, join the community. And they're busy, you know, understandably chasing those enterprise sales. Very important. And yeah, finally, about two months ago,

1:23Chris Skitch: They agreed yes, they will send someone along to present. And that was Carly, who's one of the senior technical specialists. I think I've got her title wrong there, but and yeah, so that was quite exciting. And she came along with a few of her colleagues, and in fact more of them were supposed to come from the London team. I'm not sure what their head count is now. Sixty, maybe forty to sixty. And but a few of them were going to come to the meetup and then like one or two hours before, yeah, my WhatsApp just sort of lit up various groups of what's going on and then LinkedIn and then Linda's message was about an hour or so before we started the meetup. I was like, this is this is they're like, is this big?

2:09Chris Skitch: And sort of reading Linda's message, it was like, what's going on? You really had to sort of see some of the messages on LinkedIn that, yo, this is layoffs and a large number. It's significant. So yeah, even I think we would it was about six PM and we normally have quite a few people in the in the venue by then. Not many people had turned up and I started thinking, no, what's going on? Maybe our speakers are not going to turn up as well. And then just a few minutes before we started the Webflow guys arrived. And I would I would say they were a bit shell shocked. And the first thing I said was, guys, I'm sorry to hear what's going on.

2:47Chris Skitch: Yeah. I feel like they didn't know much themselves. That perhaps I think there was some internal comms that they couldn't share about what's going on and that's understandable. But yeah, my read and understanding was that the sort of sales side of the business seems to be ring fenced and what we're seeing on LinkedIn. I don't know for sure. But yeah, the London office directly unaffected at this point with the with the layoffs. But yeah, it certainly set a an odd atmosphere for the meetup. And we had a large number, like forty odd people come along. I mean our smallest meetup might have been five people a couple

3:27Chris Skitch: Of years ago. So we we averaged probably twenty or so. So this was a fairly big turnout. And yeah, I quickly adjusted so the format of the meetup, we there's myself and originally it was just myself. And thankfully I've developed a group of volunteers. So I have a have a co host, Jimmy, that helps out and I open and sort of MC the event. I'll do some announcements ⁓ and then Jimmy does ⁓ some news ⁓ recap of what's been going on with ⁓ Webflow announcements and industry, web design, web building, AI stuff. And then we go into our presentations. But yeah, during the announcements, like one of the first things I did was address the elephant in the room as such. ⁓ And I had a screenshot of Linda's message.

4:17Chris Skitch: And just mention like, you know, this is going on and the dust hasn't settled and we've got Webflow people in the room with us and there's a an uncertainty we're all feeling. And this is if there's ever a time that community's important, it's right now. And coming together, this is a an opportunity to help each other out... Support each other in any way we can. So and I think I don't know, it's hard for me to read, but I think that maybe helped a little bit. But certainly it allowed conversation. It opened the conversation. So there were a few references to different things during the meetup. It's all live stream so you can go onto YouTube and find it. And

5:00Chris Skitch: And then really I guess the more open discussions were at the pub afterwards. I always liked to take the group to a local pub afterwards to sort of debrief and there was a lot to sort of debrief around, a lot to unpack.

5:14Janne Parri: Yeah, that was probably a good like opportunity for the folks ⁓ present because it's easy after news like that just go on the internet and see ⁓ see all the mostly negative things that people put on the internet but you could get a bit better conversation when you have those in person. ⁓ and I almost like missed the whole news because the headline was so vague I didn't understand that was a layoff news. I had to really read through it and so on. But what's like your personal take on this whole situation. And what might this mean? Obviously we do not like have all the information, we are just speculating but what's your speculation?

5:55Chris Skitch: Yeah, sure. ⁓ So I mean specifically, there's I guess a few things to look at, but the first thing is Linda Tong's message. There's a there's a clear message there and I'm gonna have to read this. ⁓ Agentic web Marketing platform. ⁓ Th those four words are mentioned ⁓ and Webflow has been using that language for a while now. And I'm not sure if that was the title of the message, but it's certainly, you know, Webflow is no longer just a website building tool for building beautiful websites. It's now the center of agentic web marketing platform. ⁓ And but it's hard to sort of square that message with significant layoffs and we don't we don't know the numbers.

6:38Chris Skitch: I think there was ⁓ an eight percent reduction in headcount a few years ago, if I'm not wrong. And some press are reporting this is larger than that. So, you know, I've I'm I've no idea. Forty people, a hundred people, we don't know. I think I saw someone on ⁓ Facebook say a hundred and forty people, but these are all just unverified numbers. Shifting to an agentic marketing platform, why does that mean the headcount has to reduce? ⁓ That's not clear. Some of the other things that are concerning in that from my perspective, the it ha it's not just ⁓ engineering that is being laid off. My the person that has helped me a lot

7:18Chris Skitch: With the with the community in the global leaders programme, which we'll talk about later, Georgina, she sadly has been laid off. That's sending a message that an agentic web marketing platform doesn't need community? I don't know, does it? It? ⁓ That

7:32Janne Parri: Yeah, that's weird.

7:33Chris Skitch: That's you know and then what is what what is an agentic web marketing platform? And I feel really bad for Carly. Like I the part of me I as you might see in this podcast, mm my inner monologue is not there and words come out. And sometimes sometimes inappropriately. And at the end of the meetup and I was trying to lift the mood as well, you know, and I had some swag that Georgina actually sent me. Just a couple of days

8:04Chris Skitch: Ago. Beautiful because web this is one of the themes. Like I want some love from Webflow, you know. I'm doing all this community work. Like, can you maybe send me some stickers I can hand out, you know? And it's few and far between. It's not nothing, and Georgina just sent me this big box that just arrived on the day before the meetup. With a lovely little handwritten note thanking me and Jimmy for what we're done. And then I mean that's quite bittersweet knowing then, you

8:34Chris Skitch: Know, she's now been laid off, which really it's a real bummer. And so anyway, at the end of the meetup, I wanted to give out some Webflow socks. I don't I should I should show them off. I should have the swag here, but the I had the these Webflow socks. Do you have Webflow socks, Janne?

8:51Janne Parri: No, I don't. But I saw those on the stream, those were cool.

8:52Chris Skitch: No. Yeah. The they're pretty desirable, ⁓ I reckon. So yeah, I'd I decided to do a pop quiz based upon what we'd learnt that evening with the presentations, and then the winner would get a pair of socks. So the first question I put to the audience, th what is ⁓ a an ⁓ agentic web marketing platform? How many people in the room put their hand? Up for these socks? You know? One person was able to answer, and that was Carly, to her credit, from Webflow. And her presentation was on that topic. And so I got my I've got a little microphone and I put it to her. And then I was like, great, okay, we'll explain. And then this is this is where I felt a bit bad ⁓ because

9:39Chris Skitch: She gave a explanation, but it was five hundred words or more. Like it was it it took a couple of minutes. So which is kind of a problem, I think. If it takes that much to explain even to an audience of you know, converted people effectively, then that how are you gonna explain it to marketing teams and to the public? It it's a bit of a disconnect. But so yeah, I felt a bit bad that I was putting her on the spot, but she sort of laughed it off. It was a light I think it was a light moment in the end. And she won a pair of socks, so

10:12Janne Parri: I'm hoping that there will be some sort of feature or something like concrete that will make sense of this agentic marketing platform thing. Hopefully

10:23Chris Skitch: So so I can't so I mean there's a bit to unpack and when we talk about the web, well at some point the early web, the Sir Tim Berners-Lee web. Like were talking before, I'm a bit of a computer history nerd, with old retro tech, Commonwealth sixty four, CRTs, I love a computer museum. I love going to events with the founding fathers of the technology that we use every day. And I went to the book launch of I had it somewhere. So Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web,

10:59Chris Skitch: And why he invented it. And yeah, he was working at CERN and scientists were creating digital documents around atomic energy, you know, atomic weapons, all these things internationally coming together. I mean it's a crazy world to think where we are now, so polarised, so divided, all the tech bros racing for the disastrous end of humanity as we know it. Post world War two, man had Dropped nukes on itself not once but twice in Japan. This devastating weapon. And all the scientists went, Holy crap. Do we go off in our silos racing for our self-assured destruction? Or do we come together and share that knowledge? And that's what CERN was founded around. And at CERN, so Tim Berners-Lee was doing his research.

11:47Chris Skitch: Putting all these documents together, but not being able to act in fact, the first thing he had to do was build a system to store his documents on his own machine. And then everyone was doing that. And he thought there must be a better way to share documents. And he came up with the with the with the web specification that then created the first, I don't know, web 1.0, I guess. And that was for eyeballs, human eyeballs to look at. And it was blue links and flashing text and hit counters and all that stuff. And then thankfully we've got the beautiful web at some point and Webflow has led that, I feel, with bridging that gap between th the priesthood of developers and their exclusive niche of knowledge and the sort of wacky

12:31Chris Skitch: Designer world of hey, let's throw some paint at the wall. And it's a lovely synergy that create you know and we've seen so many beautiful websites that WebFlow has enabled. And but for eyeballs, human eyeballs. And along the way there was some robot eyeballs as well, the search engines, you know, so SEO became a thing. So you the there's kind of two two front doors to the web. The humans looking at it and then the search bots. But now we're saying there's another set of eyeballs, which is the AI agents and building the web for them and they don't care about pretty colours. But then the the search bots didn't either. Right? And

13:16Chris Skitch: It feels like some people think that the human eyeballs are gonna go away and that people are only just gonna see website and their brand in a chatbot response. And that's certainly happening, but I don't know, personally, and I think at some point before I book that holiday or I buy that pair of UG boots, whatever it might be, I'll visit that company's website and have that brand on site experience that I'd hope you know has some sort of emotion, some sort of feeling, and doesn't just treat me like a like a bot. And so that's I don't think that's going away. So I my read on Linda's message, it sounds it sounds like yeah, they're all in on the agency web marketing platform. It's not actually that much different from SEO. That building beautiful websites is still important.

14:08Chris Skitch: But yeah, it still it still leaves a lot of uncertainty how's this all gonna play out. So yeah. Some somehow I went off on a on a deep history lesson there answering that question.

14:18Janne Parri: No worries, that's why this format is here podcasts are for rambling and going into a deep dive or something like that. But about the layoff news I'm like wondering what is the real reason for the layoffs. Obviously there's the thing that you tell to the public and we can just speculate if that's like the real deal. But I thought that Webflow was a somewhat profitable company and obviously that doesn't mean they would not do layoffs but

14:52Janne Parri: I'm like wondering what happens behind those closed doors. And what's the real reason. It's obviously bad and it sucks for those who are not working there anymore. And especially when big companies do what they usually do, that they just close everyone off and then send a message to a personal email that okay. You have been laid off. That sucks. Definitely.

15:16Chris Skitch: So so so I mean I think the thing everyone's thinking, 'cause we're seeing this with ⁓ click up laid off, was it twenty three percent and Cloudflare, similar numbers all in the last week, you know, Microsoft, Meta and they're all coming up with words like agentic web platform and stuff like that too. But the press and ⁓ the public are AI stealing jobs. AI's taking our jobs. It is you know, you could someone at Webflow's gone, we don't need to pay developers, we'll get Claude Code to do it. Yeah, and we can save all this money. And there's a couple of examples where it doesn't have to be that way, right? And you might be aware. I was at I've got some free time on my hands at the moment, I was at a AI conference in the city

16:01Chris Skitch: Last week and they ev i it was I was lucky to get a free ticket because it was an expensive thing. And Google were there, OpenAI were there, they had everyone, Anthropic was there, amazing mid journey, amazing investors, a whole bunch of Silicon Valley people had flown over for it. It was and I heard some incredible things. And one of the stories, actually the first story is about the Commonwealth Bank in Australia. So I'm an Aussie pretty proud of that, but I've been in the UK nearly half my life now. So but yeah, the Commonwealth Bank in Australia is one of the big nasty banks. I think it's fair to say they're all nasty. They were all in cahoots with

16:38Chris Skitch: Each other. And they laid off their call centre because they could just use AI. And they're like, that's gonna save us money. And they're already making so much money. And they're like, let's make even more money. And we've got pretty strong unions in Australia, and the unions went, no, you can't do that. That's not how it works. You know, go back to school, learn how to treat your employees. You have to retrain them. And then the other story, by contrast, one of your one of your neighbors, I believe, IKEA, so yeah.

17:09Janne Parri: Yeah. Those sweets

17:12Chris Skitch: So so so apart from the naming of their furniture, they do some pretty good things. And like for example after COVID, you know, they had all those furlough government handouts and everything, you're probably aware that they their profits were gangbusters during COVID. Everyone was redoing their houses stuck at home. And they made more money than ever. So what did they do with all that government money? They gave it back. They didn't have to. They weren't asked for it. That's a nice thing to do. Good on them. And then with the AI thing recently, there's a actually this was mentioned at the AI conference as a as an example. They it was their call center as well. They're like, we can replace their call center with AI. Guess what the effect was on their revenue? Increased by

17:55Janne Parri: Not a clue.

17:56Chris Skitch: Increased by one point six, I'm gonna say billion. Million now but is that saving from laying off the call center? No. What they did was like we've got all these call center staff that obviously we're not gonna sack them because we're good guys. Let's retrain them to do, has anyone got some ideas? We've always wanted to offer interior design. We've never had the capacity to do that. So they retrained them as interior designers. They now have an interior design business that has added all this revenue.

18:26Chris Skitch: Saved money on the on the call made the call center more efficient, but then retraining it's like, well that's the way it should be done. So look, you know, just to connect the dots there, like the Webflow's an American company. They do what they do. But, you know, I has it again if they were IKEA or or a Scandinavian company, they may have hopefully retrained those staff instead of as and especially in America where Healthcare's tied to your employment and all the it's just oof. It's I really it's not nice. So interesting.

18:58Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah, that is that is totally weird and somehow I like know that you cannot like totally replace people with AI and everybody kind of kind of like knows that but that like speaks to me that there is something else going on. Like obviously the AI thing and all the competition plays its part but there's probably something that we don't we don't know.

19:23Chris Skitch: It's not a public company. We don't see its books. It's at the mercy of its investors, private equity, and private equity doesn't have a great reputation when it comes to, you know, doing the right thing by people, to be honest. But so we don't know. It's smokes and mirrors.

19:38Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah. But okay, we should go back to our regularly scheduled programming, starting with the intros. This was a ad hoc start for this one, but yeah, my name is Janne Parri, you're listening to Webflow and friends podcast, and my guest today is Chris Skitch. Chris is a global leader. And the host of Webflow London meetup. He worked as a CTO of Structure for seven years. Before that, he ran his own agency, DigiRoo, for seven years. And back then he worked with WordPress and was a part of a WordPress community, also. But Chris, Webflow folks know you from the London Meetup that you host with Jimmy Elfic.

20:22Janne Parri: And the London meetup is ⁓ the largest in-person Webflow meetup there is. ⁓ you have been doing that for two years now, a monthly meetup. ⁓ You guys also managed to stream that, which is not a small feat. And I gotta say I'm a bit envious because we don't have anything similar happening here in ⁓ here in Finland. But I wanna know like how does one go from WordPress agency owner to a Webflow global leader?

20:49Chris Skitch: Big question. How many hours do we have? So Janne Parri, thank you for having me on your podcast to begin with, and what you do is fantastic for the community and in a way there's some parallels there. I think th some of the answers are as are similar, like why are you doing what you're doing? You know, and there's certainly like you can go for things like personal brand and lifting profile and thought leadership and all that. And yeah, I'm not I'm not trying to you know be overly humble here, but yeah, I mean those things are important to me. But I'm a sucker for caring for caring for people and when I see something that is not right, like I have to do something about it. Or if I think something could be done better

21:35Chris Skitch: And somehow I guess I've been drawn to community building without realizing it over time. You know, at one point for example, we had a new thing in London called the Boris Bikes about fifteen years ago. It was the first public bike sharing scheme in the world, as far as I know. And Boris Johnson He's a bit they call him Marmite, love him or hate him. Most people hate him, I would say. Most people I don't know. Most people might probably hate Marmite as well. In Australia we have Vegemite, which is superior to Marmite, but that's another story. Now and I was really excited about these bicycles. And I hadn't ridden a bike for ages. And they were there were problems with them. And there was a new thing called Twitter.

22:21Chris Skitch: That had just started and people were venting their frustration on Twitter about the unlocking the bikes and all these things. It's like yelling into space. So so I s I quickly set up a it was a fork of WordPress called B press and it was a bullet and board type thing and funneled all the traffic. And from Twitter hashtag Boris Bike into this forum. And that became the number one Boris Bike community forum.

22:53Chris Skitch: Five thousand members, right? It had Boris Bike speed dates, Boris Bike pub meetups. There was this whole community with gathering around. There was a data group within there that we're doing freedom of information requests to transport for London to open up the APIs to build apps to make it easier to book and reserve all this. It was incredible. Every time there's a problem with the Boris bikes, the BBC would turn up in my office and community Representative Chris Skitch, what's your comment on this problem

23:24Chris Skitch: With the bikes? I didn't ask to be this person. I had a the South Korean equivalent of the Economist magazine interview me in Trafalgar Square and they did a photo shoot with me on a Boris bike and a telephone box and big Ben and they're trying to line up a double deck, a bus, and a bobby, all in the one shot. But yeah, so so I that only occurred to me recently actually when I was I was sort of thinking about the Webflow community building side of things. Like where does this come from? ⁓ and I was frustrated when I went from WordPress to Webflow. Now I'd spent a decade or more building WordPress websites with my own agency and was it deeply as many are in WordPress, you you get sucked into the ecosystem and it's all volunteers. You know, or ⁓

24:13Chris Skitch: Thousands and thousands of hours of their own time committing code to an open source repository, you know, and building plugins, building in core, building documentation, organizing meetups in communities, these big WordCamp events, WordCamp Europe, incredible, thousands of people coming together and not and it is the best value for money conference. It's like sixty pounds for three days and and just beautiful people. And it's a it's a it's an interesting crazy mix. Originally it was all like non profit kind of do goodies. That's the wrong word, but you know, good people.

24:52Chris Skitch: And but then along the way, you know, corporates, you know, news corporation, Rupert Murdoch, you're all like building out on WordPress as well. So yeah, you're but all mixing together. Which is which is yeah, you go to a Microsoft or a Hewlett Packard event, it's all corporates, you know. But th this world was a community front and center. And then going to my first Webflow conference in London in I'm gonna say twenty three, twenty two, I'm not sure what year that was. And

25:21Janne Parri: Something like that.

25:22Chris Skitch: Yeah, and were you there, Janne? No.

25:25Janne Parri: Mm. I was I was about to, but was that the last like free and London event there was?

25:32Chris Skitch: Well there was only two that they did. I think it was twenty three and twenty four. And I went along, kinda I d I don't think I expected it to be like a WordCamp, but you know, I didn't expect it to be like this tightly controlled, top down, you know, enterprise marketing sales pitch. And I was like, this was leaving a bad taste in my mouth, you know, like we're all here. Building our businesses around this product and being almost treated like where that we should be thankful for what Webflow's doing for us. And like, no, like we've got problems that we want to talk to you about. No. Like it was all sanitized. And then initially thought maybe it's just me, but then talking to other people that in attending. And over the two days just it was like everyone had the same

26:21Chris Skitch: Message and it got to a point where it was that towards the end of the conference I caught up with Vlad and so I'll you know bit a bit fanboyish I let's have a selfie and stuff. And then I was like, well hang on, I may as well have a few words. And I said to him, Vlad, like coming from WordPress, I know you're not WordPress, you're not open source, but still this community of people giving their lives to this product, building their lives on it, have supporting their families. Everything. Like we they need to have a voice. And he said, well, do it. You do it. I was a little bit taken back at first.

26:56Chris Skitch: I was like, well, that's not really what I'm saying. But then I was like, okay, well, why not? And I looked into it and then and there was there was some attempts to have a London Webflow meetup in person over the preceding years, but it'd be like once a year. Once every six months, and then the organisers would disappear. And some of them were big events and successful I think. But coming from WordPress, one of the things I loved was the WP L DN meetup group. I first went to it like it was like twenty eleven, fifteen, sixteen years ago. Keith Devon founded it. Great guy.

27:34Chris Skitch: And I spoke at it a few times and it was a small group, twenty, thirty people, every month. And because it was every month, if you missed one month, you had something important with the kids' school or whatever it might be, it you could just go the following month. You could sort of dip in, dip out. It was just there. It was just like this safe place that you could just you're having a bad day with WordPress. Look, there's a there's a WordPress meetup next week. I can go along. I can vent my frustrations and maybe find a find answer. Have you tried this? You know. And even after all those hours on forums and YouTube, like actually communicating with people in the in the meat space as they as they call it, you know, where we're flesh and bone and we can see each other's eyes properly and we can talk like humans. It's beautiful. And so yeah, that's

28:23Chris Skitch: That was the template effectively. I was like, this has to be regular. Rain, hail or shine. Just each month. And therefore, you know, certainly early on that I think there was one meetup we had five people come to. I think the first one was like forty. It's like, this is great and then it's what's going on? And then gradually but because it's just in the calendar, last Wednesday of each month, we skip December, and we skip August when everyone's on holiday. But apart from that. So yeah, that's basically the story of how it started. Yeah.

28:55Janne Parri: That's nice. And yeah, the consistency, that's a key part in many of these things. It's easy to give up when people don't show up in the first or second, then you might ask yourself, is it worth it at all? But you know yeah, yeah, yeah, the same thing.

29:11Chris Skitch: Or if anyone's listening to your podcast, for example. Yeah. But the numbers slowly slowly grow up, you know?

29:17Janne Parri: Totally. And everybody knows from their own experience as a as a like visitor or listener that you don't do you do not end up going to every meetup and if you just happen to know that there are these regular things one time you might end up visiting your first meetup and then it grows from there. So yeah, consistency is a big thing. But how do you how do you like make sure that the atmosphere there is like good? Like if there's someone who is thinking that okay they should be doing that, how do you like make sure that it's a good place for people to visit?

29:57Chris Skitch: Yeah, so I think one of the important things and again this is the template of the WordPress meetup, the sort of inclusivity of it, the and I in a way it's like the anti template of the Webflow conference. Where it is rough around the edges, you know, and people aren't being preached to. Having the roaming microphone which I got for the for the live stream, you know, it sort of reminds me of the American talk shows, getting the audience involved, audience participation. But as much as possible, rather than these presentations being a one way thing, and maybe some questions and answer at the end, for it to be a conversation. And I've had people come up to me afterwards at the pub, one young

30:43Chris Skitch: Student that came along and he'd been to a number of meetups but never felt comfortable to ask a question. But I just made him feel so comfortable and he had a brilliant question for the for the presenter. So yeah, creating that welcoming atmosphere. I like to call it a safe space. I want attention from Webflow, but then being independent from Webflow it helps that safe space. If this was if I was employed by Webflow and it was fully paid for by Webflow and we had, I don't know, NDAs and all sorts of things what we could talk about and what we couldn't talk about, then that's just another Webflow conference.

31:23Chris Skitch: And that's not what I want. I want people to come and say, I hate Webflow, you know. W why can't I access the asset manager in a collection? Still, after all these years. Like there's just some fundamental things that are just so frustrating. But then there's days where it's like, wow, we've got these component systems now. Finally, after all these years. Like that was one of the big ones that while coming from WordPress and we might talk a bit more about that later, but and like ironically, as people are a bit ho bit scared in the Webflow community about so Webflow's now just for marketing teams, where does that leave me? Coming from WordPress, that's what I wanted, right? My whole business was building WordPress for marketing teams, right? And at the time people were building WordPress sites with rigid templates.

32:13Chris Skitch: With rigid fields. And I didn't invent this, but people were it was through the meetups on learn it, there was a system called ACF blocks, advanced custom field blocks. And and you would you would I'd encourage my designers to think about blocks or components. Not don't build think about templates and pages. And then my developers would build these blocks that you could then drag and drop into the editor with fields that you'd complete image and so on, multiple, drag them up and down. And for a marketing team, that was a dream. They could just build out these landing pages themselves. And from a the design perspective, like you'd have you wouldn't end up with a dog's breakfast that would it would stay on brand. And it was a great system. And then when I moved into Webflow, it was like, giving the Webflow designer to a marketer?

33:03Chris Skitch: Like, ugh, it's gonna it's gonna be a big old mess. We need to have a system like that. So so we had symbols, but then and it took a while, then we had the components and the props and then build mode finally. It took a long we got to the point that I was at years before with WordPress, being able to deliver a toolkit to a marketing team that enables them to safely and quickly build out on brand landing pages for their marketing campaigns. So yeah, I mean there's definitely I think I went off on a tangent there, but wins along the way. So it's not all you know, and they yeah. I lost count of how many people at Webflow I tried explaining this system too early on, like a at Webflow conference. And but the people I'm talking to are like enterprise salespeople and you just see them glaze over like

33:53Chris Skitch: I'm talking another language. I'm like, well, how do I talk to someone that's actually of responsible for product? And you know, you put something on the wish list and you know, it would just sort of disappear. But yeah, obviously something has happened and some of these features have come to the surface now and we've finally got them, which is fantastic. So but yeah, the meetup, the atmosphere, keeping it friendly. Yeah, allowing people to vent their frustrations and to show their love as well and it not just be Webflow either. Like the people that are coming along. That's one of the nice things. Like I'm going to the to the WordPress meetups. There was one last night I didn't make it to. And no I don't want to throw shade on them, but it won't be long before we're seeing Zimmerframes in the in the in the audience.

34:39Chris Skitch: It's an older crowd. I mean I you know, I've got a few grey hairs myself these days. ⁓ and but at my w Webflow meetups, like the demographic is much younger, right? And ⁓ and and also the mix of people and I generally found the WordPress meet ups would be more techie Devi crowd. But the Webflow meet ups you've got a lot of designers, so you've got that mix of yeah, designer and tech nerd. Which is yeah, which is fun.

35:10Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah, totally. And then the independent ⁓ point that you made is very important, like especially now that there's a little bit of changes and fluctuation within the community. No one is saying that the Webflow is ⁓ the one tool to rule them all or the one solution for every use case. We ⁓ have to be like ⁓ have to be like honest with that and honest with the things that could better and who is it good for and so on and that's like the honest foundation and then it's still a great platform and if you are planning to build with it's awesome to have some friends around you to support that and maybe talk about things and so on. Especially nowadays well the

35:58Janne Parri: COVID was a thing and everything happened on the internet and I kind of like long for the personal connections and so on. That's why I said that I'm bit envious that there's nothing nothing like that back here.

36:13Chris Skitch: Well actually that's one of the reasons I left off as to why I did this. So I was talking about just me wanting to improve things and so on, that sort of community. But also yeah, I forgot for the COVID thing. So the part of London that I'm based with work, it's not far from where I live fortunately, just by the city, Shoreditch. It's right on the edge of the city, like on the the square mile of the financial district. This incredible, you know, the millions, the billions in that square mile is insane. It's a corporation. It's a it's a crazy thing. But anyway, right on its edge is with all these disused warehouses, this down and out, downtrodden part of East London. And that's Shoreditch and old Street area. And there was a

37:02Chris Skitch: Lots of squats and creativity and art scene and then in the early two thousands the tech companies started moving in there as well. Start ups that couldn't afford big city rents and yeah, this mixture of tech and design and then it's been gentrified massively, but it's still got that still got that vibe. And I found pre COVID, like one of the fun things was every night there was another meetup. There was a yeah, WordPress meetups, PHP meetups, Adobe meetups, you know, tech start up pitching all sorts of stuff. And you'd meet people and you'd see them in the street at lunch and you'd form these connections and in the bars and it just had this real vibe. It was it was my tribe, I think's the expression.

37:46Chris Skitch: I've I'd found my place, you know, and I loved it. And then were all told to stay at home. You know, and I was stuck in this little office room in the in the house and it was chaos and little kids at the time and finally when it was all over, I was like, Yes, let's get back to how things were. And shortage was like tumbleweeds. You'd practically see tumbleweeds going and people working remotely still. And I'd be going in five days a week, just I just wanted that life back.

38:18Chris Skitch: And but no one was doing any of the meetups and that whole atmosphere had disappeared. And I was like and then the young people coming and starting the in the workforce, they were struggling to look people in the eye and they were self conscious and anxious and they weren't used to they remotely did their university, they were lacking all these social skills. And it's like this is not good, you know? They don't answer their phone they're 'cause they're anxious about who might be on the phone. All the stuff we grew up with. It's like sure things change, but with we can find somewhere in between. So yeah, at the time I started the February 2024 was my first meetup, I think it was. It felt like that was one of the few in shortage at the time. And fast forward to now, wow, it is amazing. Every night there's another meetup

39:09Chris Skitch: Kind of good, kind of bad. Ninety percent of them are all AI related. London, its position, so we're being told, is this AI international AI hub for good and bad reasons. One of apparently one of the advantages of Brexit is that we don't have to pay attention to European strict privacy laws that restrict. Limit AI development. And so we let a whole bunch of AI things happen here that are not allowed to happen in Europe. But it's also meant but we've also got that academic pedigree and many people like Dennis Snellenberg I went to his big book launch a couple of weeks ago and I was super fanboying. I think he's I think he's one of the good guys to be fair, I hope anyway.

39:52Chris Skitch: But yeah, you know, he's a London lad. Yeah, you know everyone knows his story, chess prodigy, yeah, multicultural family and but has done these incredible things. Yeah, and they're all going to these meetups around shortage and some of them get two, three hundred people going to them. And I was feeling a little bit downtrodden about my mine with like twenty, thirty people. I should I should call it the London Webflow AI meetup. And I'm like I I might get a few more people. But yeah, what one of the ones I go to, the great guys that run it's called AI Builders. It's in the same building as me. They were getting a hundred people and I went to their one about two weeks ago and they had about twenty people, which was interesting. And I think that's partly the AI fatigue thing. Like peop

40:39Chris Skitch: People are like it's just but yeah, maybe we can talk about some of that, at some point.

40:45Janne Parri: Totally. Like the AI thing, it's kind of again the same with the podcast. Like this wasn't supposed to be a AI podcast, but for some reason every episode has that topic on the list. So yeah, I think it's just the thing that we have to do right now. But about the meetups I would consider like even twenty people, that's a proper meetup and it might be even better than like two hundred people because it's more intimate and you can talk with all the all the people there. So that's great.

41:17Chris Skitch: That's right. And it's got me and Jimmy hosting it, so you know, it's it doesn't get better than that.

41:22Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah, totally. But if that's a person or people listening to this and they are thinking that maybe they should start their own meetup how can one get a thing like that going?

41:36Chris Skitch: Yeah, no, that's good question. I guess there's a couple I mean there's some obvious ways in, but I guess what people might want to know is what Webflow does to help and support. And it is a little bit hot and cold at times over as the Webflow can be with its reorganization of its different teams. And putting aside what's just happened with the layoffs in the last forty eight hours. If yeah I'm being told it's business as usual for the community team and although Georgina's left there's someone else there Mary Finley she's active on the community platform she's taking over the

42:16Chris Skitch: Webflow global Leaders program. So ⁓ so if you're interested in starting a Webflow local Webflow community, in person community, then you can reach out to Mary and there's a application form on the community platform website to apply to become a global leader. I mean the first thing you probably want to do is just check that there's not one already in your in your in your town. And if there is, get involved. But yeah, if there's not, then join the global Leader program is a good first step. Part of that application. It's just what's your interests ⁓ in Webflow? Why do you want to do this? And ⁓ once you're accepted into the program, I think you record a short video. I won't say it's a just a rubber stamp exercise, but I think ⁓ it would take some

43:03Chris Skitch: Some red flag for them to go, no, we don't want you to be a global leader. I think they're quite encouraging that people set up these they call them chapters in each in each city. And then once you're in the program there's access on the community platform there's a section that you might not have seen if you're not in the global leaders program that's set up for global leaders to do to help each other out. There's lots of resources. There's some Figma files for creating social media assets, slide decks. There's also some funding available. Now it's definitely not the reason to do this because it's a stipend more than anything. I can claim up to three hundred US dollars per event, but it is a bit of a sliding scale and there's a few other factors you need to read through the information.

43:54Chris Skitch: And I'd imagine in some parts of the world that might go a long way. In London it doesn't go far at all. Thankfully we've got an Aldi in our building. So I spend about fifty pounds on food and drinks for the meetup. So that leaves yeah, in convert I'm just trying to convert US dollars to pounds, but maybe a hundred and eighty pounds left. Which is enough to pay for the air conditioner for our venue. Two hours of air conditioning, especially at the moment, is very important. And then thankfully our venue, because I've got an office there, it used to be a WeWork. You didn't notice the WeWork cup

44:31Chris Skitch: That's in my hand. That's just on loan. It'll we'll go back to the office. And yeah, that there's free rent on the venue for the moment. But that's gonna change soon. So I'm not sure what I'm a bit in limbo as to what to do about that. I'm gonna ask Webflow for some money to cover that. But it's tough. I'll ask around the community if someone wants to sponsor it. My current position at the moment, I was made redundant from my job at the branding agency in February. So I don't really

45:05Chris Skitch: Want to be taking money out of my own pocket. So so yeah, that's that the financial thing is difficult. Finding a venue that can give you free access. So there's potentially a fallback. So there's a number of pubs, you know, people used to go out and before COVID and used to queue for hours at the bar to get served, in London at least. Now they're empty. Unless the football's on. So some of them have some of them have they love a group of people, even if they're nerds, to come along and they'll have a space maybe upstairs that you can use for free and then everyone spends their money at the bar. So that might be an option if I have to, but that won't be as nice as the you can see on the YouTube channel the venue we've got's got a nice screen and it's nicely set up

45:52Chris Skitch: And so on. So yeah get getting a venue is quite important. And then getting the word out. So LinkedIn is like a good place to start. I do a lot of the promotion on LinkedIn. And I don't know, there's other communities sort of WhatsApp, there's a number of Webflow communities on WhatsApp. So yeah, that's kind of how it starts. And then as it goes along, as quickly as possible and in fact I did it from the beginning. Like I think one of my first meetups, I said I did a little spiel at the beginning. This is this is not my community, this is our community. This is us. We're here we're here for each other. And I want I want you all to be a part of it. And also, I can't manage all this on my own. So, you know, and that's how I've found a small group of volunteers.

46:42Chris Skitch: One to do my live stream, Jimmy co hosting, some to help out with the promotion as well. And yeah, that definitely helps a lot. But and I probably should do more 'cause I mean I've got some time on my hands at the moment, so I don't mind doing a little bit extra, but if I find myself quite busy with other things then I'll need to lean more into the volunteers.

47:04Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah. One could always do more. I have the same feeling with the podcast and all the content. But yeah. I believe it helps a lot if you have more people, especially with the consistency. So it is not up to you to show up even if you're sick or anything like that. So that's a one thing. And the venue, you mentioned that might change if there's someone who is thinking of arranging something, the venue is a big question. As you said, small meetup can happen in a bar or restaurant. But those co-working spaces, I wonder if those would be willing to let visitors in a in a

47:43Janne Parri: In a way that they might be like sponsoring the events or something like that.

47:46Chris Skitch: Yeah, well that's the current arrangement I have at the moment. The reason I've got it free is that it's promoting they ha this co working space and they're hoping that people that come to the event, you know, they're often remote workers, and to have a hot desk with in their space that's potential income for them. However, yeah, they've given me notice, the other month saying that their plans have changed. Some corporates speak. Webflow's good at that. The plans have changed. They're now pivoting to an agentic co working platform. And

48:25Janne Parri: So they have space just for AI agents or something like that.

48:28Chris Skitch: I dunno. But no, they they're not gonna charge me full price, but it's more money than I've got budget for. So we'll yeah, we'll see. Yeah, I'm I definitely wanna keep this going, but also there's definitely an air like it's it the news is really fresh with Webflow layoffs. Like I'm I wanna be positive, but there's also like doom and gloom. Is this the end? Is this the you know, like I don't think it is. But and if anything, like you know, com like I started at the beginning, community's more important than ever, I think, in these times. So I've gotta find a way to keep it going. W whether, you know, I have the support of Webflow or not, you know, maybe the meetup pivots into the

49:17Chris Skitch: AI flow meetup. Day. But yeah, the people that come along like are just be yeah, they're beautiful. I love our community. We tend to get maybe fifty percent reoccurring and fifty percent new people each time. It's well last meet up this week, I reckon yeah, it was probably fifty. We had a lot of new people arriving, which is which is really interesting. Like when you when you're at home or you're online and you sort of think, ⁓ is everyone AI coding their website now? Vibecoding is Webflow what not relevant? And then there's a whole bunch of new people coming to the meetup to learn about Webflow. It's like, ⁓ something's going on. Like they're ⁓ there's

49:58Chris Skitch: Definitely still some interest there.

49:59Janne Parri: They might have tried to build their websites with AI then pivoting. But yeah.

50:03Chris Skitch: Yeah. Well, I've been that that's another way to promote it too. So when I go to other people's meetups, they often and I do it at mine. Does anyone have any announcements? I'll stand up at someone else's meetup and say, hey, I run this Webflow meetup. If interested, this is when it's on. So you can that's another way you can get people in.

50:23Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah, that is nice. But I'm like feeling the same thing that there's a lot of happening, there's not like too much hype in a sense, especially with the layoff news, and that kind of puts pressure to the Boston Webflow Conf. They kind of need to come up with something really exciting. Yeah.

50:44Chris Skitch: Yeah, how do you bounce back? Like have ha have they just thrown a grenade and then just watched it explode in slow motion? Or is this like you know, I don't know, like ripping off a band aid and now we're you know, you just have to do it and then the there's a really solid plan. It's not just a big gobbledygook of marketing agentic platformy stuff like what does this mean and for the community and not just enterprise clients, and you know, and maybe it comes together in 'cause you know it the they had the Webflow kickoff in January and I know some people that went to that and we saw it all over LinkedIn. Like, it was great, all this stuff all together in Las Vegas. You probably saw that yourself in your feeds.

51:34Chris Skitch: I mean, I don't know if they've done that before, the whole company all coming together pretty much. And and yeah, real like, this is gonna be our best year. Like all this stuff we've got planned and we can't talk about it, but you just wait and see. And if the layoffs was the big thing, then well, that's not good. But that's it must be more.

51:55Janne Parri: Yeah. Well I think they are hoping that the layoff news like everybody forgets that, when Conf and so on.

52:02Chris Skitch: Quickly passes. I it's really unfortunate for them and I like I made I imagine like there's one post in particular on LinkedIn that went viral of someone getting locked out of their laptop. And that's been picked up. It's in the new York post. It's all over the news. That one post like they must leadership at Webflow must be really upset that happened. And apparently it was a timing thing that you know, and there's security issues around there's all sorts of stuff, but it does come across as

52:33Chris Skitch: Really bad, like bad form.

52:35Janne Parri: But that is expected. Like if you gonna lay off people like bad press is gonna get out. That's just the way it goes.

52:43Chris Skitch: Not everyone's gonna smile and take it lying down.

52:47Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah. But maybe they are like building something relating to AI. And if I have a feeling that if they come up with something that makes our building within Webflow like as fast as people are doing with the AI stuff, like AI platforms, that might be a thing that really like helps helps the company, helps the like momentum and hype and everything. But yeah, we'll see.

53:14Chris Skitch: Mm. Ca can you do that without engineers? I don't I don't know if it's all engineers that have been laid off, but you know, i is i are enterprise salespeople the best people to drive the company forward with this shift? Like there's still some big questions. Yeah.

53:29Janne Parri: Yeah, tough times. We'll see.

53:31Chris Skitch: Yeah, one of the one of the things on the agency we didn't really we as much as we kind of joke about those words, you know, if you if you listen to the detail on it and some of the stuff guy, the chief Optimizely not Optimizely, what was what was the company he was from? Intellimize,

53:50Janne Parri: Intellimize, maybe?

53:53Chris Skitch: That's the one Intellimize. We've all got great names. Like it all the answer engine optimization stuff that Webflow's baking in, new things there. But he says quite clearly eighty percent of that is off your website, is outside of your website. It's coming from Reddit, it's coming from YouTube, it's coming from all these places. That only twenty percent it still matters, it's still a funnel that ends up on your website. But if this is an all encompassing platform of that full spectrum of agentic marketing, then it needs to be more than the website. It needs to be able to I don't know, post to Reddit or I don't know I don't know how it would work. Like have some dashboard

54:39Chris Skitch: That controls your a AI footprint. Across all these different services. Like is that what they're building? Like I'm just you know, spitballing ideas. That would sorta start to make sense. But

54:52Janne Parri: Yeah. Maybe like managing your paid advertising or all the assets and something like that. Like I know be

54:57Chris Skitch: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's not very glamorous. Like it's a that's a real marketing function and not the it's not the wheelhouse of most Webflow practitioners or Webflow builders. We're into, you know, design and beautiful things and not, you know, tracking codes and ⁓ ad spends and

55:16Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah, that's totally different from the past. As you mentioned those beautiful things that people are building. Webflow used to be like a tool for the designers to be able to develop what they design. But nowadays the character is totally different. And I'm kind of fine with that. I have gone towards the more technical side and that's cool, but if you if one is still on the designer side and wants just those features, this might seem like unfair or something like that. I totally get that. But the only sure thing is change. So you kind of cannot be mad for that, but yeah.

56:02Chris Skitch: Yeah, definitely the Boston conference. Are you planning to go, Janne Parri?

56:06Janne Parri: No, no, I have I have stuff back here in Finland.

56:10Chris Skitch: Yeah. I haven't booked as a global leader I've kindly been given a ticket, but I haven't booked my flights yet.

56:16Janne Parri: That's nice.

56:18Chris Skitch: And maybe I just need to see where things fall in the coming weeks and I've got some uncertainty about what I'm up to myself. So but yeah, I would I would like to go and I would really like to see community on the agenda of the conference. So

56:36Janne Parri: Hold out all

56:37Chris Skitch: Yeah, let's see what happens there.

56:39Janne Parri: But the community thing is kind of complex. Nelson Pixel Geek was just on the show and he has

56:44Chris Skitch: That's right, yeah.

56:45Janne Parri: A he had a good point about that it shouldn't be just about what Webflow does for the community, the comp the company. It should be about us and what we do. Like that's the main thing.

56:57Chris Skitch: But the thing he th the thing he missed, and I'm not disagreeing with him, but and that this both can happen at the same time and and Webflow providing a platform for community to speak and a and a and raising community's profile. Like that's great having small groups in isolation doing their own thing. You have a look at I noticed with Apple's WWDC the other week, they had set up a community page. Not that dissimilar to the Webflow community thing, but they really like show th I think they did a better job of showing off all the people in these web Microsoft communities, you know, swift coding clubs and all sorts of things.

57:44Chris Skitch: And their little stories and giving them a platform and elevating their presence on the stage. And whereas like the one we've got now with Webflow, which is only new, and they were apologetic about it, and it might sound a little bitter, but my face is not on that page. I just I just I just run the largest in-person Webflow meetup. And apparently I missed the message or something. And even Webflow Community week, they did at the beginning of the year. Like I had no heads up on that. And I did a little video just so happened about that it was a two year anniversary of my Webflow meetup and I did a little sizzle reel of some of the events and I posted it the same day that they announced Webflow Community week. I was like, and that's you know,

58:34Chris Skitch: Th they're the little frustrating things. It's not the end of the world, but it could be a bit a bit more coordinated. And I think we're sort of and Georgina had started at that time and that things have progressed really nicely since and now she's gone. So it's like resetting again. A bit frustrating. So yeah.

58:54Janne Parri: It feels like it goes in circles. But they can definitely like do stuff to elevate the community. But a at the end of everything like it is about us and what we do. Like if there are no volunteers doing stuff, like it's not gonna go

59:07Chris Skitch: Yeah. That's right. And it's not and it's not just the

59:13Janne Parri: Anywhere.

59:13Chris Skitch: That's right. And it's not just the in person community as well. I think you have a community as a podcast obviously and there's yeah, YouTube some of your past podcasts I've been listening to and they're fantastic, by the way. But yeah, like

59:28Janne Parri: Nice. Thanks.

59:29Chris Skitch: A reoccurring theme. I think it was Matt in Dublin. A few podcasts ago. Yeah, he he was he was talking about like that the excitement of the revolution of no code a few years ago. That was and that really hit home for me. It's like, yeah, like we all felt this was were doing something. We're changing the world with Webflow, you know? It was infectious. And all the there was all these people creating content and tutorials and it became appointment viewing was an expression he used to put to watch

1:00:04Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah, that

1:00:05Chris Skitch: To watch a new announcement and now it's just sort I don't know, just feel it's like this people have disappeared, people have gone off the radar. Like Raymmar was saying, like I wanted to hear a bit maybe he was not able to, like I wanted to hear like specifically what happened. It feels like there's things you can't talk about. Other people in the community like that. You know so yeah, I don't know, we can't I don't I'm nostalgia nerd. I've got old computers and stuff. I

1:00:36Chris Skitch: Long for the old days and it's hard to let go of those for me. But yeah, maybe that's the thing, like that's not gonna happen again and we just have to accept that and just do our own thing. Janne's podcast, you know, Chris and Jimmy's in person meetup. We're not completely isolated. Like I'm standing a little bit down. Like there's the you know the layoff news and stuff. So that's obviously affecting the mindset a little bit. But yeah there was a beautiful thing that happened yesterday that was real proper community stuff with this news.

1:01:11Janne Parri: What was that?

1:01:11Chris Skitch: So so so Rick who runs the Amsterdam Gl meetup, he reached out to me and was like, what's yeah, how's your thing? And he wanted to talk. It's like, hey we w I spoke to him at one of the conferences, but we hadn't caught up since and I set up a call and by the we set the call for three PM yesterday and by three PM yesterday we have five global leaders on this call. You know, off you know, not no no official Webflow involvement and were just supporting each other. It's like, what are you gonna do with your group? How are you announcing it to your group? And we've now created a global leaders WhatsApp group and we're adding more global leaders into it. And yeah, we could do that on the Webflow community platform. And I think Webflow would like us to do that. But

1:02:00Chris Skitch: You know, we yeah, having that little bit of independence off you know, outside, you know, sort of hallway channel in a way, to have these conversations. It's really beautiful and yeah, I think we all have come away from and there's been a few messages this morning amongst us. Which is really lovely. It's beautiful, you know, and in this sort of time of doom and gloom and crisis, you know, people people coming together, and yeah, trying to trying to be positive and do it do what we can.

1:02:28Janne Parri: That's beautiful.

1:02:29Chris Skitch: And it's not just us individually, it's our communities is what we're thinking of. Like how do we help them? What message do we give out to them? You know, these types of things. So yeah, I think that's a nice story.

1:02:41Janne Parri: ⁓ Yeah, totally. And that is that is beautiful. I think that Webflow will be here even if they like don't announce anything. ⁓ Webflow will still be here for years to come. The character might change towards like more the enterprise thing, like become a like new Hubspot or something like that. But the question is do we wanna like build the community around that or do we wanna do something else?

1:03:08Chris Skitch: Hmm. Mm. I've got some questions for you, Janne. That could be a good segue.

1:03:12Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah, bring it out.

1:03:14Chris Skitch: So I thought it would be fun to flip the script a little bit on you. And you've been you've been you've been doing this wonderful job, Janne Parri, of interviewing the you know the cream of Webflow. The the luminaries of the Webflow community, former webflowers, ⁓ some incredible people, which is great. And I and I've only recently come across your podcast ⁓ maybe ⁓ three or four months ago and I've been catching up on a few episodes. ⁓ And but I don't hear people get getting to ask you questions. And I thought I thought I could I

1:03:48Janne Parri: That is true.

1:03:49Chris Skitch: Could throw a few questions your way. But to start with, thank you for coming on to my podcast. Yeah, you know. And I'm trying to replicate what you do. But yeah, yeah.

1:04:00Janne Parri: All right, all right. Bring it on.

1:04:02Chris Skitch: Yeah, but yeah, so I've got a couple of questions for you. We can try and do a quick fire because we're short on time. What has been your favourite interview to date? It's a tough one, I guess.

1:04:13Janne Parri: Yeah, that is totally a tough one. I do not have like favorite one. Well I might have. Like as you said, there has been some big names, like big webflowers here. But I do not want this to be just about like big names. And yeah, those are obviously the ones that like excite me. I'm a bit scared when I come online.

1:04:37Chris Skitch: You don't show it.

1:04:39Janne Parri: That's good, that's good. But to like answer your question one that comes to mind was actually with Jack Redley.

1:04:48Chris Skitch: Really? Excellent. I'm close with Jack. He's a great guy.

1:04:52Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah. Obviously he did the Webflail podcast so we wiped with the podcast stuff. And he also does the the freelancing thing like me, so it was kind of like good wipes, good like communication and so on. Obviously there's like big insights on all other episodes and those are like great but

1:05:13Chris Skitch: Yeah, so that's my next question. What's been your biggest surprise or insight from a guest? Has there been any any moments like mic drop moments when you go, Holy shit, I had no idea.

1:05:22Janne Parri: Probably the biggest things are like that the simple things that are not easy, like there's no like shortcuts or anything like that. So if you wanna get good at something, you kind of have to do the work. And the advice that everybody is given, usually that is the simple but not easy advice. For example, you should post your work. Like that is super ⁓ simple. But for some reason, me myself included, I do not do that too regularly. But I should. ⁓ And all the all the big names. Yeah, all

1:05:54Chris Skitch: Yeah, self promotion. Yeah.

1:05:57Janne Parri: The big names like Benson Woodring, Joseph Berry and all the likes are saying the same thing like just post your work. Jack Redley included, yeah. Yeah.

1:06:06Chris Skitch: Yeah. That's great. Are there any guests that you haven't had on yet that you wish. Have you got like a list of names? Like I can imagine McGuire Brandon you've reached out to at this point?

1:06:18Janne Parri: Yeah, McGuire is there. Then there's some other busy people that I have reached.

1:06:23Chris Skitch: Bland would be fun to interview.

1:06:26Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah. I would probably if we talk about Webflow employees, I would probably go through Alan like the CTO. That would be interesting and then work my way up. But about like other people there's one obvious one, Timothy Ricks. He's a busy guy.

1:06:46Chris Skitch: Yeah, of course. That would be really great. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

1:06:50Janne Parri: So team if you're listening any time, I'll do I'll wake up in the middle of the night if you want.

1:06:56Chris Skitch: I I really enjoyed your the Matthew Munger was brilliant. So that was so good. Okay, next quick qu yeah, so I guess in the light of yeah, like the vibe. Do you think Webflow's lost its vibe? Where do you see Webflow's future? And also like are there things that if you think about some of the recent podcasts like with Nathan from Webflow, some of the things he said, were they predicting what's just happened or yeah, how what would you say about that?

1:07:28Janne Parri: Yeah, the future of the crystal ball thing is a big one. Yeah, that's definitely those like glory days, those golden days that we have memories of and yeah, we're not gonna get those back but we can like create new ones. Like that's the thing with nostalgia. We cannot get those back, but whatever we do next is the is the thing and I'm kind of hoping that there will be a new generation, but I kind of also feel like that there needs to be something to be excited about. So there's a lot of pressure at Webflow's end to come up with something that gets us again excited about building. Now the all the all the hype goes towards AI.

1:08:13Janne Parri: And all the other platforms. But as I said, I believe I said that on this episode too that if they can get the speed of build like actually good, that could be a huge win for Webflow because they have all the all the other stuff like super solid, like all the technical stuff are handled and all the marketing things, the build mode and so on. And I believe that they are building that. My talks with Nathan and Matthew kind of like get that expression or I get that just that there is something happening towards those kinds of things.

1:08:50Chris Skitch: I've got a I've got an idea for free for Webflow if th if they if they're listening. And it's not a specific idea, but it's just thinking about some of the people from your previous podcast and what they've said and the idea that Webflow were really good at making people comfortable with technology that weren't naturally comfortable. So the designers coming across and so on. Right now everyone is so anxious about AI. If Webflow were able to use that same technique to make people comfortable with building with AI, not having to keep up with all the latest scenes, must try this, do this, here's a new thing. And like every even Webflow themselves are just throwing new things in all the time at the

1:09:34Chris Skitch: Moment. Instead, just a nice like a series of controlled, you know, like McGuire style videos, and take us all on this journey together. That th and the product somehow evolving along with it at the same time. That would that would be interesting.

1:09:51Janne Parri: That would be nice. But as you said, the product should evolve with that like the MCP that there is right now it should work better. I know that they are building it and it's in the in the works but yeah, that's the thing that could get that excitement again.

1:10:11Chris Skitch: I've got two more questions for you, Janne. One, what are you working on at the moment?

1:10:15Janne Parri: Well actually I'm finishing a couple of projects. I have an ad agency or creative agency from Helsinki. That's one build, a lot of like visual stuff, and then I have my former employer slash friend that has this coaching business I'm doing his side to and those should be done kind of before the summer. So in Finland we have this midsummer fest called Juhannus and everybody starts their summer vacation from there and it's about three weeks away. So I should really be able to finish those sites before basically the

1:10:53Chris Skitch: I

1:10:54Janne Parri: Whole Finland gets shut down after Johannes.

1:10:57Chris Skitch: So you won't be working over that period or you'll do a few things?

1:11:02Janne Parri: I'll have my like summer vacation then. I'm doing like freelancing and I've learned that you really have to have to get your vacations done. You have to like book them and you have to prepare for them and so on. Those are super important.

1:11:12Chris Skitch: Yes. Absolutely. Yeah. When when I when I had my own agency and bu I started as a freelancer and then built it up from there. But my wife made sure that was the case. I had to yeah, we had to do the family holidays. And my last question, and you might have seen this coming, is I like to call it the weird Aussie thing.

1:11:37Janne Parri: Beautiful. We have to do we have to do the Aussie thing and then we have to do the finish thing, obviously.

1:11:42Chris Skitch: The finish thing, yeah, to finish off. It's yeah. So so yeah, the rules are I'm gonna give you an Australian expression in Australian and English. Which is no

1:11:52Janne Parri: Beautiful.

1:11:54Chris Skitch: It's the same th well it's kind of some people say we don't speak English, but and then you have to guess what it means. Are you ready? Okay.

1:12:02Janne Parri: Bring it up.

1:12:03Chris Skitch: It's three words up your bum.

1:12:05Janne Parri: Your bum. Like up your ass, basically.

1:12:08Chris Skitch: Up your bum.

1:12:09Janne Parri: Like if I wanna turn someone off like up your bum, like something like that.

1:12:16Chris Skitch: It's actually so this is classic Australian. We often save our worst things for the best things. I don't know if that's the right way to

1:12:26Janne Parri: Best things.

1:12:27Chris Skitch: Yeah, so up your bum is cheers. And because in England

1:12:30Janne Parri: She is yeah.

1:12:34Chris Skitch: In England it's bottoms up. The gl the bottom of your bottom

1:12:37Janne Parri: Yeah, that's true.

1:12:38Chris Skitch: Of your glass goes up, so bottoms up. But Australia we're upside down. So instead of bottom up, we go up your bum. And it's pretty you don't want to think about it too much, but anyway, we often say up your bum instead of yeah. So that so next yeah.

1:12:53Janne Parri: Up your bum. That's yeah, I didn't see that one coming. I was thinking that with my like English speaking brain that it should just be like up your ass. But I gotta say my wife watches the blog, the TV show. Yeah.

1:13:11Chris Skitch: No.

1:13:13Janne Parri: And she loves like the Aussie accent, so

1:13:16Chris Skitch: Del Tac said, wow, that's brilliant. Yeah, no my Australian reality T V is nauseating. I don't watch it, but I've got friends that just live and breathe it and I guess yeah, the block is very popular.

1:13:29Janne Parri: Totally. Okay, we have to do the weird finish thing. And since

1:13:34Chris Skitch: Что?

1:13:35Janne Parri: I was thinking some more polite phrase for you, but I just came up with one kind of like ass related thing so so you're saying, firstly in Finnish is Olla perse auki, which means to be ass open. So what does it mean if I say that my ass is open?

1:13:56Chris Skitch: Well I th I th I can only assume it is a nice gesture. Yeah, it's something you'd only offer to friends.

1:14:05Janne Parri: I'll give you a tip. It's nothing like sexual or anything like that.

1:14:08Chris Skitch: No, no, but I yes no, of course. But yeah, but I it possibly works either way, yeah. If your ass is open so so that might be the opposite of being a tight ass. In English a tight ass is someone that doesn't spend their money. So maybe ass open means that you're throwing your money away.

1:14:26Janne Parri: Kind of yeah, ki it's the right topic. It's money is the topic, but it means that you are totally broke.

1:14:35Chris Skitch: Okay, yep. Yeah. Yeah, so so you haven't been enough

1:14:37Janne Parri: Yeah, so maybe the money has just tripped off.

1:14:41Chris Skitch: Of a tight ass, your arse has been open and now you've got no money left.

1:14:50Janne Parri: Okay, Chris, this has been a blast. If people wanna check you out or follow you, where should they go?

1:14:56Chris Skitch: Yeah. So so LinkedIn. And I'm open to work at the moment. I'm just exploring ideas, career break at the moment after seven years at a I had seven years running my own WordPress agency, seven years as CTO for one of my clients and I'd moved my team into that client and they've pivoted into a branch focusing on brand and strategy and not digital. So we've all left and temptation to start my own thing again. We'll never say never. But I'm exploring options. So I love the community building side of things. So if people want to talk to me about an opportunity, find me on LinkedIn. If people are interested in my nostalgia for old technology, look me up on YouTube. I've got a YouTube channel. It's not very active.

1:15:47Chris Skitch: But there's a series of videos I'm hoping to work on where I attended the fiftieth anniversary of the Homebrew Computer Club in Sunnyvale, California last summer and met some of the founding fathers of our industry and interviewed them and I love that stuff. So find me on YouTube as well. But that's basically it.

1:16:12Janne Parri: What about the London meetup? If people are interested about that.

1:16:14Chris Skitch: And of course the London Meetup. So yeah, definitely Google London Webflow Meetup and you'll find us on meetup.com. Have a look. The link will be in the in below the description as they say. Like, share, hit the bell. And yeah, but yeah, meetup dot com, you'll find the London Webflow meetup. Come along last Wednesday of the month. And also think about starting your own meetup in your own town and reach out to me, I'm more than happy to help yeah, with any of these things and point you in the right direction any way I can.

1:16:47Janne Parri: Beautiful Chris. Again, thanks so much for being on the show and for all the listeners and watchers. We'll see you in the next one. Bye.

1:16:55Chris Skitch: Yeah. Thank you. Thank you, Janne. Cheers. Bye.