Most clients don’twant a visual builder

0:00Janne Parri: Okay, Julian. So, do you think Ship Studio and Source by Webflow will end up competing for the same users?

0:07Julian Galluzzo: At the end of the day, both are places that you will build things. I think that Source will compete with Ship Studio, will compete with Webflow's core products, will compete with Framer, will compete with ChatGPT sites, will compete with Replit, will compete with VS Code. At the end of the day, there are We're We're seeing new tools pop up daily for different user types and different workflows. So, at the end of the day, they all compete, but it's hard to be a competitor when you're an entirely different entity at the end of the day.

0:41Julian Galluzzo: And I think that that is kind of where Source's biggest risk lies is: in the fact that, you know, there are and will continue to be more things popping up which can compete with the exact same promise that Source has, but doesn't have any of the same requirements from a business point of view that Source has. And I have been saying in terms of Source that I think the direction is great. I think that the Webflow team absolutely figured out where things going and what do people need.

1:14Julian Galluzzo: However, the big problem that I see with Source that, you know, tools and entities like Ship Studio don't have is Source is looking at it and saying, "Where's the money to be made?" Because at the end of the day, whether someone from Webflow wants to sit there and tell you, "Well, actually Source has this thing that Ship Studio doesn't." I'm sure it has Plenty of things that Ship Studio doesn't and vice versa. But at the end of the day, when people can go from idea to finished product to something that they can manage and they have the solutions for their clients to manage them perfectly in the exact way they want.

1:49Julian Galluzzo: And then Source wants to come in and say, "Hey, we have $4 billion shoes to fill. And we need to create value in this space enough in order to fill those shoes, that's where I think the problem arises. If the product vision of Source was being delivered upon by a team who said, "Hey, we got to make some money, but at the end of the day, what matters here is these are our customers, this is what they need, and here's the value we can provide."Webflow is trying to put a triangle into a square.

2:20Julian Galluzzo: They are trying to take this thing and go,"We need something to bring this business value that we once brought. I'm going to try and stick Source into it."And that's where the problem is. I think Source is a great idea. These are big shoes to fill. This will not do this, and I don't think that they realize that, and I don't know how well the Webflow community understands the implications of that, because at the end of the day, if Webflow's incentives are not in the right place, and if they're focused on the wrong things, it's not going to finish in a pretty spot.

2:51Julian Galluzzo: So, probably a lot of question marks left from everything that I just said, and I'm sure we'll get into those, but really my take on, you know, the product direction of Source is I think it's amazing. Why do I think it's amazing? Because, well, I had the same idea for a product months and months and months before it exists. This one is a free, open-source movement, let's say. This one is a for-profit product. I'm not saying one or two is better or worse, but what I'm saying is that our struggles are resources, which is not really a much of a struggle now because of AI.

3:25Julian Galluzzo: Their struggles are trying to fill the shoes of a $4 billion product. Not an easy thing to do.

3:30Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah. And do you think that that is kind of like the future of website building? Like everyone uses, well, AI static builds, hand-picked stack, and more open environments, or is there still a place for closed environments?

3:45Julian Galluzzo: So, I think that we are moving from a time where the website builder market was a thing with unicorns, a thing with individual entities that would pop up with a unique edge that nobody else could, you know, match. And that's why Webflow became a $4 billion-dollar company. Where I think we're heading into now is that all of these things are commodities, you know? I, when I'm talking to my co-workers, I kind of keep using the example of like avocados. You know, probably the same thing in Finland. You guys have avocados all over the shelves right now, right?

4:18Julian Galluzzo: Let me put it to you this way. If a grocery store put a big sign out front that said, "We've got avocados."That would look stupid. Because you're looking at it and going,"Everyone has avocados, buddy."My point is that is where we are headed as a market, you know? The website market was once the avocado market where,"Wow, we need to go specifically here to get this really cool thing."Now it's getting to the point where everybody has everything. Who are you going to choose? You are going to choose the best solution. You're going to choose the cheapest solution.

4:49Julian Galluzzo: You're going to choose the most convenient solution. You're going to choose whatever works the fastest. And what's happening is that those are infrastructure companies. Meaning Webflow was a necessary evil existing because of the big, big, big gap that was needed to connect all of these infrastructure tools before, you know? Sanity, Vercel, what None of these are new tools. But Webflow was worth it, even if it wasn't the most powerful, even if Webflow's hosting isn't as good, even if Webflow's just infrastructure, the code quality on the builds that you do isn't quite as good.

5:21Julian Galluzzo: It was fine because you circumvented the nonsense that came with the enterprise dev process. Now, what's happening is that people are seeing I could just use GitHub and, you know, host my site via Cloudflare, the same thing that, you know, the best companies with the most built-out dev teams are doing. Why wouldn't I do that, you know? How is Webflow going to be able to convince anyone that they have better hosting than Cloudflare? They won't. And someone's in the comments writing, "Actually, Webflow uses Cloudflare." Yes, exactly. But they also upcharge on it. And so they're going to need to justify that to you.

5:53Julian Galluzzo: And I think we're getting to a point where the only players in the actual, you know, building product space are going to be the infrastructure companies. And then you're going to have open-source projects popping up to fill the gaps to connect these different infrastructures. So, we're not moving from Webflow onto a new platform, you know, we're moving from Webflow onto like Next.js or we're moving from Webflow onto Astro or something like that. Why? Because these are the best. These are the things which have been the best, and we know that, and everybody wants the best, and so that is where people are flocking.

6:26Julian Galluzzo: And to just pop up out of the blue, and you know, go from nothing to this big giant unicorn status company because you've got a cool wrapper, those days are over, and I think people need to realize that.

6:40Janne Parri: Yeah. Yeah, totally. And I believe that Webflow knows the landscape and they do want to compete in that. They are building their own headless CMS that should launch with a source and they have the Webflow Cloud, the whole hosting thing. I so much hope that they can build those standalone products in a way that they are actually good and they can compete in a way in this new new environment. And actually before we dive any deeper, let's do little intros. I'm already getting again excited.

7:11Janne Parri: All of your like hand waving did a little deja vu about some cow metaphor from our last talk, so

7:19Julian Galluzzo: Yes. Yes. Yes.

7:21Janne Parri: listeners, you are now listening, watchers, you are watching Webflow and Friends podcast. My name is Janne Parri. My guest today is Julian Galluzzo and as I said, this is not the first time he's on the show. Last time we talked about Memberstack site build. We briefly touched upon Ship Studio, but a lot has happened since. Ship Studio has gotten a lot of updates, also some more attention. Webflow came out with the source or at least announcements of source and Julian founded Native Agency with Bradford Huber.

7:54Janne Parri: So, Julian, could you do a little catch up for us? Like did I miss anything and how's the agency

8:02Julian Galluzzo: No, for sure. So, honestly, it has has great, you know, I for anyone who knows my history, I had an agency back in the day and I kind of decided I don't want to work in agencies anymore because the standard pieces of infrastructure or process that were required to run an agency, it was just a slog. It was a nightmare. It wasn't good for clients. It wasn't good for the team. It wasn't good for the business owners. I just didn't like the model overall. So, worked with Memberstack, of course, you know, worked full-time at Memberstack for 4 years, more more time part-time.

8:34Julian Galluzzo: And amazing team, by the way, to anyone, if you ever see Memberstack's hiring, take it. Such a great team. Absolutely love the Memberstack team. But, anyways, more or less with my direction and where I see the industry going, there was a bit of a split and so I ended up joining forces with Bradford over here and our we didn't really have a set goal. You know, our name is Native and I think in a way that idea came around by everyone throwing around the term AI native, AI native workflows, AI native teams, AI native sites, whatever. I think in a big way that's why the name popped into originally Bradford's head.

9:09Julian Galluzzo: But, you know, what we're seeing and what AI is enabling us to do and when we are just getting rid of all of the nonsense and just looking at how do we help this client? How do we provide this client with the value that they need? It has been such a wonderful experience. I think that agencies who are, you know, I talk with a lot of agency owners and I'm going to be honest and to anyone watching this, you already know, the market is not good. It is a tough tough tough market.

9:39Julian Galluzzo: If you're trying to find new clients, ouch. Ouch ouch ouch. You can still do it, but the market is really in a difficult place. And so, we, luckily, through through some connections, through just our public work, we ended up getting some some really really great clients. We have been crushing it for them. They've been loving us. They've been talking about us, referring us to other people and it's been amazing. But, really in a nutshell, what we've been doing is trying to reimagine, I know every single new agency says,"We're trying to do out with the old, in with the new."Everyone says that, but really we're just trying to rebuild what it looks like to be an agency, rebuild what it looks like to be a service provider serving your clients.

10:21Julian Galluzzo: And we it's been a crazy ride. I cannot believe that we've only been in existence for like 4 months now. It is shocking. I've grown an agency before, and let me tell you, we are about 30 to 40 times further along in our journey in the same amount of time, if not more. Like, it's And there's a lot of specifics, and I'm happy to talk more about, you know, for anyone watching this, what the kind of things that we're doing that are impressing these clients so much, and why they're referring us. I want to share all of that, but in a nutshell, the agency life has been amazing, and I now see that the agency life can be amazing, where I thought before that just No, just work for a product company, your brain will thank you, but no.

11:01Julian Galluzzo: You can truly have a good thing going with an agency.

11:05Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah. And I remember last time we talked, you were still doing the Memberstack things. And a few weeks or a few months after that, you just came out with Native. And now, when I did a little prep for this episode, I checked the Native site, and there was there was so many testimonials and stuff, and I was like thinking,"Did you like prepare this like years in advance or something like that?"So, that kind of got me off off guard, so yeah.

11:35Janne Parri: Maybe we should like visit that right now. Like, how have you been able to like do all of that? And what's the core of like Native? What are the like services, and what are the differentiators that you are offering?

11:48Julian Galluzzo: That is a great question. We're working on it. We're working on our marketing. We're working on our positioning. As it stands, everything's a work in progress at the end of the day. But what I can say is that what we've done, what we put out, it has resonated, and it has worked. Our primary focus is on giving to clients an experience that feels native to them. So, look, when it comes to websites, we are doing mostly Next and Astro builds. We all know that. I think a lot of us are doing that now, you know, in one way or another. But, what we do that is unique is that we don't, you know, sit there and say,"Oh, use these tools and follow this process and do this and do that."We want to join your team, you know, your you as in our clients.

12:29Julian Galluzzo: We want to join the team, look at what they're doing, figure out how they could be doing that better. So, one example that I think a few people saw on LinkedIn and on X recently is the Slack agents that we set up for our clients, right? So, with those, you know, it's not just a Slack agent product at the end of the day. We don't just build that Slack agent and say,"You do it this way, work in this way."We send it in there and then we watch what our clients are doing. Sometimes our clients will ask, let's say, "Generate me a PDF based on this page that I'm going to use to share in some sort of deck."And we'll look at that and go, this is a real example, by the way, you know, our Slack agent doesn't do that.

13:07Julian Galluzzo: Let's make it so he can do that. And then they'll say, you know,"Go ahead and use the context from our Sanity to create like five or six new static landing pages." Let's give it the context to do that as well. We sit behind these marketing teams, watch what they're doing, give them the tools and the capabilities to do so better, and stick around and enjoy the ride, really. At the end of the day, the work we're doing doesn't change that much, but the concept of it and the way that we operate it isn't"Hey, you come and follow our rigid process and talk to this AM and talk to this PM."And it's literally just add us into your Slack channel, we're going to bring value.

13:45Julian Galluzzo: Why do people come to us? Maybe it's because they need a new landing page. Maybe it's because they want to do a site migration. For some clients, we're dev partners. For some clients, they have devs, we're design partners. For some clients, we help more on their marketing. At the end of the day, we have these tools, we have these capabilities, and we have the expertise to build incredible systems for businesses. And the biggest unlock and the reason why when you're looking at that looking at her site and going,"How do these guys have so many case studies? Now, how do they have so many testimonials when they're this new?

14:16Julian Galluzzo: The reason is because we I think what so many of us in the Webflow space have done is we've looked at it and gone, we are members of the Webflow community. We are in here. What we've done at Native is myself and Bradford, two people who very much so been involved in the Webflow community, we've stepped outside and gone, hey, you know what? These are our skills, this is what we offer, and this is what we build. Where can we do that? You know, let's separate ourselves from the term Webflow start being we're the tech guys that bring value.

14:47Julian Galluzzo: And when you see how much of a world there is, you know, beyond the space, there's a whole wide world out there, there's so many opportunities to be gotten. It's crazy. So, really, in a nutshell, the story of Native is a story of just acceptance of the times, acceptance of the fact that things are changing, and a desire to create our spot in this new future. Whereas, I think a lot of businesses right now are more focused on, you know, defending their spot in the market, or at least where their spot in the market was a year ago or 2 years ago.

15:23Julian Galluzzo: I think that's what most people are doing right now. I don't think it's a good path to take. I think if everybody takes the path of Native, and that doesn't mean that you're doing more AI builds, that doesn't mean that you're building more software than websites. That means whatever whoever you are, whoever you are as a company, rediscover your value because the world has changed. And I'm happy to say that I think we've done that. I think it's going really well, and we're still growing. We're still really defining that, working with some new types of clients that we never would have worked for before, you know, because one thing that I think is so interesting and one thing that I want anyone watching this to take away is that you're a web developer, you're a web designer.

16:04Julian Galluzzo: But have you ever stopped to think about how many things beyond websites you can make? Because look, a website is basically client comes to you, they want a website, you crush it, check, move on. Maybe they'll pay you for a retainer, maintenance contract. If it is, it's not going to be huge. Maybe not. You are just a solution to one more item on the checklist. But when you can look at your skills and understand that you are so much more than that. You're so much more than a web designer. You're so much more than a web developer. You start to see where you can provide value. And capitalism 101, provide value, get paid for it.

16:38Janne Parri: Yeah. Yeah. That's beautiful, though. There's so much there. I want to make sure that we get to the nitty-gritty of the Slack agents. But before that, I'm a tech guy. I bring value. Like, how do you package that? Like, how do you How do you sell that?

16:53Julian Galluzzo: That's the tough thing. And I will I There's a million different answers to that, but I will give the one answer that is actually practical. And that is find your foot in the door. Be around these people. And as soon as you hear them complain about something, "Oh man, I sent this to Sherry in accounting, but she didn't open the Google Doc." You're like, "Wait, Google Doc? Come on. No, let me help you with that. Let me do it. Do some free work, you know?" Show them what you can do. Once they see you and go You There's going to be this aha moment in your clients'brains where they go, "I have problem.

17:25Julian Galluzzo: This person's the solution to it." That's where you're going to start making money. Because they're going to start throwing things at you. "This is inefficient in our business. Take this. Oh, we need a new system for this. Oh, we don't have any reporting for this. Oh, we'd love to know this. Oh, our investors would love to know this." You know, you need to get your foot in the door. You need to show them that from day one. Because you can't just You know, my usual title or thing that I'm saying is we do AI enablement. What does AI enablement mean? Our business is not inbound. Let me put it to you that way. The amount of clients that we've got from inbound leads, zero.

17:56Julian Galluzzo: Not even one. I don't even know why our site exists at the end of the day. It exists cuz we want it to exist, right? But like that is it. It's you know, kind of just accept that your positioning is wrong and that you need to work on it and it needs to get better. And in accepting that, you are going to actually show your potential clients. Because you're going to say, "You know what? Don't go to my sites. Forget about it. You're going to see some cool work there, but let me show you why we're valuable. That's the difference.

18:25Janne Parri: Yeah. Yeah. Zero inbound is actually something exciting because that means it's active then. So, what sort of tactics, what sort of foot do you get to the door and so on?

18:38Julian Galluzzo: Exactly. And look, I will admit here, we've got a lot of benefit in terms of just connections. We're people that have been involved in the industry for a while. We know a lot of people. The people involved with Native all kind of know a good bit of people. So, a lot of it's just coming from, you know, connections at the end of the day. We're doing some outreach, too, but for the most part, it is through connections. And maybe some people watching this going oh, well, cool. You just have a bunch of rich friends. Use your connections well, you know? Like, you know someone who knows someone who knows someone. It's always going to be hard when you're a junior to get your foot in the door.

19:13Julian Galluzzo: But, for most people, let's say a Webflow developer watching this who's watching their client list dwindle even though they're doing great work, going, well, cool. I want to pivot, but I don't have these connections. Yeah, you do, people. Who's your mom? Who's your mom know? Who's your dad? Who's your dad know? Who's your cousin? Who's your cousin know? Who's your friend? Who's your friend know? Who are your old clients? Who do they know? And again, if you're just going in saying, oh, I'll help you with your website, they're going to go, yeah, well, we already have Mary on the marketing team that's doing that for us. Well, we don't really need you. Find these people.

19:43Julian Galluzzo: Typically, a path what it would look like is I would start talking to someone. They would see, you know, anyone on our team. We'd have a conversation. They'd ask questions like this, I saw you post about these Slack agents and stuff. Show me what's up with that. We'd show them. They'd go, oh, we'd love something like that for our team. No problem. We'll handle that for you. Ba-ba-ba-boom. Here's your Slack agent. It's set up. Wait, can you guys also help us with this? Yeah, we could help you with that, but it's going to cost $5,000, $10,000. Yeah, no problem. You guys crushed it last time. That's the path. Find someone, show them the cool work you're doing.

20:13Julian Galluzzo: They're going to realize they need as well. They're going to start working with you. If you're just like, man, I'm a web developer, they're going to go, yeah, I don't need a web developer. And it's going to get harder and harder.

20:22Janne Parri: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. I have referenced the Ran Segall Flux Academy video quite a few times where he said that like that development part is shrinking and if you label yourself as especially Webflow developer, that that will be quite tiny tiny like that.

20:41Julian Galluzzo: been tiny. You know, but it's getting smaller.

20:43Janne Parri: And you got kind of have to add to that do something more nowadays. You can do more and solve more problems and as you said like you might get a retainer, but often times that might not be something that the client wants to buy. They want to buy like a big solutions for their big problems or something something like that. But those agents before we forget those. This is kind of coming from the website development angle and we can definitely go go towards like more broad solves and examples, but one thing that is heavily on my mind right now is the handoff and client edits for the websites especially with those static sites.

21:29Janne Parri: So, how does the agent solve that problem and with what sort of setup and what sort of details and so on? Well,

21:37Julian Galluzzo: I'm I will show you. I will tell you and I will show you, but before we do that, I got to flip this one on its head first and say as a Webflow developer how does the process usually look when you hand off a site? I know for anyone watching this are going to go,"I already know that cuz I've been doing that."But tell me because it will serve as excellent contrast for what I'm about to tell you. What does it usually look like? How do you train your clients? Do they usually need your help? Do they not need your help? ETC. How's that look?

22:08Janne Parri: Yeah. Yeah. Basically, I want to have some component library building blocks for the for the clients. Those might be open or closed components. Then I will have a live training and I will do some Loom or Tella videos for them to reference on the later date when they have forgotten about the live training. But I wish to get to a level where the client would be able to do the basic edits, new landing pages, section swaps, and that sort of things with the site.

22:40Janne Parri: That's all of it in a nutshell.

22:42Julian Galluzzo: My goal has always been make it so your clients don't need you. My theory has always been if you make it so they don't need you, even if they're not going to pay you, they will be so happy with you that they will refer you. It's always worked for me. I've not gone a day without work because of that goal. And that's why I loved Webflow because that was my way of trying to provide that. But let me ask you, you and I used to do this. I used to make my clients UI kits, train them, Loom videos, categorized videos. How often does that client come to you and say,"Janne, I need you to make me a new page."And you're like,"I told you how to do this."You'll take it because they're still paying you, so you know, great.

23:17Julian Galluzzo: But this is a realization that I've had is we walk around acting like Webflow makes it so clients own their sites. That promise was never true. It's not Webflow's fault. They've got the best product they can for it and they put a lot of work into it. But at the end of the day, the whole marketing teams managing their own website, that's not possible until today because of what I'm about to share with you. Here's the way it works when we want our clients to manage our site. We add Nate, short for native, but anyways, we add Nate into the Slack channel.

23:49Julian Galluzzo: We hook up Nate into their repo, tied to their channel, tied to the exact people that they want to be able to update it. Anybody can go into that channel and request anything according to predefined guidelines we set. So, there's clients who are small clients, they don't really care, they just say,"Yeah, I just want it to work. I want to say get this done and I want it to get pushed straight live." If that's the case, we could do that for you. We also work with enterprise clients where that's not the case and they say,"We have very specific things in place."So, you might say,"Yeah, your your clients use agents to manage it."

24:21Julian Galluzzo: What if the agent hallucinates and says that the brand is pink when the brand is actually blue? The answer to that is CI, as in you can make rules in GitHub, which is where for anyone who is maybe more focused on Webflow builds hasn't used GitHub before, that's where all of your code lives. You can make rules saying anything. For example, you know, I'll I'll pull up one example with a client here. But like, when this client here says that they want something changed, you can see in here and first of all, obviously, this is going to be blurred for anyone watching but Janne can verify that this is all happening.

24:57Julian Galluzzo: Today, yesterday, Sunday, Saturday, Friday, these are all you can see him tagging Nate for every single time. What is he doing? Well, at the end of the day this client here is a marketer. How do How do marketers usually get stuff done? For example, a new page. They send it to the designer. They send it to the developer. Why don't they like that? Because it takes a long time. We are providing our clients with an experience that is native to the way that they want to work. Oh, using this template, make a page using this file.

25:27Julian Galluzzo: And then he How did he generate this markdown file? I don't know. Presumably using Claude. Sometimes there's no file. Sometimes it's just as simple as, you know, this person saying,"Please make the sign-in link over here."And what happens? Take a look. So, he's saying,"Just to confirm, is this actually what you want?"And then this guy over here, his name is Colin, goes,"Yeah, this is exactly what I want."Nate says,"It's done." But guess what? Nate sends a preview link so Colin can confirm it's done.

25:58Julian Galluzzo: Colin hasn't been given the rights to get any stuff live. Only this guy here, Chase, is able to do that. And so when he says,"Yeah, it's good, push it live." Well, then it goes live. So, whether you have anything from, you know, change the text on this pricing section to here's the copy, make me a brand new page to go and hide this from the navbar, whatever it is is possible. And anytime we're looking and saying,"Oh, we're missing something here. We're missing some sort of guard rail. This person shouldn't have access.

26:28Julian Galluzzo: This person should have access."We're one prompt away. In fact, we also have an admin agent who manages that. So, I can go ahead and say,"Nate didn't have access to this."Tag our admin agent Jake, say, "Nate should have access to this." It's going to open up a pull request for us automatically. And so, at the end of the day, this is basically what I'm leaning more and more into is how are humans made to work? How do we want to work? How do we want to be productive as a species? And what I'm realizing more and more is that we want to talk. We want to collaborate.

26:59Julian Galluzzo: We want to speak with people. We want to make things heard. And so, at Native, our goal is how can we make it so that our clients can just talk and stuff gets done. How can we just talk and watch stuff get done? And so, this experience for clients at the end of the day, there's no training. There's no new tool. There's no context switching. They're not going to come to you and say,"You know, what they might do is they'll say,'Yeah, this page is good, but I want it to look better.'" Go for it. And then, we make it better. And we're just watching on the sidelines.

27:30Julian Galluzzo: So, what I'm wondering for anyone watching this, feel free to say in the comments, what client wouldn't love that? What client wouldn't want that? What client wouldn't What human wouldn't want that? To just be able to speak and watch things get done. And then, when it gets into Well, governance and compliance and enterprise stuff, we have the best version control system used by the best enterprises. It's called GitHub. And when it comes to governance and who can do what and who can't do what, there is no platform No platform can even promise you to do that out of the box.

28:02Julian Galluzzo: Good governance and compliance is done by people who care. That's it. And so, if we build crap for our clients, our clients get crap. If we build good stuff for our clients, our clients get good stuff. If we build non-compliant stuff, that's what they get. If we build compliant stuff, that's what they get. It's always on you at the end of the day. So, that's the short and sweet or long and bitter of it. What Whichever one.

28:27Janne Parri: That's so cool. I'm like getting excited because for so long I have been building those systems that the clients could build their own sites and so on. But as you said, maybe 1%of the clients actually use those to the extent of their capabilities and so on. And that looked super super cool. I'm like wondering part of me still wants to hold on to some visual UI of building things. So, do you think there is still a place for that?

28:58Janne Parri: Is that reserved for the let's say the actual person who build the sites or does any clients ever ask that?

29:06Julian Galluzzo: That's such a good question because I think lot of people say that, but they don't ask what you ask, which is is there a place for this? Is it needed? And my answer to that is this. I am in a time in my life where I want to say yes to my clients. If for example, most of the builds that we're doing have Sanity. I am actually a believer that Sanity's kind of useless nowadays. Like you don't really need that CMS. But the CMS exists. There's a visual editing capability to it. Typically what happens is our clients will come to us. They'll say,"Oh, what are we using for the CMS?"I'll be like, "We don't really need a CMS."They'll go, "Yeah, but this person whatever wants a CMS."No problem.

29:42Julian Galluzzo: We'll do Sanity. You want visual editing? No problem. We'll add it in. Nobody uses it. Nobody cares. But in the same sense, Ship Studio. So, a lot of people they're like,"Oh, well clients aren't going to want to use Ship Studio."I, the creator of Ship Studio, do not necessarily believe clients should be using it, period. It's a tool that's made for builders, not a tool that's made for marketers or business owners. It's a tool that's made for people who build all day every day. But some of our clients want that. We have marketing teams where the whole marketing team is using Ship Studio. And that's how they're updating their site.

30:12Julian Galluzzo: They wanted to learn and they cared. So, at the end of the day, the question is what do you want, client? Do you want visual editing capabilities? We could do that for you. What I'm going to tell you is this. 95%of marketers are going to say,"A Slack bot? I don't need to leave Slack? Sign me up, you know?"But there will be 5%that's going to say,"You know, I really just want a CMS."And to that my answer is, "Have it, you know?"You want a CMS, you want a Slackbot, you want Ship Studio, you want to use Source. Have at her. Go for it. Have fun.

30:42Julian Galluzzo: Like, you know, it's just the time, my job, my life used to be dedicated towards these stupid technical requirements of"Well, this is out of scope and we can't do that and this doesn't work with this." And my answer now is just freaking do it. You want a visual editor? Take it. You want Like, anything you want, just take it.

31:01Janne Parri: Yeah, that's so interesting. What is the need for the for the visual editor? Sometimes you want to drag some sections to a different order, sometimes you want to write the copy there. And how often is that sometimes? Like, if it's once a month, would it be easier to not have it at all? But, yeah, have you found any any like middle ground like lightweight editors or whatever in that that sphere?

31:30Julian Galluzzo: Honestly, I would just say that I kind of think that the way to go for default for the most people is the Slackbot because they don't need to learn anything new. And then it just goes down to how much do they want to learn, how involved do they want to be. Really, I think the middle ground is when you see tools like Lovable and tools like Replit. Full stack builders' tools, but they're dedicated to a less technical audience. That to me is that middle ground. But, I don't see much of a need for it in the sense that I think there's two kinds of people.

32:03Julian Galluzzo: The type that wants to build and the type that has another goal, but they need something built. For this type, you know, you want whatever's easiest. And for this type, you want whatever's best. You know what I'm saying? So, is there a middle ground? I don't really know. And it's like I kind of feel like in a way that's what Webflow posi is it is kind of positioning Source as. And again, I look at it and go,"Cool. Cool, I see the vision. Maybe there's a need for a middle ground, but really I just don't None of my clients are asking for Source.

32:36Julian Galluzzo: You know what I mean? My clients are either asking to use the stuff directly because they have a Claude Code subscription, they tinker around in their free time, and they want to own the site. And we give them access to Ship Studio, and they absolutely love it. And then on the flip side, I'm a marketer, I don't give a darn. We give them a Slack agent, and they love it. But and this is the thing, I have a little bit of fun, obviously, with whenever Webflow released something about Source, and I'm like, couldn't anyone just do that in a day? I've got a little bit of fun, but I really, you know, I'll use Webflow.

33:08Julian Galluzzo: You know, if Source comes out, and it's like, for example, I don't know if you saw Fimo, actually Nelson, PixelGeek Nelson, legend. Hi Nelson, I don't know if you're watching this or why you would be, but anyways, you know, he's working now with Fimo. Fimo is from the creators of Strapi, F-I-M-O, I think, dot AI. Anyways, Strapi, if you don't know, is the biggest open-source headless CMS in the world. And the people who created the biggest open-source headless CMS in the world saw a need for this new product. And this new product, in a big way, is that middle ground.

33:39Julian Galluzzo: So, they did a demo they showed me, and it basically is like, hook it up to your site, clients have user-friendly agents, you know, in the background, it's all like standard version control get, but like on the front end, the client just sees these user-friendly agents and all this stuff, and it's like, […] guys, this is cool. My clients might want this. But again, my clients might want this. I'm not sitting here hunting for the solution cuz it needs to exist. Because guess what? When my client says, hypothetically, if my client says, Slack agent's not enough, you know, Ship Studio's too much of a challenge, well, then I would just kind of say like, where's the challenge?

34:13Julian Galluzzo: Well, you know, getting GitHub set up. Okay, you can just do that with an agent. Here's how you get it done with an agent. Oh, sweet. Okay, now this is actually easy. So, it's like, I question there's people going after that middle ground. Webflow with Source is one, Fimo is another one. I think it's really interesting, but like, it's not a big market, man. It's really not a big market. So, again, that's where I look at Webflow with Source, and I'm like, I don't think you guys should bet on that. It's a cool product direction, but there's a difference between a cool product which may have a market and basically just company internals, man.

34:48Julian Galluzzo: If Webflow doesn't make their big stamp soon, they're going to get like somebody's going to force them to do a valuation. When somebody forces them to do a valuation and they see that our realistic value is nowhere near the 4 billion it once was that all of our employees signed off on and accepted compensation packages under a $4 billion valuation, that's where you start having people walk away and a meltdown happens very, very quickly. What's going to happen with Webflow? I don't know, but my point here is this.

35:19Julian Galluzzo: Source cannot just be a cool little product with a questionable market. It can't be. If it is, Webflow as a company as we know it will cease to exist. I'm not saying they're just going to fade into obsolescence, but as we know it, Webflow has big, big, big shoes to fill. And so I know you didn't even mention Source, but you're like, is there room for a middle ground? And immediately I know in a big way that's what Webflow's focused on, right? So I don't know. My clients haven't been asking for that, you know?

35:50Julian Galluzzo: They just haven't been. And if they do, I'm happy to provide it to them, but Yeah. We'll see.

35:56Janne Parri: Source is so open right now. It's not out out yet. There's just a handful of people trying it out. So people have even like hard time understanding what it is about and so on. But I believe they are betting big on the marketers like trying to ease the marketing manager role, like bring everything into the same same environment and hopefully that would be their edge on this matter. They kind of especially with the Webflow Conf keynote, they kind of left the usual audience, the builders and so on, like on the side.

36:32Janne Parri: They had the their little like demos and builder keynotes separately. So that's quite obvious. Hopefully they can pull pull it off and hopefully there is not a big big melt down. That's always a tough to watch and so on.

36:47Julian Galluzzo: I love the Webflow team, man. I love the Webflow team. I've been speaking to so many of them for so long, you know. I built my career around Webflow and watching the, you know, the fallout in a big way. What whatever's happened now, whatever's continuing to happen, wherever it's going to go, like it's difficult for everyone involved and I think a lot of people might look at me and be like, "This guy's kind of a dick." And you know what? I welcome you to say that. But really, you know, at the end of the day, I've seen another scenario where nobody is pointing out the obvious.

37:19Julian Galluzzo: Nobody's sitting there and going, "This could lead to a very bad spot." And that's what I was really trying to do. At the end of the day, I think Ship Studio just started as my message to Webflow saying, "Build this, guys. What are you doing? Build this." It's obviously transitioned quite a bit since then, but they're in a difficult spot right now, but they've got a lot of talented people. Where the problems arise to me is this. Like I said, you've got the people that don't care and they want whatever's easiest. They're going to just use agents. And then you've got the people that do care, they're going to want the best.

37:51Julian Galluzzo: Webflow is an incredible team, man. Here's the deal. Webflow could outship me and the Ship Studio contributor group do laps around us with their eyes closed. There's no questioning that. Who the heck are we? Nobody. Webflow has a lot of engineers, a lot of very talented engineers. The problems come around like this, you know. I've seen some of Webflow source. I've got my sources, no pun intended. And like at the end of the day, you know, when there's no option besides deploy to Webflow Cloud. Like I think Webflow Cloud's a great idea.

38:21Julian Galluzzo: That's one feature I don't think I've given them enough credit for. Like long overdue, but when it came out, amazing that that option exists. But here's the deal. You want the best hosting, there's no other way to say it. Webflow Cloud is not the best hosting. It's a good option if you're using Webflow already, but you're never going to switch from Cloudflare to Webflow Cloud. You're never going to switch from Vercel to Webflow Cloud. You're just not. And on the same front, source is opened and I see that that's the case, first of all. You can only deploy to Webflow Cloud, and then it's like, "Okay, click to switch your agent."

38:52Julian Galluzzo: You can't. It just uses Webflow's built-in agents, which are going to be more expensive and worse than Anthropic's agents, than OpenAI's agents. You know what I'm saying? And it's like, here's the thing. It's not that Webflow can't build it to be open to Codex and Claude Code, and they can't build it to be open to Vercel and Cloudflare. They can, but they're sitting there and going, "Where do we make money?" Because guess what? If they just sat there and went, "What's best for the customer?" you're going to end up with Ship Studio. And let me tell you how much money I made from it.

39:22Julian Galluzzo: Big old zero. That's the reality that we're living in is Webflow's business that they built around has has turned into something where someone like me who just has the incentive of, "Hey, people will hear about me through Ship Studio. Therefore, they'll hear about my agency, and I'll get paid through it." We don't care. The thing which Webflow and a team like that would sit there and have hundreds of meetings about how do we price this in? How do we price this in? How do we increase our revenue from this? Someone like me is just saying, "Build the feature. Make it open." I'm I'm, by the way, gesturing the Wispr Flow click right now.

39:57Julian Galluzzo: milking No, we're not milking cows. We're clicking buttons, but yeah, you know, so, it's an interesting thing to watch, you know.

40:07Janne Parri: Totally, totally. That's few things like just deploying to Webflow Cloud. I believe they kind of promised third-party providers in the keynote or some demo.

40:17Julian Galluzzo: Yeah, I hope so. should

40:19Janne Parri: be should be those. They could be that from the beginning in the beta phase like they would have just their own. I don't know. But I got I got the sense that that would be possible. And also about the agents, yeah, they will definitely have those own agents there, and those might be the thing that they like create the bills.

40:40Julian Galluzzo: They got to charge for something, obviously. That's fine, but But

40:44Janne Parri: on the last official live stream, there was Matthew Munger, Timothy Ricks, and Katherine Cry Crygo, I believe. They kind of said said that you would be able to bring in your own agent. That was kind of like vague. How would you do that? But that was kind of the sentiment that in some way you could do that. And that would be a huge thing obviously if you couldn't.

41:12Janne Parri: When when you are changing from the closed environment and get to taste this open web and then you have to like use their own proprietary agents, that would be a huge turn off. So, I'm hopeful that they see that.

41:27Julian Galluzzo: Yeah, exactly. And I think there is a lot of things that they've said which it's like, oh yeah, we want to make this possible. We want to make this possible. And I hope they do. Again, it's a case of like their product team is not dumb. Their product team knows the customers. They know what the customers need. They know what the customers want. But the product team is not and this is the difference because in Ship Studio the product team is everything. The product team, the contributors just want it, get it, ship it. Whereas the Webflow product team is going to say, we need to open this up to agents. And then the business people are going to say, no, because how would we make any money then?

42:01Julian Galluzzo: And then they're going to find this weird middle ground where what's going to happen is people are going to use it and they're going to go, these aren't the best agents, you know, this isn't the best hosting. Or maybe I can hook it up to my own agents, but it's through some silly little connector like the Webflow MCP for example where it's like, yeah, okay, cool, but why would I use this instead of just building it directly? And the final piece that I think just has my eyebrow raised is some of the things that I've seen. It's not polished. It's not

42:29Julian Galluzzo: It's not polished. Look, it's research preview, you know, I don't want to don't want to rip on anyone here, but like when a company that is basically so prized for its visual builder releases a padding input that is four individual sliders. And it's something that's supposedly been in the works for months. Something fishy is going on. This is speculation from my end from everything that I've been watching, but like we need to see it come out. At the end of the day, I think it's very interesting that Webflow is talking so much about a product which threatens its existing business and yet is not available for purchase under Webflow.

43:08Julian Galluzzo: I am voicing all of my concerns about how the product direction align with the company, you know, incentives. And at the end of the day, all of those things are going to come out when they release it. We're going to see what's possible, what's not possible, what's it cost, who are they charging, what's their marketing, who are they targeting, and all of these things, whatever they are, are going to become clear. And my point of saying these things, and I really hope the Webflow team watches this, sees it, and understands me, is that you don't want to let those things happen.

43:43Julian Galluzzo: Those things could happen. You don't want to let those things happen. And, you know, hopefully they're watching this and going, "Yeah, we already know all of that stuff. We already know the answer to all of these things." I hope that's the case. I hope that's the case. We'll find out on that faithful day when Source gets released. But like, have you been seeing a lot of the things on social about people like decompiling closed-source software and, you know, basically Yeah, absolutely.

44:10Janne Parri: Not nothing nothing like profound, but I have seen some like short-form content about those things.

44:17Julian Galluzzo: Exactly. It's Basically, my point here is this. Webflow can build the coolest features with Source. They could they truly could. What's stopping some random guy with a Claude Code subscription from going and saying, "Rebuild this. What a great idea." You know, there's infrastructure stuff at the end of the day, but it's like: where's Webflow's edge that's going to enable them to ship this thing in some groundbreaking, earth-shattering "we need this"? Everyone's going to start flocking back to Webflow, or flocking to Webflow from other sources, sources no pun intended.

44:47Julian Galluzzo: I don't I don't see it. I hope it's there's just something I'm missing, but yeah, man, as you can tell, I have a lot of thoughts on the whole situation. Obviously, you know, so yeah, interesting. We'll see.

44:58Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah. That is that is true. Like old school Webflow users will obviously want to like focus on the build part. Like Webflow is saying that it's more about the marketers and there is so much happening after the site gets published. But if we think of the build part like well, yeah, you are building Astro sites with the source and there are already tools for that. There are few free tools for that. It needs to be like totally better in some some way like and even even then it's like questionable.

45:28Janne Parri: Why would I pay pay for this if I can like handle it with a free tool. So on. Again, I'm coming back to the marketing thing like maybe their play will be like combining everything under one roof for the marketers. Like and maybe even trying to make some sort of like optimization rule like Optimize, I believe already kind of tries to do like they track the analytics of the site and based on that they do experiments automatically and do that sort of loop that should enhance the site automatically or something like that.

46:04Janne Parri: But yeah, just for the build part I'm like right now seeing that it's a tough tough thing to come come out with a paid product in that sphere. Wouldn't you agree?

46:15Julian Galluzzo: It really is. I would not be building for builders right now to make money. I just wouldn't. You can. There's a lot of people building new products and making money. Anyone who says SaaS is dead and there's no opportunity you can't make money. That's not true. But call a spade a spade, it's not an easy space to be involved in. And on the topic of marketers and what comes after, you know, again, there's a lot of opportunity there. But what I think Webflow maybe overlooks or overestimates is how much marketers want to add another tool into their, you know, sphere. They don't. They do because they have to.

46:47Julian Galluzzo: But if you could give a marketer what they need without having to have another tool. And again, at that point it becomes you want everything in one place. Why can't a team like Native build you a ridiculous agentic first site with a really good PostHog setup to the point where you can go in and just straight-up ask, "Who is on my website today? What kind of things were they doing? What are some ideas that we can do moving forward?" And then it automatically launches an AB test.

47:13Julian Galluzzo: This could be a very easy setup for a team like mine to build over Slack, which again would then make product as a product people would go, "Why would I need that when I could have a custom solution that does the same thing?" Again, you could just make the same product, make it worse, and then charge more money from it. If your marketing is good, you'll build a business. So, these are all really just speculations at the end of the day. I'm sure Webflow's got some card in their back pocket that they're going to pull out. But, one thing's for sure, I think that people like me have basically gone a large portion of their careers looking to Webflow for what's next.

47:52Julian Galluzzo: Webflow, show us this North Star. Webflow, show us what's next. And I think that what we've seen is that we can't be doing that anymore. We need to expand our horizons. We need to figure out what's next, what our clients need, and then what tools fit in to that stack. Webflow's in a tough position right now. Like, I'll sit here with my criticisms. I'm not going to sit here and tell you that if I was an exec at Webflow, I'd be able to do anything better. Like, it's so easy for the person to be the armchair critic. And I just want to make that darn clear.

48:25Julian Galluzzo: This is not a criticism of any individuals or the work that they're doing or anything like that. It's just calling it how I see it and pointing out the fact that there might be some stuff that we're missing. Like, marketers, again, it's just it goes down to the fact that I don't see this need for something like that. I think it's already been solved. Look, I think if Webflow Another thing to mention is timing. If Webflow released Source a year ago, totally different story. Ridiculously different story because people hadn't made the switch over to agentic workflows.

48:58Julian Galluzzo: Look, I will tell you right now, there are about in the in the Slack community there's a thousand active members. Realistically there's three to five thousand freelancers and agencies that all build their client sites on Ship Studio. That gave me nothing in terms of money which I never wanted it to. But what that did to Webflow at the end of the day, how much money have you brought Webflow over your career? A lot, right? Client sites like not through your own personal card but client sites billing, workspaces, add-ons.

49:31Julian Galluzzo: I'm confident that I'm directly responsible for over a hundred thousand dollars, you know, easily in a small portion of my career for Webflow revenue. So when one individual leaves, when one agency leaves, when one freelancer leaves, that's not just one customer leaving. That's dozens of customers leaving. That's their clients. They're going to convince all of their clients that this is the best way to go. So if Webflow, again my point is if Webflow released source a year ago when nobody knew what was next and Webflow said here's the workflow of the future, take it, I think that people like me would still be using Webflow source, you know?

50:11Julian Galluzzo: But at this point in time Webflow has taken so long where anyone who wants to jump ship or learn new workflows has already learned them and when you've already learned them and know that you can already do all this stuff for free it's like why would I pay for that? So tough man, it's tough.

50:30Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah. Okay, still the Webflow. I know that someone would probably shout out in the comments that what about the enterprises. I believe someone said that Webflow has had like record breaking sales month and it comes from the enterprise sales I would imagine. So do you think that they have an edge on that side somehow?

50:54Julian Galluzzo: Webflow has an edge on the enterprise side in the sense that enterprise companies move slowly and Webflow had an edge in 2024 and so they're feeling the tailwind effects of that today. That is the case with pretty much all Webflow agencies I've noticed as well. They had some record-breaking months, who was absolutely crushing it, and then it just wasn't all of the sudden. And in terms of enterprise, I mean, we work with companies I'd say probably 30%of the web clients that we work with are either direct targets of or past customers of Webflow enterprise.

51:28Julian Galluzzo: Also, it's just a lot of the connections we have, a lot of the companies that we talk to. And I do not know of a single enterprise company who wants to be using Webflow right now. Again, they're saying, "Hey, Source could be cool, but we want to enable our team with these workflows." The reason what I think Webflow doesn't understand is that the reason why these companies went to Webflow is the exact same reason why people are leaving Webflow. They are moving to Webflow because they're tired of the old slow processes where you got way too many chefs in the kitchen, and they want to move on to something leaner and faster, right?

52:02Julian Galluzzo: And so, you're getting a lot of companies that are still moving over to Webflow for that same reason, but they're going to very quickly realize that now there's another thing to move on to, to get to the next level of that. And so, from the conversations that we've been having with companies that are on Webflow enterprise, they are in the midst of migrating because of Webflow's marketing. They basically declared their own product as a thing of the past and said, "Hey, we got this new thing with the future, which is Source." And it's going to be Astro.

52:32Julian Galluzzo: And so, everybody started rebuilding their sites on freaking Astro. And by the time Source comes out, they're already going to be using Ship Studio or OpenCode or the Claude Code desktop app or Codex, and they're going to go, "Why would I need this thing? Our site's already in Astro. Thanks, Webflow, for pointing us towards Astro. We don't need you anymore." Like, the timing has been such a difficult, difficult, difficult thing, and I think that's probably been their biggest mistake. It's not direction, it's about when they're doing it.

53:00Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah. That was my reaction with the Source announcement. Okay, cool. This is now more open, but I was expecting something like Webflow 2.0 something like that. Why don't I start to learn Astro and all the all the other tools and so on. But okay, if the watcher, listener and me included are like on the static build camp and now we're excited about those Slack agents. How can how can we build one of those?

53:31Janne Parri: Like what happens in the background and what sort of guardrails do you build and tell me tell me more about those?

53:38Julian Galluzzo: So, honestly, to actually get a Slack agent up and working is incredibly easy. I'll drop the sauce right now and say, go use Ship Studio and click Vercel Eve starter project when you're creating a new one. There's a lot of ways to build agents. There's a lot of hosting providers for them. But what I always noticed in the past when building agents was that they're they'd be so amazing in theory and then something would just happen that would make it unusable. You get some $400 Anthropic bill. I don't know if if you ever bought into like the OpenClaw hype and like set up an OpenClaw agent.

54:11Janne Parri: Almost almost. And

54:12Julian Galluzzo: that's what happened to me and it's like, yeah, this is cool, but I'm not going to use this. The point is when it comes to agents, there's a lot of under the hood infrastructure that you would not think about such as caching. So, for example, how do you cache an agent's like context? I don't even know. I'm not going to sit here and tell you I'm some sort of expert on that, but what I will tell you is if they're not cached, then the new the context goes in every single time. Every single time every single time. That's how you end up with those big bills. Eve is like an agent framework which has all that stuff out of the box.

54:44Julian Galluzzo: So, what I would do is go to Ship Studio, new Eve agent and then explain what you want to build. The way that we were doing it for our clients is that we have our agent Nate. And Nate is one agent, but he lives in different workspaces. Access is scoped down to the Slack channel. Like you can only touch X site from X Slack channel period. But the beautiful thing about that is that we have the ability to add and remove features and tools for different clients. But, what happens is that as we improve it for client A, it's automatically improving for client B.

55:19Julian Galluzzo: And so, it's becoming a part of our unintentionally, it's becoming a part of our service offering that we have a hosted Slack agent, which just gets better constantly. So, there's a lot of things that you need to think about and really when it comes to anything from a security point of view, it you need to follow a no trust model in the sense that like don't set it up to be able to merge stuff into main. Don't set it up to give accesses that it shouldn't until you need to. And when you need to, make sure that you put some guardrails in place.

55:49Julian Galluzzo: A lot of things are just already handled from these, you know, industry-leading infrastructure tools like GitHub and Vercel. But, really just don't overly trust agents in that sense. Make sure they only have the access to the stuff that you want them to have access to. They don't have access to the other stuff. It's really not that difficult. And again, do it on a test project first, then do it on a small client project. Test, increase, increase, increase. But, really like I'm telling you right now, step one, open Ship Studio.

56:21Julian Galluzzo: Step two, Vercel Eve starter project. Step three, FN key if you have Wispr Flow. Step four, repeat after me. I want to build a Slack agent for my clients. I want to make sure that only the right clients have access to the right sites. I want to make sure that there's no overlap from an actual structural standpoint. And I want to make it so that we can build on these agents over time. I've built a test project, which we're going to use as a fake client. Use that as your starting point.

56:51Julian Galluzzo: Let's build it. Let's test it and take it from there. If you literally just record what I just said and put it in, that's 70%of your Slack agent. And then what does it really go down to? Understanding what your clients need, what they don't need, what's annoying to them, what's not annoying to them. And so, really what's getting a chance to shine through is our understanding of basic skills, of business, of communication, not just can we build a Slack agent. Yeah, I could build it, you could build it, he could build it, she could build it, but we know what's needed, when it's needed, and why it's needed, and that's why our clients love us.

57:26Julian Galluzzo: But as far as yeah, how should your clients edit their site? Slack agent. And you know, there's probably someone if they haven't already wrote in the comments saying, "Why don't you just do a Slack agent that updates Webflow sites?" Yeah, we've tried that, and what happens is that it hits the freaking rate limit before it makes the edit because it's trying to find the element on the page every freaking time. And so, like that just goes down to where people are going to ask, "Why would I use this?" You know, and so Webflow needs to open it up, make it easier, and they're doing that with Source, so kudos to them, but but yeah.

58:02Janne Parri: That's beautiful. You've mentioned Ship Studio quite a quite a few times right now, so I believe we'd need to have a little update on Ship Studio. Like, what's the what's the current thing you're working on, and what do you want to see in the future for Ship Studio? Yeah,

58:18Julian Galluzzo: so at the end of the day, this is going to be a really easy one to talk about because here's how my life goes. I use Ship Studio constantly. I'm just using it, making stuff, building stuff for clients, testing it out, seeing what works, seeing what doesn't work. And then, when I run into something and go, "This is bad, this doesn't work," I build the next feature. And in the same time, you have other people doing the same thing. Ship Studio is a product built by the people who are using it to complete real client work, and that's why it's so good, and that's why all the features that we need it already has. Look, at the end of the day, the real magic is done by the agent providers, the infrastructure providers, not by Ship Studio itself.

58:56Julian Galluzzo: Ship Studio exists as the glue to hold all these things together and give you a workflow that you understand. And so, the future of Ship Studio is that it must be capable of doing all of the work that myself and the many other people that rely on it to deliver for their clients, you know, the work that we're doing. So, that's one thing that I saw with Webflow is that, you know, Webflow is a private for-profit company, great people and all that, but it's a company at the end of the day. It will do whatever it needs to do to survive.

59:29Julian Galluzzo: The only incentives of Ship Studio are that what does it need to do to survive? It needs to be a better tool for you. It needs to be an easier-to-use tool for you. It needs to provide you with additional value. That is it. There are no other incentives in it to the point where basically whenever someone's got a cool idea, this is something that it needs to have, it's going to have it. Recently, I realized that more and more my work is taking place and I think this is incredible over my phone and less so on my computer. But, I use Grok Bot like crazy now and I freaking love Grok Bot, man.

1:00:01Julian Galluzzo: Genuinely, that is the workspace, in my opinion, of the future for all sorts of people, from devs to marketers to business owners. But, anyways, so I noticed myself using that more and more. And as far as I'm concerned, if something comes around that makes it so I don't need Ship Studio anymore, I want to make money. I want to feed my family. If you give me a better way to do that, I'll take it. Ship Studio is not feeding my family at all. It only is because it provides me with the surface needed to do so. And so, I started to realize, I'm like, this is just an example, by the way, I'm doing more work over my phone, but I don't want to use Grok Bot to, you know, do the work on my client sites.

1:00:37Julian Galluzzo: The agents just aren't necessarily as good. The usage limits just aren't necessarily as good. So, I did a lot of thinking on that and I realized it's wait a minute. More and more we're going to move away from UIs. We're going to move more towards communication, more towards chat. Well, in that world, what purpose does Ship Studio really serve? An interface to hold everything together. And what I realized is that

1:01:00Julian Galluzzo: no matter which tool you're using, you want your If you're a serious builder, you're a serious dev, you want to be using the best tools, the best agents, the best workflows with the biggest usage limits and the most flexibility. And so, after realizing that, I went, "Okay, how can I bring the power of Ship Studio into every single agent that I'm using?" So, built a connector, basically, where you can control it remote. And now, most of my work looks like I have a conversation with Grok Bot.

1:01:31Julian Galluzzo: Grok Bot manages the context, manages the plans, and then uses Claude Code, Codex, the world's best agents on my subscriptions, which are only $200 a month. And that was literally a week or two ago. That has transformed not just my workflow, my life. And at the end of the day, that is just one small example of how when a company realizes that, "Hey, wait a minute. People aren't going to use something like this anymore." They try to double down. They try to do more marketing, make you want to use it. We realized that, and we're like, "Yeah. Ship Studio in this form doesn't have a future, because the future lies in conversations, the future lies in meetings, the future lies in conversation work, you know?"

1:02:10Julian Galluzzo: And so, but, you know, and if the tool's already exist, I'll go to the Ship Studio community and say, "Hey, everyone, go try this new tool. It's amazing." But, it doesn't exist. And so, basically, Ship Studio is now not only the amazing workspace and glue and visual aspect to hold it all together, but it's also become the context layer in the workstation for your mobile agents to use, right? So, it's going to keep growing, it's going to keep getting better, it's going to keep doing what the people who rely on it to earn a living need it to do.

1:02:41Julian Galluzzo: And that I just think is so beautiful. And that is why, when the time came, I started to notice myself wanting to build features into Ship Studio, which weren't useful at the end of the day. I tricked myself into believing they were useful, because, "Oh, we're going to be able to monetize it. We're going to be able to charge for it." Once the incentive shifted to just, "How do we build a cool tool that's going to help us make money by, you know, helping clients?" That is when the product direction of Ship Studio entered like god mode, because all of the wrong incentives are gone.

1:03:12Julian Galluzzo: It's all about how do we make the best tool that allows us all to make a living. and that's how it's going to keep growing. And to anyone who believes in and loves that vision, we are looking for more amazing people as contributors always to bring your own opinions, your own expertises, your own workflows that we may not even know you need. When someone comes around and says, "Hey, Ship Studio doesn't this do this. I need it to do this." Open a pull request. Let's get it in, buddy. And even if we don't get it in, it's yours. You can just you can do whatever you want to it.

1:03:46Julian Galluzzo: So, that's the future of Ship Studio. It's going to continue being what it needs to be.

1:03:51Janne Parri: Yeah, that's blowing my mind. I It's evening already back here, and I believe I will not get sleep after this one. There's again so much to think about. But yeah, just on contri- contributing to Ship Studio, like who are the biggest contributors? I believe you are Native is kind of like funding the whole whole thing, I guess. Are there any other names you can drop?

1:04:17Julian Galluzzo: Yes, so there's quite a few people who have contributed to the overall mission, and they've contributed really maybe opened a few PRs, and really helped explain things to people. There's so many people that I want to shout out for their integral role in building It's a real thing, dude. I'm going on websites, and I see the logo of Ship Studio like as one of the tools that they use, and it's amazing. And there's so many people that I could I could shout out for their their role in making it what it is. But what I will say is that most of the actual the code came from Claude, if we're being honest.

1:04:49Julian Galluzzo: But the code came from my Claude. And Native is what pays the bills in the sense that like for example, we have a Slack agent that monitors every single bug that happens in Ship Studio gets automatically reported to the Slack agent, which automatically opens an issue in GitHub, and logs it, and tracks how often it's happening. Native pays for all of that stuff. But there's so many people I could shout out shout out, and I'm not going to shout out everyone. But if I can shout out one person, let that be Martin Crandall. Martin Crandall is someone who just rolled up into the Ship Studio community and basically Martin's a designer, a really good designer.

1:05:27Julian Galluzzo: I'm also a designer, a really mid designer. I'm more of an engineer by trade, you know? And Martin basically rolled up and just saw the vision, saw what Ship Studio was meant to be, but used his skills of just taste and consistency to make the Ship Studio experience not just what it needs to be, but something that actually feels incredible. Now when you use Ship Studio, you don't feel like you're building something that Julian, you know, slapped together. It feels like a refined There are like publicly traded companies with dozens of people inside them using Ship Studio.

1:06:05Julian Galluzzo: Like Yeah. there's a reason for that. It's because it's really freaking polished. It's because it was really well done. And the reason for it being really well polished and really well done is all Martin. I am the slop cannon that goes, "I've got an idea. Build it, build it, build it, build it, build it." And then Martin comes around and goes, "Cool idea. What if we took that, bent it around this way, and connected it to this feature so that people could actually find it?" And I'm like, "Martin, that was my vision. You just blew it up. You took my vision and realized what I didn't even realize it once was."

1:06:38Julian Galluzzo: And the whole point of that and Martin, fat shout out to you because you were integral in what Ship Studio is, what it's become. But what I want to shout out for anyone else is that Martin just showed up and just did He just sent a Figma file. He used it, sent a Figma file. Now, in not very much time, he is one of the most recognizable faces in the Ship Studio community. You know, like people you have the opportunity to jump into this community community with no credentials, no anything. Prove your value, help the community, lift yourself up, and get to a point where people are actually reaching out to you to do these things on a paid level for them.

1:07:16Julian Galluzzo: Like you can use Ship Studio as your platform, basically, as your community, as your voice. And I want you to do that as long as you're contributing to the community, right? But, it's amazing to see, man, how just anyone at the end of the day like in a closed product I can't go and just say, "Webflow, this is what your product should look like." The only way I can do that is by building something separate like what I did with Ship Studio. Whereas, if someone else has a vision for what the next version of Ship Studio is, just just do it. Just show me. And if I'm like, "Huh, this sucks."

1:07:47Julian Galluzzo: and you don't agree, fork it. Publish it as a fork. Use your own thing. It's still helping the overall community. It's amazing, man. Open source is honestly one of the most beautiful beautiful things that I have ever seen out of humanity. Like, you know, whatever for anyone who isn't not to get into religion, you know, I'm a Christian. And I believe that if Jesus was to come back today, open-source software would be one of his favorite human creations because as silly as it sounds, genuinely it is beautiful.

1:08:20Julian Galluzzo: Why did I do this? Because I want to help people. Because I want to give people something that's going to help them. Why did Martin come in and put so much of his own time and effort? Because he wanted to help people. It's there's literally no incentives besides just wanting to help people, wanting to give back to the people that gave to you. and I think that's the future of software. I think it is the brainchild of all the people who need it to survive put together into one movement, one thing which they can continuously grow with, and it will evolve infinitely as does the industry.

1:08:54Janne Parri: Amen. That's actually quite quite a beautiful place to end, but I'll I'll give you another another chance. Like, is there still something on your mind about agents like website sphere, like Webflow, Ship Studio, or any anything that you want to voice out before we go into the weird last section you might remember?

1:09:16Julian Galluzzo: love the weird last section, of course I remember. I got it very wrong last time, I think. But, let it be it's not new information, but what I really want to say to everyone is this. I know a lot of you are scared. I know a lot of you are looking at your incomes dropping. I know a lot of you are looking at your clients leaving going, "Where do we go from here? What's the future?" And what I can tell you is that the future is extremely bright. There is more opportunities now than there's ever been before. You just have to look for them. And make sure your incentives are in the right place.

1:09:48Julian Galluzzo: You know, make sure that you are genuinely looking at it and saying, "How can I bring value to these companies?" Not just how can I convince them that they need this one service that I offer. And let me tell you from not not to plug myself or my own, you know, paid education or anything like that, but all the people who come back to me, you know, who've done that stuff, who've done my, you know, very simple at the end of the day sprints, come back and they go, "This has changed my life. I've never been making more money. I've never had more clients." And it's not because I'm, you know, I have some secret knowledge that's going to change your, you know, life.

1:10:21Julian Galluzzo: It's because once you see it, once you accept it, and once you just start moving forward not from a place of fear, but from a place of hunger, and from a place of, you know, wanting to deliver value, you are going to come back to me and say, "Maybe it's Maybe it's from a course you did. Maybe it's from watching this video." You're going to come back to me. I've had dozens and dozens of people already do this, and I cannot tell you how happy it makes me, and just say, "That is the moment that changed the course of my career." And again, all it is is throwing out the stuff that's currently blocking your brain, and just saying, "Let's try it.

1:10:53Julian Galluzzo: Let's accept that a robot might be better than me at this thing that I've been doing for a decade." It hurts. It hurts me. It's going to hurt you. But once you rip off that band-aid and embrace it and own it, there's no better feeling. I've never been more optimistic about the future than I am today, and I've always been optimistic about the future. So, please, for anyone who's scared, don't be scared. Things are about to get way better. Even if they get worse first, they will get better. Trust me.

1:11:18Janne Parri: Yes. Yes. Beautiful. Okay, Julian, if someone wants to check you out, follow you, or maybe even contact you, where should they go?

1:11:26Julian Galluzzo: X and LinkedIn. Those would be the primary places. I'm active on them. I'm posting on them. I think last time I made a joke about how like don't message me on LinkedIn cuz like ew, LinkedIn. But honestly, these days I'm kind of ew, all social media, but you know, that's also the place that I, you know, meet and communicate with people like you. So, please on X and LinkedIn, I assume there's going to be a link in the description for those. Check them out. I am more than happy to share this with anyone. If anyone wants to come to me and say this is my situation, what would you do from here?

1:11:58Julian Galluzzo: Not saying to listen to my words blindly, but I'm happy to bounce feedback, ideas, whatever it is. DMs are always open.

1:12:06Janne Parri: Yeah, yeah. And Native has a website, but maybe you shouldn't visit that or how did you phrase that? Like

1:12:14Julian Galluzzo: Yeah, no. Maybe you don't even need it. We have I think one of the most beautiful agency websites, you know, out there right now. I It's not huge, but it's beautiful and shout out to our design engineer Eldar for that one. But yeah, we've got native.agency. Beautiful site. You could check out some of the work that we're doing on there. We're going to be doing more content education in the near future. So, keep an eye out for that, you know. One thing that we really would love to do is provide a more simple path into this future for our fellow, you know, X, whether it's Webflow, Framer, whatever it may be.

1:12:51Julian Galluzzo: And just to be clear, that doesn't even mean you're not using Webflow anymore. It just means that you're expanding your horizons. So, keep an eye out for that. Check out my profile. Check out my co-founder Bradford's profile. We got a lot of cool stuff. We don't hold back. So, yeah, we're we're both fun follows.

1:13:09Janne Parri: Beautiful. Beautiful. Okay. Now to the finish line. Nathan Huening actually came up with the finish line thing. Like it's finish and it's a line of finish and so, yeah. Okay. You know what's coming, but for all the listeners and watchers who might not know, what follows is that I'll give Julian a finish saying. I will translate that to English and Julian's job is to guess what that means. So, are you ready for your say?

1:13:38Julian Galluzzo: ready. I am ready.

1:13:40Janne Parri: This might be easy. I'm not sure. But I'm obviously biased, so I'm not sure. But okay. in Finnish it is menneen talven lumia. And in English word for word it means the snows of last winter. So, what does it mean if I say that? Okay, that matter that's some snow from the last winter.

1:14:02Julian Galluzzo: My guess and perhaps I'm looking at this too literally, which I definitely did last time, but my guess would be that it's talking about the effects of things that happened before. Like you know, let's say we're talking about something I'm trying to think of an example. Something that's going on today and it's like, oh, well, this happened today. That could be why. No, that's something that's from before. That's the snows of last winter, not the snows of this winter. That would be my guess and I'm very excited to hear how wrong I am.

1:14:31Janne Parri: It's close. It's I would I would or maybe you even meant meant that. Like it's basically old and forgotten. Like I believe there's a phrase water under the under the bridge. So, it's basically the same. Yeah.

1:14:45Julian Galluzzo: Okay. You also have acqua passata in Italian like just the water passed. Like Okay. Yeah. Okay. No, that's not what I meant, but now that you say it, I could totally totally see it. And I will give you one actually and

1:15:00Janne Parri: Beautiful. Okay, bring it on. I gave

1:15:02Julian Galluzzo: you one in Serbian last time. I'll give you one in Italian now and it's kind of well known, so you may have heard it, but it's in bocca al lupo. That means in the mouth of the wolf. What do you think that means? It's not It's not what you're going to guess, but go for it.

1:15:17Janne Parri: Okay, thanks for letting me down gently. I think

1:15:21Julian Galluzzo: it literally.

1:15:22Janne Parri: I'm like thinking in some sort of like in a dragon's den like in a tough place or something something like that. I'm in a tough place or

1:15:31Julian Galluzzo: That's exactly what you would think it means, but let me ask you the English phrase break a leg.

1:15:36Janne Parri: Yeah, that doesn't make sense, but I do know that

1:15:39Julian Galluzzo: It is the exact same. It is you say it in the exact same time. Oh, and in French, there is another way to say that. Merde, which just means like fecal matter. I don't know what it is, but the phrase I'm I'd be interested to hear what it is in Finnish, but every language has like one of those kind of good luck. Go get them. Go get them tiger like and I find that they never make sense. In the three languages that I know, English, Italian, and Serbian Yeah, Serbian's is rather literal, but English and Italian, those don't make any sense.

1:16:14Janne Parri: Yeah, my brain is now set to English, so it brings up the break a leg, but I'm not sure if there if there is something. I will put that in the in the description if there is something, but I'm I'm sure that there's something, maybe not so widely used. But yeah, Julian, thank you so much for being on the show again. This was a great talk, a lot to think about for me and for the audience. Yeah, I'll I'll hope that we get to do this next time and by then, who knows what has happened.

1:16:48Janne Parri: But okay, for the watchers and listeners, we'll see you in the next one. Bye.

1:16:53Julian Galluzzo: Take it easy.