#001 - How Finsweet Founder Joe Krug built one of the leading Webflow agencies

Learn more about Joe Krug

Twitter: https://twitter.com/joekrug

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joekrug/ 

Website: https://finsweet.com/

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Chapters

00:29 Introduction to Joe and Finsweet

01:04 Finsweet's Beginnings and Growth

02:28 Balancing Agency Work and Product Development

03:52 Transitioning from WordPress to Webflow

06:17 Learning and Growth as a Self-Taught Developer

08:55 Client Acquisition and Project Management

12:05 Offering and Withdrawing Design Services

18:09 Decision-Making and Listening to the Team

23:19 Business Growth and Targeting Larger Clients

27:26 Product Strategy and Development

35:13 The Webflow Community and Its Impact

41:36 Future of Webflow and No-Code Movement

46:23 Personal Insights and Business Philosophy

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Transcript

Mike Mahlkow (00:29)

Hey everyone, welcome to the Happy Building podcast. Today we have Joe from Finsweet one of the most respected Webflow agencies in the world, my own words. Uh, Joe, how are you doing?

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Joe Krug (00:42)

Hey Mike, I'm doing well, thank you for that. I appreciate it. Yeah, doing really well, happy to be here.

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Mike Mahlkow (00:47)

Good, good to have you. And I think what I would like to start with is if you just tell us about your own journey so far with Finsweet, but maybe a little bit before that, just like give us an introduction about who you are, what you're building, and then we can start from there.

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Joe Krug (01:04)

Great. Well, I always started out in sales. I've always known myself as a sales person. And before Finsweet, that's what I was doing. I was running a sales team and I was selling things of my own. So it kind of transitioned into web when I was working for a company that has some problems with web. So naturally I started to learn a little bit more. I picked up some odd tasks.

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and I really started to fall in love with it. So I wanted to create Finsweet for a way to make money, a side business as I figured out what I wanted to do. And it turned out that web design and development is exactly what I wanted to do. So I took that on the side gig and I made Finsweet full-time. So Finsweet for the first year was just me, but over the past almost eight years, we have grown to a team of 50.

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and we have grown entirely to help with our agency work. We build clients' websites. So let's say a company were to come to us, we build their marketing site and we go and ship that in Webflow. That's part of the business. And the other part is products. So we create products for the Webflow ecosystem. And that is what Finsweet is today, agency and products.

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Mike Mahlkow (02:28)

And that is a great transition because one of the questions that I had for you is your agency in quotation marks, let's say your company does things a bit differently than most of the other companies in the agency space that I'm aware of, especially because you are building products. So one thing that I would love to understand is how do you allocate resources internally between the sometimes very sophisticated Webflow projects that you're doing with some like big clients and like...

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different countries all over the world. But then at the same time, you build some of the most used or well-liked products in the Webflow ecosystem. How do you balance that?

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Joe Krug (03:08)

Well, we try to keep those teams separate. We almost try to look at it like two separate businesses in a sense of allocating those resources. There are times where we share resources, there's times where people go back and forth, but for the most part, it's the product team and the agency team. So if the agency team needs more people, we're not just going to pull someone from product, we're going to find somebody externally. And at the product team,

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needs more people, we're not gonna take someone from agency. So we try to allocate those resources right from the beginning, right when a person is onboarded to the team. And just as the team needs to grow, we hire more people for it.

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Mike Mahlkow (03:52)

Got it, interesting. Then let's start with the agency side and then we can hop over to the products a bit more. So you said it was only you at the beginning, you fell in love with the web, but I also know that you had a couple of iterations in terms of what you're building, what you're offering. So let's start with how you started out, because if I'm not mistaken, you started out with WordPress or at least use WordPress a bit more. And then at some point you transitioned to Webflow.

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And now you are a Webflow only agency, if I understand correctly. So talk me through the transition over the years, because eight years is a long time. And then how did you make these like very crucial decisions of like moving from like one platform to another? Because I assume it wasn't an easy decision at the time, but maybe it was.

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Joe Krug (04:44)

It actually was going, making that change from WordPress to Webflow. Uh, I was building, I was building marketing sites on WordPress. It was going well. I was happy with it. And then I was asked to build a fairly large blog on WordPress. And this was such a challenging project for me. It was the most challenging site I ever built. And I thought it was very bizarre that. A Web technology that's really made for blogging gave me such a hard time building a website for blogging So after that project I started looking for alternatives I started doing some Google searches checking out other options and I found Webflow

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And once I started using Webflow, I started to understand the web on a deeper level. I knew there was HTML. I knew there were CSS somewhere behind the WordPress dashboard. But in Webflow, I was actually learning how the HTML and CSS interacted with each other. So I kind of had this knowledge excitement, this knowledge burst coming into Webflow. And really from there, I thought.

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This is what I need to build in. I'm not only learning more about the web, but the things I'm making are faster. They look better. They're easier to build. They take less time. I mean, there was just, there was really nothing keeping me on that WordPress Train anymore. So I, I literally stopped completely and made the switch.

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Mike Mahlkow (06:17)

Got it. And then you alluded to something that I also found interesting, because apparently when you started out your web journey, you weren't an actual developer, right? You were a salesperson, as you mentioned earlier. So you taught yourself everything on the way. How did that go?

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Joe Krug (06:38)

It is great. I love learning from doing. That's my favorite way to learn. I think it's really the only way that I can learn through actually doing it. So it felt very natural to just have a trial and error type education system. I saw something I liked to build. I tried to build it and I just fought my way through building that. I learned what I needed to learn to, to accomplish the task. I.

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challenged myself. I tried to learn things that seemed a little bit further than what I was able to do. And just through, let's say through a year of doing that, I really turned into a quality professional to the point where I felt really confident building sites for people. And it's a great feeling. So I learned on the job for sure. And that's exactly how I would do it again. It was very effective and efficient.

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Mike Mahlkow (07:38)

And the learning that you did, was that during client projects or was that during your side projects and then you translated that into client projects? Like, did you sometimes take projects and you were like, I think I know how to build that, but maybe I have to figure out parts of it.

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Joe Krug (07:54)

Yep. Yeah. I learned on all types of projects. I would build these fun little side projects all the time if there was any downtime. And I would always pick kind of ridiculous things to build. So fun projects for sure. Great learning. But I think the best way to learn is through those client projects. That's where the real, you know, quality, executable information comes from, from the client projects. So.

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I would absolutely accept projects that I wasn't 100% sure of, but I knew that I'd be able to do it. I don't have the two lines of JavaScript code needed to make this happen, but I'm pretty sure I can find out how to do it, or at the very least hire someone to do it. I was honest with myself. I didn't over-quote things or under-quote things. I just...

I was honest with myself.

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Mike Mahlkow (08:53)

That makes sense. Yeah. So like a challenge, but a challenge that you were pretty certain of that you could solve that makes, that makes sense to me. And then we, we jumped from you being the solo WordPress developer to nowadays having like a pretty large team and navigating like multiple client projects at the same time. Um, can you talk a little bit about the process of

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Joe Krug (09:01)

Correct. That's a great way to put it, yes.

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Mike Mahlkow (09:22)

maybe like acquiring a client project, like a new one, and then getting from inception and discussing the, like maybe like the scope with the client to then like completing it in quotation marks. And maybe we exclude maintenance for now, but that's like, maybe lead me through like the whole project and how you like to do it. I assume there's like differences depending on the products, right? But I assume you have like some kind of like standard process that you like to follow.

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Joe Krug (09:52)

Well, yes, I'll start with how we get people to contact us. We don't have any outbound sales. Everybody comes to us and we do that through our product offering. So right now, most of our product offering and our most popular products are all focused on free for the end user, completely free, community based. It's really made people love Finsweet.

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And like you said in the beginning of this, the most known and respected agency, whatever you said, it's because we are very generous. We have created a lot of valuable resources and we give those away for free. Because of that, a lot of people find us when they look for Webflow.

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So if a company is looking, hey, I want a Webflow agency, or I'm trying to do this in Webflow, they may come across Finsweet. There's a high likelihood. We come up in a lot of searches. So it's a great lead tool. It just has so many benefits for the company. So people come to us because of our involvement with the community. Once somebody comes to us, we have to qualify the project. We get a lot of people that...

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you know, may seem qualified on the first email, but when you really get into it, are not qualified. Usually through budget, right? Some people come with solid ideas, solid plans, but then their budget falls short. Or they may have a budget and they just have no plan. You know, we don't wanna work with that person either. So we need to qualify that lead. And then after we qualify them, we create that spec, get the contract going, and we are...

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working towards that contract. We focus on leaving the client happy. That's really our goal. So specs can change, right? We're okay adding a little bit extra to the spec without charging or changing it a little bit because something changed. Right? Our end goal is to make them happy and be fair, right? Be honest. Make sure you complete the project, but...

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At all costs, they should be leaving happy. They should not be leaving unhappy. So that's kind of our goal. And as long as we focus on keeping people happy, we really don't have too many unhappy customers.

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Mike Mahlkow (12:17)

Yeah, I think that's a, it's aligned incentives, right? If they are happy, then they might even get you like more projects or more clients in the future. And then specifically you are very community oriented company, right? You already talked about the products you bring out. So if you have happy people running around, liking your services in the community, that that's also something that can give you additional power. One thing that you said was interesting to me, like qualifying them based on the plan, because qualifying based on budget makes

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like a lot of sense and I assume most agencies out there do that, right? If the client doesn't have the money, then you can't do the project. But what kind of plan does someone need to have to be able to work with you? Like how much needs to be done already? And are there areas where you can support and also areas where you say, well, you need this before we can even like get started with this.

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Joe Krug (13:13)

I'll give you an example of a type of request that may not work for us. Let's say a company comes to us and they say, hey, we need to make updates to our website. It's not really working that well. And that's it, right? We need a redesign. We need a redevelopment. There's no game plan at all.

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We find, oftentimes we find that when people are that vague with it and they start to reach out before they're even ready to move forward, that project may take a long time. And that project will probably take a very long time to scope and spec for a project that you don't even have yet. So really what we look for is people that come with their designs ready or their site map figured out or their...

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They're integrations listed.

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You know, these types of things, some people come with, some people come with limited, right? We're not asking for it to be perfect, but at least give us an effort. Like, let us know, is it going to be in this kind of range of a project, this kind of range, who may be working on this? We don't wanna have five phone calls just to figure out your spec, right? It should be, we should get some initial spec, have a phone call, figure it out, and move forward. So we try to focus on those. Of course, you know,

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Sometimes clients come through all different ways, maybe with a very vague spec, but we try to avoid those for most of the time.

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Mike Mahlkow (14:51)

And then you said design ready. And this is also something that I read from you like a while ago, that at first you also offer design services, but then at some point you decided not to offer design services anymore and you wrote your decision down in a pretty elaborate blog article that went at least semi-viral in the agency or Webflow space.

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So maybe talk me through you offering design as part of Finsweet and then making the decision to move away from it, just verbally for the people who haven't read the article.

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Joe Krug (15:32)

So we used to do design, and we were pretty good at design. We had some very interesting design work, and that was really one of the first ways people knew about Finsweet through our wild design.

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And I found that once we added more designers to the team, once we had more projects, it was a little bit harder to control how the project went, how happy that client was at the end of the project. Since design is so subjective, we found that the only time clients left us unhappy is when we did design work, because the design work was not up to the qualifications.

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or the expectations that they had in their head. A client is thinking of some type of design, we can't see that what they're thinking, but they have some level of quality, and for whatever reason, the communication in the project did not communicate what they wanted. We designed something that was below their expectations, and they left paid, but not very happy, right? A little bit unhappy. So.

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I don't like that. And I found that all of the projects that had that were the design projects and all the implementation projects were just 100% perfect. Development can be objective. There is no right and there is no wrong. If it is an efficient solution and it works and it achieves the use case. So I found that we're able to do that and leave everybody happy. And we had higher margins.

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The team was happier about it, so I said, hey, we gotta make this change. We made it and it was a huge impact in a positive way for the company. We were more efficient, we could take more projects, we could scale the team quicker, because now we could just hire Webflow developers, not Webflow developers and designers. It's a hard, it's hard to find people that do both very well. So we could hire quicker.

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So it was a really good change. Now, interesting fact, I am now starting to draft a new article saying that we are bringing design services back. So we are now coming back into design, yes, and I'll explain why. The type of client that we've taken on has changed. We are now working with much larger companies and some of them have very specific requests, like...

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We need the same company to do design and development. They were told they have to find a company to rebuild their website, not for service providers with all different skills. So we have design partners, and sometimes we send out projects and they come back and we can still do the development work and it's great. But we find that we're losing so many people that don't want that. They want all in one shop.

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So we still have good designers on the team and we have even more designers on the team that just kind of took a break from client designing. So now we are starting to think, how can we bring back this design service for this use case, for those clients, those enterprise type clients that need everything in one house and not creative work, right? We're not going to be making sites for awards and probably will not be doing most, any of those.

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We're going to start building and designing functional websites for large clients So it's interesting how the business kind of changes and the services you provide can also change and at the time It just worked for each stage of the business. We were supposed to design in the beginning We weren't supposed to design and we were supposed to focus on development start building our product line You know all development focused in the middle and now We are expanding out to design

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We are bringing more design type elements into our products and it's just a really nice flow of the business throughout the eight years.

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Mike Mahlkow (19:48)

Yeah, that it seems as if you're thinking about Finsweet as, and I'm just using my own words and you can correct me if I'm wrong. But basically what I'm getting from you is you want to provide solutions to the clients in the way that best suits them. And you are less strict or at least less focused on how you do that. And if that means that you

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have to bring something back that you kicked out before, then you can move your ego aside and just say, well, like it was the right decision back then, but now our clients have changed, our world has changed. So basically what I'm getting from you is like at least a propensity towards change that I haven't really seen that much in like many other people, like not only the agency space, but also beyond. So after saying that, my question is, how do you process the information that you're getting

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and then making these types of decisions? Is it just that you get this gut feeling? Do you just listen to what your customers are telling you and then you see a pattern? Or how do you get to these bigger decisions that design, we kick it, design, we bring it back? Do you know where I'm coming from?

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Joe Krug (21:06)

Of course. Well, I'll tell you about the bringing design decision back. That would be from our, our head of agency, Jay Wolf. Jay manages the sales. He's the leader of the project managers, the webflow developers, everything with agency can flow up to Jay. And Jay told me about this. He said, we're losing business. There's a huge amount of business coming through that we cannot accept and we cannot send to our design partners.

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because they need everything in one house. So, I mean, I made the decision instantly after hearing that. I don't have to hear anymore. We're losing business. Big clients are asking for something. And we have the resources right now, right here to do it. So that's a no brainer. I'm not gonna even think about that. So I said, great, let's do it. And we have been slowly.

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very slowly accepting very select design work. Right, we're not just gonna blow open and say, hey, everybody come for design. We're starting slow, making sure we have the process right. But, you know, relying on the team. So I guess that would be the answer. Having people that you trust, and when they come to you with a problem, a challenge, and then a solution, go and take that.

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Mike Mahlkow (22:31)

Yeah, I like that. Like high trust is very important, especially when they have more context than you, right? Because if it's the head of agency, then he is the point of contact for everyone. And all the information that's important is flowing into him. So it's a good sign that you trust him enough to just make the call in that regard. Um, maybe, um, one more question in that area. And then I would like to jump into the, into the product side a bit more.

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Mike Mahlkow (23:01)

What are some learnings that you made when you offered design earlier about what was challenging and what are you changing now? Is it only about what type of design work you accept or is there more to it?

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Joe Krug (23:19)

Well, I think it's a little bit of both. What type of design work that we accept for sure. We used to accept a lot of highly creative design work. Maybe some 3D, some heavy illustrations, layered type artwork for websites. We really accepted and created some very creative art. And I think the subjectivity.

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level of creative art is way higher. So what I mean by that is people are much more likely to be unhappy when you're dealing with highly creative art because it's just really specific, right? It either you either love it or you don't love it and you could really dislike something when it's highly creative. But when you're dealing with more functional work, more functional type design where let's call it a normal looking website,

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This is, I think, a lot less likely to leave somebody unhappy. Because, you know, how many ways can you imagine a normal website, right? A business enterprise type website. There's, you know, you can figure it out. You can get to what that client wants a lot easier than some wild, highly creative, award winning type website. So definitely the type of projects that we take on. Also the budget.

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Right. We're not going to take on these. Sometimes we would take on development projects and design projects that were fairly low budget. So when these kind of blew up in the middle or at the end, it, it just wasn't, we weren't in a good place with that. Right. Nobody wants a small project to kind of blow up and you're like, now I'm using so many resources for this small project to try to save it. So we want.

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big projects and we want to put our best people on those big projects. So we're not just going to take these like smaller, Hey, like help us out with design. It's going to be, Hey, we have a big design requirement. Uh, we need your help. And we need a great UI and UX person, right? That's what we're looking for. So did that answer the question? Is that great?

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Mike Mahlkow (25:36)

Yes, yes, I think it did. But I just remembered one more question about the agency side. So we'll jump to products afterwards. So in startups that we are very familiar with, there's often this growth from offering your product to smaller companies, and then you're growing up market, right? You sell to like mid-cap companies, and then at some point, you sell to enterprise companies. It seems as if you've done like a bit of a similar journey in the agency space where you work with smaller companies and then increasingly with bigger companies.

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Mike Mahlkow (26:06)

And now you seem to be reasonably focused on big companies just because that's where a lot of the budget is. That's where maybe also some of the interesting projects are. And I understand well what like startups or products have to do to grow into this, but maybe tell us a little bit about what growth did you like, Finsweet has to go through, had to go through to get to the enterprise clients. Was it a collection of great work?

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Is there like specific because for products is certificate. Sometimes you need specific features like SSO logins or like security based things. So what is it that you have to prove or had to prove to get to the enterprise sector?

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Joe Krug (27:00)

Past work, I think past showing your past work is the best way to give somebody the confidence to work with you. Because I can say, yeah, we can build this SSO integration, no problem. Maybe they believe me, maybe they don't. But if I show them that we build this SSO integration, they'll say, okay, well, now there is no question they built this, it's working, I see it. So

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showing that past work is huge and what I like to do is

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Joe Krug (27:26)

build more in the project than what is on the spec. So if I have a project, let's say that's 10,000, I'm going to build that like a 20,000 spec. So if I do that a bunch of times, then I have a whole bunch of projects that look like they are 20,000 spec.

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So then now I'm going to attract bigger projects. If I take a 20,000 project and I build it like a 100,000 project and I do that a few times, I now have a portfolio of 100,000 projects. So you do good work, you have a portfolio to show, and then you just build more than you're supposed to and really make it an impressive project to show in the future. That's how you can get to the next level and the next level and the next level and the next level.

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And that's exactly what we've been doing and we continue to do, right? When we're pitching any type of client, yeah, we have 100 plus portfolio items we built in the last two years, but we have this project, this project, and this project that are very similar to what you're asking us to build. And with that, the sales process becomes a lot more simple, a lot less challenging. So that's a big one for us, those portfolio items.

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Mike Mahlkow (28:47)

Got it. Yeah. So like build good work over deliver and then transform it into something like case studies almost that you can just use as proof that you can deliver what they want. I like that. Then let's make the transition because as we mentioned earlier, it's very interesting that you have the agency side and the product side. And I think you alluded to it earlier, but it is a big part of why you're that well known and like a very unique positioning.

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just in the overall market. So maybe tell us first a little bit about what types of products are you building and maybe list a couple of the ones that are most used or most loved by the Webflow community.

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Joe Krug (29:29)

Sure, one of our most loved is our attributes solution. It's a product, it is free, we are making it open source and it's called Attributes. It allows you to place custom attributes on elements and through those custom attributes carry out JavaScript functions. So let's say you want to create copy to clipboard.

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Instead of writing any type of JavaScript, you can place a few attributes on the elements and that will turn it into a copy to clipboard functionality. So this is great for the Webflow community because a lot of people don't like writing code. So you can create some very complex JavaScript. You can really figure out complex solutions like on-page filtering of many items.

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searching through many items in a list. You can do those types of JavaScript actions through these attributes. So this is a huge library. We're gonna continue growing it. We're going open source. And this is going to be really sort of a marketing funnel for us. This is how a lot of people find us, right? If you need Webflow, you may need one of these solutions. And it's just a great way to get people interested in Finsweet.

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So that's going to be free. We're probably not charging for that or any, any part of it. We have client first client first is our CSS naming convention and build strategy for web flow. So we use client first at, at Finsweet for all of our clients. And we build very nice organized projects that are easy to understand. And we.

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made this system open source for the community. So a lot of people follow client first. So we have the docs for that and we consider that a product. And now onto the paid stuff, which is fairly new. We have Wized and our Webflow apps offering.

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Joe Krug (31:34)

Webflow recently released their apps marketplace. We just released our first few apps. We're going to continue building Webflow apps. That's gonna be a key part of our product strategy. And then Wized I would call it our core product. And Wized is going to help you communicate with all different services and render any of that data on your Webflow site.

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So you can go and place a couple of attributes throughout your web flow site and then those elements with the attributes can be manipulated by Wized. We can show information from other platforms. We can create, we can carry out JavaScript functions and whiz is really what we're going to focus on as our core product and how we're going to make money in the product space.

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Mike Mahlkow (32:26)

Yeah. And that is also honestly how I first heard about you because one of the like original builders behind was, is actually a friend of ours. And then I think how it worked is like he started building the product and then at some point you acquired it from him, like you meaning Finsweet and now you're building it out, you're, you're launching a new version, you're building additional functionality, but again, like it's very interesting that you are and like

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agency at least first, I assume in terms of like how much money you're taking in. That's the huge chunk, right? But at the same time you acquired a product. So have you done this before? Is this the only product that you acquired? Like what was the decision behind, behind that one?

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Joe Krug (33:11)

This is the only product we acquired and.

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It was certainly a stretch for us. Uh, and certainly we have very little product revenue. It is all coming from the agency, but I'm very serious about product. I think product it's the ultimate scaling part of any business, any tech business. So yeah, we can scale our agency and I want to continue growing the agency for forever. But we can't exponentially grow.

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the agency. We can't super scale the agency, but we can super scale products. Products and SaaS, it gives Finsweet the opportunity to be massive. The opportunity. Right? Agency, it doesn't give you the opportunity for that. It just gives you the opportunity to build a great company, very successful. But I want to give myself and everybody that works at Finsweet the opportunity for massive success.

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And I think that is where product comes in and specifically something like Wized. Right. We built that attributes. This is great. We already declared that as our, our free Avenue, right? I always wanted to have something for free, but then when, when we've, we found Wized and Jonas, um, just kind of thought, well, this is the type of product that we can run with. This is the type of product that, uh, makes sense if built correctly. So.

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We started talking, it worked out. I think we both, it worked for both of us at the time. And yeah, he, he built the initial version. He came to Finsweet, he built another version. Um, and then now somebody else has taken over the project and we are now continuing to build another version. Um, and I don't mean like completely rebuilding the app, just we are making massive improvements, uh, as we continue building it. So.

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Joe Krug (35:13)

It's a great process. It's been a very, very interesting learning process. We're still new at product. So I feel like we're just learning how to do this and we're doing it as a team. It's a very cool experience.

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Mike Mahlkow (35:28)

I bet it is. And yeah, I 100% empathize with what you said about building products for potential massive success, because that's what we are doing over at Fastgen, or like me and my co-founders have been doing before. And like the startup world and the product world is where we mostly come from. So having this ability of...

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outsize returns, as you say, I think it's a very interesting and smart idea of like combining because there's also a lot of synergy between the two in your specific case. So I really like the approach. Maybe one more thought on the Webflow community in itself. Like the product strategy I find like very interesting and I'm very excited to see where you go with this. But we have the agency side. We have the product side.

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And then one thing that is, I think at least very special about Webflow is the community that they were able to build. And you have been very immersed in it over the last, I don't know how many years, five, six years. So, um, I assume you 100% agree with me that it is special. Um, that's just my assumption now, but what do you think makes it special? Like what did Webflow do that other companies could not copy? Because there's other companies in the space. Webflow is not the only.

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like website, visual website builder. There's like many other companies that do that, but it seems to me at least that it has like the strongest sense of community. Maybe I'd like to hear it. Do you agree with that? And if so, how do you think they made that happen?

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Joe Krug (37:07)

Well, I definitely agree with you. It has a very strong sense of community. And I would say the strongest sense of community, the strongest, um, in all aspects, when you compare it to, let's say something like a square space or a wicks. Right. Maybe the other platforms have more people, uh, but the community is so rock solid and Webflow and I believe this all started.

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from their clonables feature. The clonables feature, I believe, was the true catalyst to Webflow's community. Now, what are clonables? In Webflow, you can build a project and you can release it as a clonable, which means that anybody publicly can view your page and clone it. They can make an entire copy of your Webflow project and then go and...

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have it in their own environment. So this was a super social way to share work, to learn and to have fun. When Webflow was first launched, there were very simple websites built, right? So people were like sharing their entire web projects. They were sharing fun and cool, quirky things that they built. They're sharing educational things. Look how I built this.

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There's a cool way to do this with interactions. Uh, just a bunch of great, great ways to use and love Webflow. And through that, I think it created this social storm of just passion for the product and being able to see people enjoy your cloneable and, and take somebody else's cloneable and be able to access that immediately is so cool.

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I could clone this very complex website and go and pick the whole thing apart and see how that person, that experienced web developer built every part of this project. And that was a big thing that I did for learning. I used the clonable section as education. So I think that's what started it. And through that, people started to give more. And we did the same thing. We started to give, and give.

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Joe Krug (39:31)

Not only in the cloneable space, but all throughout the ecosystem. And as more people started giving and giving and giving, that's how you build a great community. That there's just a whole bunch of people giving with no real sense of return. I'm not giving this to you to get something in return. I'm just giving it to you.

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because it's cool, because I learned something, because I think you'll learn something, and that's a great way to build community. So that's what I think, that's the origin story in my eyes.

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Mike Mahlkow (40:03)

Got it. Yeah. I personally have to say that this is one of the things I love the most about Webflow. Because I can admit this, I'm not the best designer. I can build stuff, but it usually doesn't look that nice. So I leave design at Fastgen to other people. But whenever I build site projects or websites for myself, sometimes I build stuff for my friends. Just finding something.

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on Webflow that someone else has built with a better eye for design, and then just like copying it and then making the tweaks to it. It just feels almost magical. And it also has taught me like a lot of things about building websites that I was not aware of before. So I 100 percent think that it makes sense that this was the catalyst, the early catalyst, and then things just started building on top of that. Um, maybe just a couple more questions before we

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wrap this up looking at the time. Let's talk a little bit about the future. I think we talked a little bit about the future of Finsweet. You want to grow the agency, but you also want to focus or like increase focus on the product side for the outsized return. But let's zoom out a bit more and let's talk about the future of Webflow or even let's call it no code, low code, whatever you want to call it in general. So maybe let's start with Webflow like.

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Where do you see the future of Webflow and what role do you want Finsweet to play in that future?

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Joe Krug (41:36)

Well, I see Webflow being the premier tool for front end design and component building. That if I'm building a web application, a marketing site, whatever, creating that the HTML and the CSS for that Webflow will be the best way to do it. And I, I answer like that because of their Webflow conf.

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releases this year. This year they released some very interesting tools and upgrades to Webflow that are really going towards that direction being that front-end go-to That I don't want to create components I don't want to create layouts in any other way except for Webflow and that's exactly what I would want them to do as Finsweet because what we do is we try to focus on the

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Let's call it advanced functionality of the web. And that's why we have products like attributes that let people go and do more advanced things on top of their components or whiz allow you to make requests and manipulate data and manage the data store of your application on top of webflow. So for them sticking to more of a designer front end component type approach.

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I think that's going to be a big win for them and that's going to fit perfectly with what we're doing at Finsweet. So we were all very happy about this year's WebflowConf releases because it's, I think, a good direction for everybody.

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Mike Mahlkow (43:15)

Got it. Yeah. I really, I really enjoyed Webflow Conf and what they, what they published there as well. And then, um, second to last penultimate question that we have, um, on the Finsweet website, you shared that you had some childhood business lessons you learned from your dad. So could you elaborate a little bit on what he taught you that you might still be using to that day?

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Joe Krug (43:44)

Sure, my.

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My dad always treated his business associates right. I remember he

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Like it never seemed that somebody was mad at him, the people that he did business with. At least that's the impression that I got as a child. He always had Christmas gifts. Like he was really specific about the Christmas gifts for all of his clients. He was really specific about making sure that they got tickets to sports games. Like he was just always thinking about them and just making sure that they were well taken care of.

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So that's something I've clearly taken from him, among many other things. But that sense of creating good relationships and just taking care of people, it's a good feeling to have. So that's a nice thing I learned from him.

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Mike Mahlkow (44:43)

Yeah, I love that one. This is very closely resembling to how I think about, let's call it like my career or like how I do business. I think one of the most important pieces for me is the relationships you build along the way, and then also making them last, which in our case is second company we co-founded with the same co-founders. We even rehired our first four software engineers that we hired at the last company.

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Many of our investors are the same. And then I made a lot of friends along the way. So I can definitely empathize with what you said and what your dad taught you on that, in that regard. Maybe to close it off as a last question, are there any resources that can be blocks, that can be books, any type of content that you are like just a huge fan of, it can be related to Webflow if you want, but it can also be.

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something else, like who do you want to give a shout out to anything that you can think of in that area?

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Joe Krug (45:43)

Well, I'm not much of a content consumer on the business side. I don't really, I don't read business books or business content or watch videos or listen to podcasts, really. I do a lot of that for health and nutrition. I love reading about health. I love reading about improving my life through health. That's recent. That's since my son was born.

but that's really all the reading I do in content consumption. So I don't have any shouts out.

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Mike Mahlkow (46:11)

Hmm.

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Got it, then give us a recommendation there. Do you have anything that you really enjoyed there? It can be a blog, can be a book, can be something.

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Joe Krug (46:23)

Yeah, I don't have, I mean, I have like a list of books that I would recommend. I don't have the specific name. Yeah, I don't know. That's a tough one. I'm not, I don't have the content quick on to share there.

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Mike Mahlkow (46:38)

That's okay. That makes sense. So basically what I think what I would just get from this is focus on your health because it's the basis for so many other things. And in your case, at least according to what you just said, the birth of your son was a major reason for you like to refocus on that side and just make sure that everything is well set up there, which I can understand and it makes a lot of sense to me.

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Joe Krug (47:06)

And instead of reading, a lot of people will read books and then based on that information make changes in their business. This is why you would read. Read, get some information, and then pick the things you like and make those updates. Instead of doing that, what I like to do is just analyze and listen. Look at what's happening in the team. Listen to people on the team.

listen to the customers and then work in real time. Just make updates and change things and do things and update the business as needed. I don't need somebody else to tell me their story so that I can work that into my story. I just need to be very aware of how we can create a good story together. So just like I told you the story with Jay.

we should make this update. And I said, great, let's do it. Like we're working in real time, I'm listening to the people and we just, we act, we execute. So that's instead of reading, that's how I like to think about it.

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Mike Mahlkow (48:18)

I really like that because one of the issues that you will run into if you over rely on other people's stories is that the context just isn't there. So what you're telling me is look at the actual context of your business, which is what do your clients tell you? Like talk to your users. What is your team telling you who might have like seen patterns that you haven't seen and then use the actual context data that you have to make decisions and not some like...

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I don't want to call it fake context data, but maybe some context data that doesn't necessarily apply to you. Yeah, abstract. And yeah, I think that's a very good way of building the business. So I think that's a great place to close this. Listen to your users, listen to your customers, and specifically listen to your team members and give them enough trust to have them sometimes make the calls or at least contribute in a major way to making the calls. And Joe?

There was a pleasure having you on. I think we, I definitely learned a couple of things and thanks for being here. I hope you have a good rest of your day and to everyone who listened as always, happy building.