Learn more about Raphael Goldsztejn

Twitter: https://twitter.com/raphgoldz 

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/raphael-goldsztejn/ 

YouTube:  ​https://www.youtube.com/@weweb 

Website: https://www.weweb.io/ 

Chapters

00:29 - Introduction and Background

03:30 - Starting WeWeb and Early Challenges

10:30 - Transition to Web Applications

20:30 - Current State and Future Plans

28:30 - Target Users of WeWeb

31:30 - Reaching the Target Users

32:46 - Building a Community and Word of Mouth

34:30 - Product Roadmap and Decision Making

38:50 - Building Trust with Users

42:26 - Product Velocity and Shipping Fast

49:09 - Future Plans: Reusable Components, Marketplace, PWAs, AI, and SEO

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Transcript

Mike Mahlkow (00:30)

Hey everyone. Welcome to another episode of Happy Building. This time I have the absolute honor of having Raphael CEO and founder of WeWeb on the podcast, calling in from Paris. How are you doing?

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Raphael - WeWeb (00:44)

Hey Mike, really good to be here. I'm good, how are you?

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Mike Mahlkow (00:47)

It's a pleasure to have you. And what I would like to start with is if you give us a very quick intro about your own personal background before we dive deeper into WeWeb and what it does. Like, I always like to understand like the story and how you actually got to WeWeb. So tell us a little bit more about your like professional experiences before you actually started WeWeb.

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Raphael - WeWeb (01:10)

Yeah, so I did as a university, I did an MBA basically. So I have more like a business background and I majored in finance. And so I started my career by doing some, you know, finance for commercial real estate, basically, financial consulting and optimizing commercial real estate portfolios for a company called JLL. It's a great company, very famous in the US.

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Mike Mahlkow (01:27)

Mm.

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Raphael - WeWeb (01:38)

I really enjoyed my time here. But you know, when I was an intern back in my university, I actually worked for an entrepreneur. And he started a brick and mortar business, but it's an outstanding success. He basically built corners inside supermarkets where you can buy fresh sushi. And so you can see the master sushi chefs actually cutting the salmon in front of you.

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Mike Mahlkow (02:01)

Hmm

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Raphael - WeWeb (02:06)

you know, making the products in front of you. Everything is beautiful, very designed, very lean. And so you buy the products and they're actually very good. They are very good because they were made and I had so much luck back then. They were made by the chef of the Japanese embassy in Paris. And the guy was actually coming to the apartment where we were working just to try out the recipe. And he was like, here, do you like them? Like, is it good? Everything was so great because like this guy was an absolute amazing chef. So.

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Mike Mahlkow (02:06)

Mm-hmm.

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Raphael - WeWeb (02:35)

He created those recipes. And then, so my former boss basically launched his business and he grew from one corner to hundreds and hundreds in a couple of years. So it's an amazing scale story. He didn't raise one penny. Everything was self-funded through loans or his own personal money, but he didn't invest so much from his personal money.

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Mike Mahlkow (02:35)

Yeah.

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Mike Mahlkow (02:55)

Hmm

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Mike Mahlkow (03:01)

Mm-hmm.

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Raphael - WeWeb (03:02)

And yeah, and now he still owns 100% of the company and he's a tremendous success. And now it's all over Europe. So it's been an amazing experience. So I worked for him for a year and a half because I did basically all of my internships for him. And then he wanted to hire me and I wanted to try, you know, my way through the corporate world, just to see, you know, how it feels. I had fun, but after two years, I was like, okay, you know, I want my own entrepreneurial story.

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Mike Mahlkow (03:15)

Mm-hmm.

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Raphael - WeWeb (03:29)

And so I met my two co-founders, they were friends of friends. And my two co-founders are actually very technical. Both of them are developers basically. And so we started out by doing a website builder that was first dedicated for mobile. And so we had a lot of friends who were owning bars and restaurants all across Paris. And those guys didn't have any computers. They wanted to be able to update their data directly on their phones.

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Mike Mahlkow (03:48)

Hmm

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Mm-hmm.

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Mike Mahlkow (03:56)

Mm-hmm.

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Raphael - WeWeb (03:57)

So we built that for them and WeWeb really started like this in 2018. I'll just stop there because that's it for my background and then a lot of things happened until WeWeb became the WeWeb that is today.

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Mike Mahlkow (04:01)

Interesting.

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Mike Mahlkow (04:08)

Yeah, okay. That was a very good intro. So basically from optimizing real estate portfolios to growing sushi brick and mortar corner stores. I think I know what you're talking about. I've seen a couple of them in like supermarkets in Europe. And I'm not super big into sushi, but one of my co-founders, like if he could, he would eat sushi every single day. So I'll definitely tell him that.

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Raphael - WeWeb (04:19)

Yeah.

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Raphael - WeWeb (04:23)

Cool, yep.

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Raphael - WeWeb (04:30)

Okay, he would enjoy being around one of those corners. They are very, very good.

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Mike Mahlkow (04:34)

Yes, I'll tell him that he should let you know if he if he ever needs some good sushi advice. So like from that and then you said you wanted to do to build something on your own. You had like this like kind of like drive to do that and you met your co-founders and you said they were friends of friends. So maybe tell us how did you how did you actually like decide to build something together? Because it's always interesting especially for people who want to found something but who are

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Raphael - WeWeb (04:38)

Yeah, absolutely.

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Raphael - WeWeb (04:52)

Friends of friends.

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Raphael - WeWeb (04:58)

Yeah.

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Raphael - WeWeb (05:03)

Yeah. So that was great. I spoke to one of my friends from the business school and I was like, you know, I want to do something, you know, in the entrepreneurial world. And I have something for tech. I like tech, but I'm not technical myself. But I was always curious, you know, I was always on the look and on Twitter looking around what was happening, the different trends and stuff. But I was not coding myself, which was good.

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Mike Mahlkow (05:04)

So like, how did that actually happen?

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Raphael - WeWeb (05:33)

to start a no-code platform. I think it made a lot of sense because I was really non-technical, so I could have this hat of the non-technical guy who actually wants to build something very technical. And so that helped. And I spoke to my friend and my friend told me, well, one of my best friends from youth is actually a developer. Let me just introduce you to each other. And so we had a nice drink in Paris. I pitched him that...

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Mike Mahlkow (05:37)

Hmm. Yeah.

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Raphael - WeWeb (06:00)

there is those guys who own restaurants and bars and we should just talk to them, just to understand their needs because I'm sure they have some needs from a technical perspective. And don't ask why, but because we were always in the bars, you know, at the university. And so that's how we became friends with those guys, you know what I mean? These were the only guys who we knew who owned a business back in the day. So, you know, they were the first target, basically. It's funny. And this guy who became my co-founder told me,

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Mike Mahlkow (06:14)

Yeah.

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Mike Mahlkow (06:21)

Mm, yeah. Yeah.

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Raphael - WeWeb (06:30)

I have a friend from university. He's a beast in code. He codes as fast as he can think. So we should get him in the team. And so his name is Mark. And we met Mark probably a week later, same bar, having a drink. And we say, yeah, there's always a bar somewhere in our history. I don't know why. And then the three of us said, OK, let's start something. And I based my way of doing.

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Mike Mahlkow (06:39)

Mm. Mm-hmm.

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Mike Mahlkow (06:44)

Mm.

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Mike Mahlkow (06:47)

I see a pattern. I see a pattern. Yeah.

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Raphael - WeWeb (06:59)

on the experience I had with the sushi guy. And I remember he started his own company by still working for his formal job until he got his first contract. And we did the same. So we basically were working and nights and weekends, we created our first product. And then we had like one client and all of this client, we said, okay, you know, let's do this. Let's just quit. Yeah, like fortune is here. Let's quit and let's start our company.

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Mike Mahlkow (07:09)

Mm-hmm.

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Mike Mahlkow (07:23)

That's it. That's it.

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Raphael - WeWeb (07:29)

And so we went full time on January 2018, the three of us, and yeah, started the company.

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Mike Mahlkow (07:39)

Okay, so basically what you did is did it as a side gig and then you needed this specific sign and because you saw your former boss do it very successfully after he had his first like contract or client, you said, okay, this is the sign, we've worked really hard. Now we have like some kind of external proof that this is actually working. Let's do this. Okay, great. Okay, so you have three people, you're going full time. It's January 2018.

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Raphael - WeWeb (07:59)

that someone actually wants this and let's work on it. Yeah, exactly. And yeah.

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Raphael - WeWeb (08:08)

Yeah.

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Mike Mahlkow (08:08)

maybe lead us to the next couple of steps. Like what happened afterwards?

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Raphael - WeWeb (08:11)

Sure. Well then, from January 2018 to December 2019, two years, it's a struggle. It's like two years of struggle. The three of us, we hire a couple of interns. One of the interns is still with us. His name is Damien. He's actually the cousin of Mark and he's the same kind of beast. Like both of them, I don't know what happens in the family, but they are two like... Yeah, exactly, two coding beasts.

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Mike Mahlkow (08:22)

Hmm. Okay. Yeah.

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Mike Mahlkow (08:28)

Mm-hmm.

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Mike Mahlkow (08:33)

Haha, nice. I love it. Good DNA.

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Raphael - WeWeb (08:41)

and he's still with us today. And so, yeah, we kind of start to work together, and revenue goes up and down. It goes up and down, goes up and down. There's a lot of turn. It's a very hard sell. You know, we don't have much traction. It's very hard. But on the way, and I think that that's what was interesting, we figured that there were some technical gaps in the no-code world, one being...

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Mike Mahlkow (08:57)

Mm-hmm.

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Raphael - WeWeb (09:08)

There is this whole wave of API, API things and decoupling everything, the back and the front. And most new websites and web applications were being built in a decoupled fashion, in an API first fashion. Remember we are in 2018. And there is those new JavaScript frameworks that are becoming popular. Back in the days, it's Angular and then Vue is popping up and then React is popping up.

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And we are like, OK, so there is maybe a path in this whole no-code landscape to build a new front-end builder that will be decoupled so that you can connect to any back end. And that will be based on JavaScript frameworks so that every single element is actually a scoped component, which will make the whole thing much more modular than what was existing back in the days. And so in 2019, we were.

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we wrote a white paper, actually, a strategic paper. I think it was, I don't know, 20 pages, about the whole, those trends that I'm describing right now. And we said, okay, there is definitely a place for a new no-code platform here. We should build it. And I went out to see some VCs. And so I started around, I think, probably in June 2019, and I closed it in December.

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me six months. It was very, very long because we didn't have much traction. We don't have much proof that we were very good entrepreneurs. We had everything to prove basically. And so we closed the first round in 2019. And so say January 2020, we have the cash on the bank and now we can start to execute more because building a front end builder was very ambitious. We were upfront with our VCs and told them it's going to take time because it's hard to ship an MVP website builder.

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Mike Mahlkow (10:39)

Mm.

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Mike Mahlkow (10:43)

Mm-hmm.

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Mike Mahlkow (11:01)

Mm-hmm.

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Raphael - WeWeb (11:05)

It has to be, you know, people have expectations with regards to. Yeah. Right. Exactly. Yeah.

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Mike Mahlkow (11:08)

Yes, I know the struggle. I know the struggle, just on the other side. But yeah, I think let's stop here for one second and then we can continue the journey because this is something that I find very interesting and specific in the kind of space that we are in. Because you always hear about, okay, ship your MVP quickly. You need to get it out to your users as quickly as possible and as fast as possible. However,

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Raphael - WeWeb (11:28)

ship your MVP. Yeah.

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Raphael - WeWeb (11:33)

Yeah.

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Mike Mahlkow (11:36)

I would argue that, let's call it in-depth tooling overall, but then also specifically in the no-code, low-code space where you want to give your users the ability to produce something else. It's not that you are a logistics provider for them or a SaaS app that sinks their bookkeeping or something, which is also like, it can be difficult to build, but the idea is that they use your product to build another product or to build something that actually...

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Raphael - WeWeb (11:52)

Great.

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Mike Mahlkow (12:04)

Like software that's actually for other people again. And I think this is like one step removed and therefore the expectations are higher on the one hand, but then also on the other hand, it's just a little more complex to build because to actually work, you can, you cannot only have like one feature. You need to have a couple of features together. And I just do that. You obviously know all of that. I just, I just do that preamble for the listener. So maybe lead us through why it isn't as easy as it might seem to

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Raphael - WeWeb (12:07)

Thank you.

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Raphael - WeWeb (12:12)

Yeah.

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Raphael - WeWeb (12:21)

Yeah, correct.

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Mike Mahlkow (12:34)

ship like a no code, low code front end builder in like two months or something like that.

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Raphael - WeWeb (12:38)

Of course. Yeah, exactly. I mean, you have to think first about what's gonna be the output. You have your machine, your software, and then there's gonna be an output. And this output, like you said, people will be extremely, will have very high expectations out of this output because they'll basically create their website on all their web application with it. So it needs to work, right? And when you deploy it, it needs to be performance.

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Mike Mahlkow (13:03)

Mm.

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Raphael - WeWeb (13:06)

needs to be scalable, it needs not to have any security issues, you know, that type of things. And so then you're thinking that suddenly you need to create a software that actually is writing code. And the code has to be very clean. Sorry, there's my baby crying in the background. Yeah, he's very cute. Maybe he will show up on the video later. Yeah, I don't know. So, all right. And yeah, so that's why it takes a lot of time to actually craft.

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Mike Mahlkow (13:22)

That's fine. That's fine.

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I bet, I bet. And... Yes.

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Raphael - WeWeb (13:34)

Because whenever you add a new feature, you have to think that the output will be clean code, and it has to work very well. And then you have to think about all of the UX, because it's actually a new way of programming, if you think about it. It's like you're visually programming something, and it has to cover a lot of different use cases, because as you've probably said, you actually give a platform for someone to actually build different things. And then you have...

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when you are a front-end builder, and if you set out to be a front-end builder, you have to be agnostic to the type of things that are going to be built with your platform. And you could pick one. That's what we did at the beginning. We picked websites and not web applications. And I'm actually thankful we started with this because it's probably slightly simpler than building web applications. But still, building websites, just imagine Webflow, just imagine WordPress. Those are very complex, very comprehensive.

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Mike Mahlkow (14:13)

Hmm.

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Mike Mahlkow (14:17)

Mm-hmm.

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Mike Mahlkow (14:23)

Mm-hmm.

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Raphael - WeWeb (14:33)

platforms. And when people will look at your platform, they will directly compare it to the others, to Webflow and WordPress. So you have to catch up with the level of features that they have. And so that's why it takes a lot of time.

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Mike Mahlkow (14:34)

Yeah.

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Mike Mahlkow (14:43)

Mm-hmm.

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Mike Mahlkow (14:50)

Got it. So it's basically three different things. If I understand correctly, number one, it's just a lot to build, right? There's just like lots of things that you need to like get done. Secondly, the expectations are a bit higher because you are producing like a software based end product, which is a bit different than did the order ship or did the order not ship in e-commerce, right? Because the UI can be bad in e-commerce, but as long as the like order arrives on time, that's fine. But like in like

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Raphael - WeWeb (14:58)

many features. Yeah.

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Raphael - WeWeb (15:11)

Mm-hmm.

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Mike Mahlkow (15:19)

If you work in this tool on a daily basis to build your websites, to build your own business, then you need a little bit higher bar of quality. And then I think the last thing you said is also very true. There are just these behemoths in your space. WordPress has been around forever. I don't know the percentages, but a very high percentage of actual websites on the web are powered by WordPress. And then

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Raphael - WeWeb (15:27)

Yeah.

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Raphael - WeWeb (15:43)

I think it's 60% of all websites built with a CMS. So it's like gigantic. Yes, it's amazing. Yeah, of course.

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Mike Mahlkow (15:47)

Yeah. And that's, that's a pretty, that's a pretty high market share, right? That's, that's, that's quite a bit. And then you have Webflow. Webflow is also like this, this company that has been like going on forever has a big community and then you're building this like website builder and you're constantly being compared. I assume they, one of the first questions that people always ask is how are you different than WordPress or how are you different than Webflow? So, okay. So you basically have the stage, you're shipping, you have some money. Um, but there is a gap, right? Because back then you were building websites and now you're building.

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Raphael - WeWeb (16:06)

Absolutely. Yeah.

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Mike Mahlkow (16:16)

secure state scalable production grade web applications. That's the goal of WeWeb right now. So maybe lead us through the transition. What was the key moment here?

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Raphael - WeWeb (16:19)

web applications. Exactly. Yep.

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Yeah, so actually you gave a hint here. People were always comparing us to WordPress and Webflow and all the others. And the value we were providing compared to those was not high enough, I would say, to really make the company take off and really make people understand what was our position in the market. Because they were like, okay, so you're decoupled, that's fine. I know some people using headless systems like Prismic, Contentful, Strapi, and Ghost and all the others.

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Mike Mahlkow (16:33)

Mm-hmm.

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Raphael - WeWeb (16:56)

And so we were like, OK, if you use one of those headless CMSs, you should probably consider using WeWeb on top rather than building with React or of you, because you will enjoy your web flow-like experience, but you will still be able to continue to use your headless systems. But headless systems started to understand that front end is critical, and they added some capabilities for marketing teams to basically move around React components that were pre-built.

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Mike Mahlkow (17:24)

Mm. Mm-hmm.

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Raphael - WeWeb (17:24)

and they were slightly getting into the front end. And so they were slightly eating the value that we were creating. And at the end of the value that was remaining was very low compared to the struggle it was to actually buy WeWeb and train your team on WeWeb rather than WordPress, React, your headless system. And so it was a lot of friction for the sale. And the value that we provided was not high enough. And

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So we are at the end of 2019 right now. And so we applied to YC at that moment to Y Combinator. And we apply on that same philosophy, right? That there might be a space for a company here that's gonna be a decoupled front-end builder because of all those API first systems. We just didn't crack it yet, but there must be something. And so that's what we told the partners during the interview. So they called us for the interview.

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Mike Mahlkow (17:57)

Mm-hmm. Mm.

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Raphael - WeWeb (18:21)

That's what we told them. We showed a couple of, we had the opportunity to do a little demo. We showed what we did and I think they were excited and so they brought us in. And going back to the beginning of our conversation about, you know, shipping early, I think what we did not do properly at the beginning is that we were shy to actually do Product Hunt, to launch on Hacker News and to get some press, you know, to get the media to talk about us.

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Mike Mahlkow (18:49)

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

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Raphael - WeWeb (18:50)

Because we were like, you know, WeWeb is not ready. We don't have any traction. And so we will use those firepower when we have traction. It was a big mistake. Because during YC, the partners told us the first day, all right, two weeks later, you guys are on Hacker News. And then one week later, you guys are on Product Hunt. You know what it is. And I was like, all right, let's do it. And so we did it. And here's what happened, Mike. Before YC, we were having about 100 sign-ups every month.

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Mike Mahlkow (18:58)

Mm-hmm. Mm.

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Mike Mahlkow (19:08)

Yeah. Yes.

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Mike Mahlkow (19:19)

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

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Raphael - WeWeb (19:20)

which is very low, right? And out of those 100 signups, I was carefully selecting the people that were right into our target. And so I was extremely biased and I was only talking to people that I thought I was interested in. During YC, we made a thousand signups per month. So it completely boomed. And suddenly we had data. And out of this data, you know what we learned? We learned that people were trying to bend WeWeb to actually build web applications.

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Mike Mahlkow (19:29)

Mm.

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Mike Mahlkow (19:34)

Mm-hmm.

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Mike Mahlkow (19:38)

Mm. Yeah.

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Hmm

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Raphael - WeWeb (19:49)

and not websites. So people were having those decoupled backend API first. And they said, I don't care building a website on top of it. What makes sense is to build a web app on top of it. I want to build my client dashboard, internal portals, all of those logic-based web applications. And so we reached out to them and we said, what's your alternative? And I said, we don't have any alternative. We just code everything and it's a pain in the ass. And then we were like, okay.

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How much would you be willing to pay to have such a product? And we landed two customers willing to pay $1,000 per month. And then I said, all right, I guess we need to pivot. Or it was not a real pivot. It was more like a change in use case. Because people are still building websites with WeWeb, but not only anymore. They build their websites, web applications, and everything you can do with a front-end builder. Yeah. So that's the next big step where

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Mike Mahlkow (20:36)

Yeah.

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Mike Mahlkow (20:40)

Yes.

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Mike Mahlkow (20:44)

Yes. Got it.

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Okay. So basically what happened is number one, you were less shy about launching and then you just launched and they noticed, Hey, like we already have a product that is kind of working and people are bending it and people are using it in ways that we did not actually expect them to use it, but this is potentially the use case that is number one, more profitable for us. And number two also has like less established competition.

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Raphael - WeWeb (20:50)

that we took.

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Raphael - WeWeb (20:56)

Yeah.

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Raphael - WeWeb (21:08)

Exactly.

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Raphael - WeWeb (21:17)

And more value, more obvious value for the customer. Exactly, yeah. Yeah.

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Mike Mahlkow (21:19)

Yes, more obvious value. That makes sense. So you decided, okay, this sounds like a smart idea. Let's go more into web applications. So how was that transition period from you, from a product perspective? Because a web application needs a couple of different things in a website. Right? So how was the transition period, or maybe like one step before that, before we talk about that?

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Raphael - WeWeb (21:30)

Yeah.

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Raphael - WeWeb (21:38)

Of course, so much.

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Mike Mahlkow (21:44)

Was it an easy decision internally? Were all of you immediately on the same page or was it these classic late night, oh my God, I have no idea. And then two parties or three parties discussing different opinions. What was it like?

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Raphael - WeWeb (21:46)

Hmph.

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Raphael - WeWeb (21:57)

Yeah, it was a great defining moment for the company, I think. It happened over the course of one week. And so it's the end of YC. We're in March. We did YC from January to March, 2020, 2021, sorry. So we do YC, it's March. We need to pitch demo day and stuff, and then probably raise another round. And we're like, okay, we know that we don't have any traction. It's a very hard sell only for websites.

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Mike Mahlkow (22:01)

Mm-hmm.

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Mike Mahlkow (22:06)

Yes.

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Mm-hmm.

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Mm-hmm.

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Raphael - WeWeb (22:25)

And we have two options. Either we felt that we had traction for two different things. Either we do a marketing website builder, but for SEO purposes at scale. So building like thousands and thousands of web pages at scale that are highly, highly performant in a no-code fashion. Or we build a web application builder. And then I went, we are three co-founders, the three of us, Mark, Florian, and I, went to see the whole team and we're like.

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Mike Mahlkow (22:38)

Mm-hmm.

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Mike Mahlkow (22:44)

Mm-hmm.

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Raphael - WeWeb (22:54)

What are you guys excited at? And when talking about the marketing websites, all of them were like, I don't want to talk about that. I'm not excited. You know, like they were like from a feature perspective, development perspective, I don't think they were super enthusiastic. And even my CTO was like, if we have to do it, I'll do it. But you know what I mean? It was so funny.

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Mike Mahlkow (23:02)

Yeah.

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Mike Mahlkow (23:07)

Mm.

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Mike Mahlkow (23:13)

That's such a CTO vibe. It's like, well, like maybe people are paying us a lot for it, but it doesn't sound interesting to build. Yes. Yeah.

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Raphael - WeWeb (23:19)

Exactly. And then, and for the web application builder, ideas were flourishing from everywhere. You know, like it was like everyone was so excited. Everyone had so many ideas. And then we're like, okay, so we need a team of passionate people. So let's pick that direction. And it was the right direction. First of all, it was much more exciting for us. And then secondly, it led us to where we are now, where we have traction and we have more clients with a little value. And then from a product perspective, what did it mean?

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Mike Mahlkow (23:26)

Mmm.

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Mike Mahlkow (23:30)

Mm-hmm.

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Mike Mahlkow (23:36)

Nice.

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Mike Mahlkow (23:39)

Mm-hmm.

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Raphael - WeWeb (23:49)

So we took those two customers I told you about that were ready to pay a thousand bucks per month and we brought them from basically the month of May to the month of November, and we built that transition with them, for them, for their specific use case, which was much better than doing it on our own basically. And in the meantime, we tried to have more input from different people, but those were the two main focus clients.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (23:53)

Mm-hmm.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (24:04)

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

‍

Yes.

‍

Raphael - WeWeb (24:17)

And we did launch again in December of that same year. And since then, we had traction. Basically, we did a second launch on product and hacker news. And since then, we found traction.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (23:56.9)

Nice.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (24:30)

Great. So it was only a very short like four year journey that basically happened overnight. Okay. But that was very helpful to understand. And I think it's very helpful for two different reasons. Like number one, it shows like a lot of persistence and resilience in your team. I think that you had this vision and you knew like...

‍

Raphael - WeWeb (24:35)

Exactly.

‍

Raphael - WeWeb (24:39)

Yeah, but uh...

‍

Mike Mahlkow (24:56)

you kind of knew which direction you wanted to go into broadly, like in terms of the like decoupled front end builder that is basically JavaScript components. And you just didn't find the right application for it. And usually, usually the, the common startup advice is start with a problem and not necessarily start with like part of the solution. And in your case, you had like some of the solution figured out and you knew that it was out there, but you just didn't fully know.

‍

Raphael - WeWeb (25:00)

Yeah.

‍

Raphael - WeWeb (25:05)

Yeah.

‍

Raphael - WeWeb (25:10)

You got it. Yeah.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (25:26)

Like where to apply it. And then it took you a little bit and it took you like some different attempts and then at some point you ended up. So I think that's, that's just like, like pretty cool to hear for everyone who wants to build their own company or who even is interested in we web. Right. Because like, if I'm thinking now about, okay, do I want to use we web for like future projects and then I have the choice between like, I don't know, like different teams potentially, and one team has been heads down grinding on this specific thing.

‍

Raphael - WeWeb (25:27)

Yeah.

‍

Raphael - WeWeb (25:37)

True.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (25:54)

for like such a long time, and now things are actually looking better, the likelihood that they are continuing that way if things are actually going well are much higher if they already had these challenges in the past.

‍

Raphael - WeWeb (25:56)

Yeah.

‍

Raphael - WeWeb (26:04)

Yeah, that's true. And the expertise we got along the way as well, because we spoke to so many customers. And it's actually very funny because now, like I told you, more people are still building websites with WeWeb. And now more and more people are actually asking, hey, are you guys about to focus on SEO at one point? And we are going to make it. And the funny part is that we already have the knowledge because we've been there. And so now it's just a question of...

‍

Mike Mahlkow (26:10)

Mm. Yes.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (26:18)

Yes.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (26:24)

Yeah.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (26:29)

Yes, yes.

‍

Raphael - WeWeb (26:32)

allocating the resources and the time to do this. But that's something we will do because the ultimate vision is to have that front-end builder agnostic to the type of projects you're building as long as you want to have a decoupled architecture and JavaScript-based output, basically.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (26:44)

Yes.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (26:51)

Nice. Yeah. And I think if I remember correctly, it was Quentin from your team who also mentioned that mobile projects are coming to WeWeb at some point next year as well, which is then going full circle back to the very first WeWeb year when you were building.

‍

Raphael - WeWeb (27:02)

True. Yeah.

‍

Raphael - WeWeb (27:07)

Man, thank you so much, I never thought about it. What? It's so true. Yeah, it's actually so true. It's so funny. Yeah. There you go. Yeah. Full circle.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (27:11)

Yeah. So you're actually going back to your roots as well, which is good to your full circle. Okay, so we basically have established where WeWeb is right now. So if I use my own words, it's production grade, scalable, secure web applications that have JavaScript as like its fundamental layer. That's what you're doing right now.

‍

Raphael - WeWeb (27:34)

Yeah, that's true. Yeah, exactly. The way I put it, usually, it's a no-code front-end builder for decoupled architecture. And the JavaScript part of it is sometimes not even a choice. Sometimes many users actually don't really look at that. They just trust us on the performance of the output. But not all of them. For some of them, it's very critical to understand that behind the curtains, everything is written in Vue.js.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (27:41)

Mm-hmm.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (27:50)

Hmm. That makes sense. Yeah.

‍

Yes.

‍

Raphael - WeWeb (28:03)

and that it's an open source JavaScript framework that everyone knows. And so, yeah, but...

‍

Mike Mahlkow (28:09)

We actually use VJS as well at Fastgen for most of our things. Yes. So, okay. So we've established where you are right now. I want to look a little into the future, but let's do that a bit later. And now that we've actually arrived at like the present day, more or less, let's talk a little bit about WeWeb itself. And let's start with the question now that we've established what it is. Who should use WeWeb? Like who is the, the prime target or who are people that should

‍

Raphael - WeWeb (28:12)

Already do you? Okay, cool. Nice.

‍

Raphael - WeWeb (28:20)

Yep.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (28:38)

say, okay, we were up to something that I should consider for my projects.

‍

Raphael - WeWeb (28:42)

Yeah. So you can think about it in two different ways. Then there's the type of companies and you can think about the size, the industry, and then there's the type of people. Um, with regards to the type of companies, we cover every, every sizes and every industry. So we are very agnostic to actually the type of companies we have, you know, the one-man agency using WeWeb, the one-man startup using WeWeb. And then we have.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (28:53)

Mm-hmm. Yes.

‍

Raphael - WeWeb (29:11)

PWC as a client, we have BNP, Carrefour, Crédit Agricole, Lapos. We have very large enterprise customers as well, Cisco as well as one of our customers, using our platform, which is great. And the interesting part is all of them, and then it brings me to the second thing, came the same way. Those guys who actually subscribed to WeWeb and started to use it are builders. And

‍

Mike Mahlkow (29:21)

Mm-hmm. Mm.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (29:33)

Mm-hmm.

‍

Raphael - WeWeb (29:41)

Then there's the type of builder. And in the no-code world, you have a different level of skills required to build with no-code platforms. And then you can start from really no skills at all. It's going to be easy, drag and drop. And if you are a friend with PowerPoint and Excel, you will find your way. And I would put in that category maybe stacker, software for the web app builders.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (30:01)

Mm-hmm.

‍

Raphael - WeWeb (30:08)

And I think those platforms are great for people who don't have much skills, but they want to build something that's going to be, you know, to build something fast and that's going to be functional. And then you have a level above this one in terms of skills required, where you will have people using bubble, for example, and for those type of people, you need to be tech savvy.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (30:20)

Mm-hmm.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (30:35)

Mm.

‍

Raphael - WeWeb (30:35)

You need to understand what's the backend, what's the frontend, what's an API call, what's HTML and CSS. What's JavaScript? You don't really need to actually know how to program and how to write that code, but you need to understand how this works. And so that's where WeWeb is positioned. So the type of users using WeWeb are usually tech savvy. They could be developers. They could be product people.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (30:40)

Mm-hmm.

‍

Raphael - WeWeb (31:05)

in product teams with a nice tech background or tech understanding, or we call them the citizen developers, people who actually got trained on what is tech and how everything in the tech works, but they just don't know how to code. Those people would usually be like the right users for WeWeb.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (31:12)

Mm-hmm.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (31:24)

Got it. And I assume, and maybe I'm incorrect, but I assume that makes go to market sometimes a bit more difficult because you have so many different people who could be a citizen developer. It could be an actual developer. It could be the head of marketing. Why not? It could be someone on the compliance team. It could be someone on the product team. So how do you think about reaching these people if you know the technical skill level they're at?

‍

Raphael - WeWeb (31:36)

Mm-hmm. Yep.

‍

Raphael - WeWeb (31:44)

Yep.

‍

Raphael - WeWeb (31:54)

Yeah.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (31:54)

but you don't necessarily know their role or maybe you know some roles that are more likely to be a fit, but like, how do you think about reaching those kinds of people?

‍

Raphael - WeWeb (31:57)

Yeah.

‍

Raphael - WeWeb (32:03)

Yeah, that's interesting. We figured that the one common thing our users have is a curiosity to learn, and they behave like developers. So they will go online, they will look up on forums, they will look at videos on YouTube, and they will trust their peers to do a good job in finding the right platform.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (32:12)

Mm-hmm. Mm.

‍

Raphael - WeWeb (32:27)

And they will reach out to their peers just to have their feedback on their experience with our platform and stuff. And so at the end of the day, it's mostly word of mouth, just like, just like, you know, react or Vue.js and these things, it's really like developer driven. It's really community driven growth. And that's how we, that's how we organize WeWeb. So we try to provide content that people can share or to help them understand what's our platform.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (32:38)

Mm-hmm.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (32:45)

Yeah.

‍

Raphael - WeWeb (32:56)

And then we just try to provide the best user experience possible and the best experience with our platform possible to our users, because we know that then they will tell their friends. Then they will engage in forums and talk about it. And then suddenly, people will be interested in WeWeb and they will go and sign up. That's also one thing very interesting that I said at the beginning. People subscribing to WeWeb are usually, 95% of the time, the builders.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (33:24)

Hmm.

‍

Raphael - WeWeb (33:24)

So they are those people who will land on our landing page and actually click the button, sign up, and end up in the editor and try things out. And it's very different than when you sell B2B SaaS for the HR team. Sometimes it's just the CFO who's going to buy it. And he will look at the different set of features, but he will be more interested into the value and then the financial proposal. Why are our

‍

Mike Mahlkow (33:33)

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (33:41)

Mm-hmm.

‍

Raphael - WeWeb (33:53)

For buying, we have actually the people using it, and I think it makes a whole different.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (33:56)

Yeah.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (33:59)

Definitely. Yeah. It definitely makes it easier if you can market and sell to the same people, because you can tell the same story, right? You don't need to invent one story for the buyer and one story for the user. You can basically just repeat, repeat what it is that actually makes you great at what you want to accomplish. And I think that's a good part to talk a little bit more about one thing that we kind of touched upon that I always find extremely interesting with these kinds of platforms.

‍

Raphael - WeWeb (34:06)

Yeah.

‍

Yeah.

‍

Raphael - WeWeb (34:17)

Yep.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (34:29)

namely product roadmap and deciding what is part of the product roadmap or not. Because I'm, I'm assuming, and you already mentioned it, you're being pulled in so many different directions. Some people want SEO, some people want mobile. There's like a hundred other things that you could add because web applications are basically endless, right? You can build so many different things. So how do you make internal decisions of what you should build next?

‍

Raphael - WeWeb (34:39)

course.

‍

Raphael - WeWeb (34:49)

Yeah.

‍

Raphael - WeWeb (34:55)

Yeah. So I think the first thing is we always go back to the philosophy of that strategic paper we wrote in 2019 of being a decoupled front end builder, because like that's our instinct and gut feeling tells us that this is what the market wants. And it started as being the instinct and gut feeling, but now it's the market telling us. And so, you know, very often people are asking us, are you guys, you know, will you guys integrate?

‍

Mike Mahlkow (35:07)

Mm-hmm.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (35:12)

Mm-hmm.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (35:17)

Mm-hmm.

‍

Raphael - WeWeb (35:24)

a backend in WeWeb. And we were like, no, because it's a whole different product and it means defocus and it means not being aligned with our vision. And so, but we are going to build the best integrations with those guys, you know, that's the feeling. So that's one, and thanks to this, we are making a lot of decisions. We're telling a lot of no's basically because we always follow this one pass. Yeah, we want to be like a

‍

Mike Mahlkow (35:38)

Mm.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (35:50)

Yeah, it's important.

‍

Raphael - WeWeb (35:54)

decoupled front-end builder for any type of project. And then we are going one step at a time. So that's why mobile PWAs came late and will come late to the party. It's going to be Q1 next year, but it's already two years that we are building that web application builder. And so first, we want to nail one type of products, of digital products, that you can output.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (35:58)

Mm-hmm.

‍

Raphael - WeWeb (36:23)

And then we'll expand to different others. SEO is also something we talked about since three years now. And so we are not bad at it, but we are not amazing at it. But that's something that's going to change when we decide to focus on it. So the next focus in terms of typology of product will be PWA. And then it's going to be probably SEO. But we still need to decide. And it's going to be decided only when we are sure that we are going to be able to do it.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (36:31)

Mm.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (36:37)

Mm-hmm.

‍

Raphael - WeWeb (36:52)

very good at web apps and very good at PWAs.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (36:55)

Got it. Okay, so you basically use the original framework and the like founding document, I almost like founding document of modern WeWeb at least, almost like your constitution, your internal constitution at WeWeb and you go back to that. That's actually, I think that's great because it just forces alignment internally, right? If you have this like constitution like document and you can always just go back to it and say, this is what we decided.

‍

Raphael - WeWeb (37:06)

Nice, yeah, exactly. Yeah.

‍

Raphael - WeWeb (37:17)

Yep.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (37:24)

I mean, maybe at some point you might need to change a couple of things about it because the world changes and you might need to tweak it a bit, but having this underlying just foundational alignment between everyone in the company is I assume very helpful when it comes to making decisions because you can just cross off some things that otherwise would be a longer conversation.

‍

Raphael - WeWeb (37:27)

Of course.

‍

Raphael - WeWeb (37:36)

Yeah.

‍

Raphael - WeWeb (37:39)

Yeah.

‍

Raphael - WeWeb (37:44)

Yeah, it's our compass. You know, it's the original direction that we decided to take. And we know it's going to take 10, 15 years, 20, I don't know. But that's the direction. And that's what we want to provide to the world, you know, in the web world. That's the value that we want to build. And we think we are, you know, it's just the beginning of the journey. But we are well on the way to actually provide a lot of value in this area.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (37:47)

Yes.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (37:58)

Mm-hmm.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (38:09)

Nice. And then you mentioned trust already at some point. And I think trust is so important for people that are trying out a new platform and just being sure that what you can build is possible, being sure that it, it fulfills the purpose that you get help if you need help. And some of it is just delivering, but it's also about how do you convey that trust to people, right?

‍

Raphael - WeWeb (38:30)

Yeah.

‍

Raphael - WeWeb (38:38)

Yeah.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (38:38)

And we web is very community focused, as you mentioned, but tell me a little more about what you're doing to convey that trust, that people can trust in WeWeb to the outside.

‍

Raphael - WeWeb (38:49)

Yeah, I think it happens really on a daily basis in the little details of how we manage the company and the relationship to users. When the user has an issue, we try to reply. Of course, we could be better. You know, it's all about allocating resources and having enough resources available for all the users. But, you know, it happens so many times that, you know,

‍

Mike Mahlkow (39:16)

Mm.

‍

Raphael - WeWeb (39:18)

Some users just reach out and he's like, I don't know what happened, but I lost my work. And for us it's like, whoa, big alert, everyone stops. We need this guy to find his work back. And many times we figure that it was not our fault. The guy just lost his work out of some misclick or anything. But then in the end it's our fault because it shouldn't have happened from a UX perspective. And then we are learning from this. So it's just one example. I have many others, but you know.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (39:34)

Yeah.

‍

Raphael - WeWeb (39:47)

I don't know, just people asking for some help, for some things that for us seems very trivial, but we are still going to help them or direct them to the right resources. So yeah, I think it's trying to be available and also trying to be accountable and never letting the user down, especially when he's in trouble. Like, my application, I can't publish, I lost it. My production is down. And so.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (39:56)

Mm.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (40:02)

Mm-hmm.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (40:11)

Yeah.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (40:14)

Hmm.

‍

Raphael - WeWeb (40:15)

We try to be very, very reactive. So we have those priorities. Behind the curtains, we have those priorities. And level one is production problem. The work has been lost, and someone cannot publish. This is level one. And level one means whatever you're doing, you just stop. And you just answer to customer and make sure that he is happy again. And it doesn't even mean to be a customer. It can be just a user, a non-paying user. And so you can't.

‍

We'll try to provide the same level of assistance for that type of problems, whoever the customer is. And then I think people talk, and then again, coming back to word of mouth, and people will be like, well, I can talk to the guys at WeWeb, and they were kind enough to help me, although I know they are so busy with so many other things. So I trust them to continue helping me in that sort. So that's for the.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (40:51)

Got it.

‍

Raphael - WeWeb (41:11)

I would say user relationship. And then the other part is like you said, shipping, you know, like people are asking for things you, you try and commit, you say, okay, I'll try to deliver it to you, you know, next quarter and, and you make sure you actually do it. And you don't stop the very.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (40:44.7)

Hmm.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (41:28)

Yeah, this is, this is one of our favorite things. Just, okay, you need this feature. We'll give it to you at that point and then just try to ship it as fast as possible. And even there, sometimes it's expectation management because if they want like a very specific, weird integration that no one else ever wants, and it's a very, very long time to actually build, then, then you need to, like, you can help them like find a workaround.

‍

Raphael - WeWeb (41:38)

Yeah.

‍

Raphael - WeWeb (41:23.5)

Yeah.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (41:56)

But sometimes it's literally just, OK, this feature, it makes a lot of sense. We just ship it as fast as possible, which is actually a great transition to the next question that I wanted to ask you, because product velocity is super important. It is one of the key things that keeps the community engaged, that also just shows that you move forward. Because as we've alluded to earlier, there's so many things that could be built and so many things that could make a platform better. So the short version of the question

‍

Raphael - WeWeb (42:01)

Yeah, exactly.

‍

Raphael - WeWeb (42:08)

Yeah.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (42:26)

How do you make sure that WeWeb ships fast?

‍

Raphael - WeWeb (42:29)

Yeah.

‍

Raphael - WeWeb (42:34)

I think the first thing is the quality of the product itself and how it's architectured. So that's something that doesn't have to do with anything that the user sees. But it's actually, if your product is a noodle plate, you're screwed. And I'm telling this because I lived it. Our product used to be a noodle plate, and it was terrible, and we were so slow, and it was awful.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (42:12.9)

Mm-hmm.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (42:46)

Mm.

‍

Raphael - WeWeb (43:02)

And then we had someone who basically came and saved our life. Her name is Aurélie. She still works for us right now. She's an amazing developer and she has that structure in mind. And she helped us structure our product so that it would become more nimble and much more easy to actually update and change. And so Aurélie, if you listen to us, thank you. And yeah, she did a fantastic job to provide this culture because eventually it's a culture.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (43:08)

Mm-hmm.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (43:32)

Mm-hmm.

‍

Raphael - WeWeb (43:32)

within the tech team. And the tech team obviously adopted it with pleasure. And it took us about six months to kind of pivot the infrastructure, if I can say, to become much more agile and nimble. And from a day to another, then the velocity increased by 10 fold. It was absolutely amazing. And so yeah, that would be my first.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (43:46)

Mm-hmm.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (43:54)

Hmm. Yeah.

‍

Raphael - WeWeb (43:58)

So first, ship your MVP and stuff. It can be dirty. You don't care. But once some of the parts you know they will stay, make sure they are not like a noodle plate, because otherwise you will pay it later, especially because velocity is very important for the users. And we understand them. And if it's important for the users, then it's the most important thing for you as a startup. So I would say that's the first one. And then the second, and it's probably related, but it's the second.

‍

Again, I think it's a question of culture. And so sometimes don't spend too much time trying to figure out, write the best product ticket and have all the designs ready and stuff. Just build something, ship it, put it in the hands of the customer, get their feedback and make it better on the way. And it doesn't mean that behind the curtains your code is disgusting. It means that you didn't spend too much time trying to design something that's.

‍

actually not going to hit the target. Make your best guess, build it, put it in the hands of the customers, and then iterate with them. And I think that's how you keep a nice speed.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (44:57)

Hmm.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (45:10)

Got it. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me. And so it's architecture. And I think many people underestimate architecture. So when we started Fastgen, the first month we worked on Fastgen, like the whole team didn't write, I don't want to say a single line of code. There was probably like, we wrote a couple lines of code, but the only thing that mattered back then was architecture, architecture. Just because we knew if we got this wrong,

‍

Raphael - WeWeb (45:36)

Interesting.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (45:40)

It would slow us down so much. So the very first thing that we did when we started like back in the day was just think about architecture and then once we had that figured out, then we actually started to building, uh, started to build. And I think that was like, it felt really slow back then in the very early days, right? Because we're like, Oh my God, like we have, like, we want to get like the beta, like the private beta life at that point. And we haven't even started shipping. But it was such a.

‍

Raphael - WeWeb (45:42)

Very interesting.

‍

Raphael - WeWeb (45:50)

Thank you.

‍

Raphael - WeWeb (45:54)

Very nice.

‍

Raphael - WeWeb (45:59)

Yeah.

‍

Raphael - WeWeb (46:06)

Of course.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (46:10)

good decision because it now makes us much faster. And I think we benefit from it a lot. And there's always things that you sometimes have to like adapt and demand, et cetera, but it definitely helped us. And it makes a lot of sense that you said, like since you shifted the architecture, it makes you faster. And the second part, I also find interesting because, and I wanna be clear because I think that is what you said. What you say is not ship a bad feature. What you say is,

‍

Raphael - WeWeb (46:21)

Sure.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (46:39)

ship a feature that actually solves the problem for the user, right? And then you can optimize around that afterwards. So the problem needs to be solved and then everything else, just optimize it, iterate and make sure that they can, they can break through that barrier and that they can actually continue working with this. That, that, that makes a lot of sense to me as well, because you can spend a lot of time just on like some last pixels and then this animation here and that animation. And you can always do that in polishing afterwards, but

‍

Raphael - WeWeb (46:46)

Exactly. Yep.

‍

Raphael - WeWeb (46:51)

Yeah.

‍

Raphael - WeWeb (46:57)

Yeah.

‍

Raphael - WeWeb (47:06)

Yeah.

‍

Mike Mahlkow (47:07)

Usually the user cares more about, can I do this? Or does this work? At least on the very, very first level. So yeah, that makes sense to me as well.

‍

Raphael - WeWeb (47:11)

Yeah.

‍

Raphael - WeWeb (47:16)

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And about the first part, like how did you anticipate this? Is this because you learned it the hard way before? Or?

‍

Mike Mahlkow (47:25)

I mean, this is the second startup we're building. So basically in the last company we were building, we were building a Fintech. We raised like a lot of money because we are investing in students all over the country, like a hundred plus million dollars. We like move millions of dollars around every week and we're building all these different products internally. And the issue that we ran into was, okay, we need to ship this faster and this fast and this fast. And then sometimes we were just blocked by things that we decided pretty early on. So we just knew this time.

‍

Raphael - WeWeb (47:37)

Amazing.

‍

Raphael - WeWeb (47:51)

Uh huh, yeah.

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Mike Mahlkow (47:54)

we really needed to like focus on the structure first before we can start. And we also talked to one or two of our like advisors back then, or just people we knew, like the CTO of Plaid was someone we talked to a lot about. And also like some other like CTO of like pretty big companies that scaled with them. The issue is that you have then is we don't need like Plaid level scale right now, right?

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Raphael - WeWeb (48:00)

Great.

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Raphael - WeWeb (48:08)

Nice.

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Raphael - WeWeb (48:21)

Sure. Yeah, you need to.

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Mike Mahlkow (48:22)

So we don't need like 10 billion. So you need to like kind of, you need to find something in between where we don't need to change our architecture at any point soon. If we ever are, and I hope at some point we will be a $10 billion company, then we will have to change some things about the architecture. But we can worry about that in the future. In the interest of time, I think I only have one or two questions left for you. That was already very exciting. Let's talk a little bit about the future. I promised it earlier.

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Raphael - WeWeb (48:28)

Yeah.

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Raphael - WeWeb (48:32)

Yeah.

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Raphael - WeWeb (48:40)

Probably, yeah. Exactly. Nice.

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Mike Mahlkow (48:52)

And maybe you can give people a little bit of a sneak peek. You talked a little bit about what's coming, but I think there's like a couple of more things that are also coming in terms of like web applications related, what are the things that you're most excited about in the next, like let's say six months or something like that.

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Raphael - WeWeb (49:08)

Yeah. The first thing I'm most excited about is on Wednesday, we'll have a very important release. And that very important release is what we call reusable components or components. And it's going to be you will have components that are going to be instances with a parent-child logic. It seems trivial and obvious that we should have that since many, many months, right? But we didn't actually need it to arrive to the scale we are at right now.

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Mike Mahlkow (49:19)

Mm-hmm.

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Mike Mahlkow (49:24)

Hmm. Mm-hmm.

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Raphael - WeWeb (49:35)

But now it's obvious that we should build it. Many of our users are asking for it, and we know that it's gonna help them ship faster, which is in the end our mission. Our mission is to help users ship faster. We did many things to help them until now, and I think the next big thing was this one. And this one is going to open up the second big thing, which is the marketplace. And so we'll have...

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Mike Mahlkow (49:40)

Mm-hmm.

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Raphael - WeWeb (50:02)

many of our users actually building templates, UI kits, and plugins for our customers, just like Bubble has, for example, today, or Webflow, or WordPress. And if you think about the community-driven growth, we think it makes a lot of sense to actually open that marketplace, but we needed the reusable components first, because we wanted it to be as scalable and maintainable in time as possible.

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Mike Mahlkow (50:11)

Mm-hmm. Yes.

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Mike Mahlkow (50:23)

Yes.

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Raphael - WeWeb (50:30)

And so the marketplace will be happening at the beginning of Q1 next year. We already started to kind of draft it and talk about it with customers and users, but we're going to actually deliver it, hopefully in January, the first version, might be early February, we'll see. It's gonna depend on, but it's gonna be early Q1 basically. Then the next thing is gonna be PWA, so mobile applications.

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And we are going to figure out a way, because it exists in the dev world, to actually wrap those PWAs to deploy them in one click on stores and make them almost native mobile applications. Everybody is excited about this at WeWeb. All the users are excited about this. Thank you. I'm looking forward to see what people will build here. That's going to be very nice. So that's going to be for Q1.

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Mike Mahlkow (51:09)

Mmm.

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Mike Mahlkow (51:13)

Nice.

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Mike Mahlkow (51:19)

I'm excited about it. That sounds pretty cool.

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Raphael - WeWeb (51:27)

as well. And then when Marketplace, PWAs, all of this is well on the way, I know that in Q2, it's going to be improve those two, improve Marketplace, improve PWA, keep improving the integrations we have with different backends, that type of things. So that's going to be Q2. And in between, we are going to add a lot of AI in WeWeb. We already started.

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Mike Mahlkow (51:39)

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

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Mike Mahlkow (51:44)

Hmm.

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Mike Mahlkow (51:54)

Mm-hmm.

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Raphael - WeWeb (51:56)

And it's actually so exciting what you can do with AI in platforms like ours. Because again, if the mission is help customers, help users just deliver digital products faster, then AI is going to definitely help. And I think the combination of AI and no code is a fantastic combination. Because if you think about it, you can prompt the AI in WeWeb

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Mike Mahlkow (51:59)

Hmm. Yeah.

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Mike Mahlkow (52:10)

Mm-hmm.

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Raphael - WeWeb (52:25)

you build a workflow. And once the workflow is built, maybe 70% of the time it's going to be good. But 30% of the time, something will not be working. But you will have access to the visual builder just to understand what's not working. You won't have to go into the code to actually fix it. And that's going to be amazing. Another great thing if you think about using AI to build your interfaces, because that's going to happen in WeWeb as well, you will prompt something.

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Mike Mahlkow (52:51)

Yeah.

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Raphael - WeWeb (52:53)

and it will create a nice, beautiful interface for you. Most probably, maybe only 30% of the time will you be happy. But then if you want to change the color of a button, you will be able to do it through the interface. And that's going to be much faster than prompting again the AI to just change the button color from blue to green. You know what I mean? And that's why we're thinking that combining AI with the power of no code is going to help accelerate even more.

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Mike Mahlkow (53:14)

Yes.

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Raphael - WeWeb (53:24)

shipping digital products. So that's something also I'm very excited to work on. And we are going to hire AI specialists, probably one or two. And those people will just be 100% of their time dedicated on improving the WeWeb co-pilot and the WeWeb AI integrated in WeWeb. We are going to train our own models, I think most probably. And there might be a way to bridge the gap between Figma and all the design platforms.

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Mike Mahlkow (53:46)

Mm-hmm.

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Raphael - WeWeb (53:53)

and a platform like ours, WeWeb, through AI as well. Like, using the vision, maybe you can get all of your Figma designs properly put into WeWeb, and then you can add the logic, and then you can go in production. And then you would again accelerate from design to production. So it might seem that I'm going all over the place here, but I think there is a nice silver lining. And it's just step by step, we'll get there. And that's going to take.

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Mike Mahlkow (53:55)

Hmm.

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Raphael - WeWeb (54:21)

all of the 2024 and probably towards the end of 2024, we hopefully will have the time to focus on all of those SEO capabilities. And the biggest one will be basically SSR. So if you're familiar with it, so it's server-side rendering of the pages. Today is not the case in WeWeb, but there might be a way that we can achieve this and that you would be able to select a set of pages and server-side render them.

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Mike Mahlkow (54:35)

Yeah.

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Mm-hmm.

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Raphael - WeWeb (54:48)

And then for the SEO, you will have top-notch performances. But that's going to be for the end of the year, I think.

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Mike Mahlkow (54:56)

Got it. So lots of exciting stuff coming, lots of different areas, lots of stuff to ship as well. So I'm excited about it. I like that you think that far ahead. And yeah, I'm overall also excited about how many cool things people are already building with WeWeb and Fastgen on our end. We definitely see it coming up more and more often, that people are excited about WeWeb.

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Raphael - WeWeb (54:58)

Yeah.

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Raphael - WeWeb (55:02)

Yeah.

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Thanks.

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Raphael - WeWeb (55:14)

Yeah, that's great.

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Mike Mahlkow (55:18)

But I think we're out of time. So it was great to have you on. We could go on for like multiple more hours. So maybe we just do another one at some point next year once the new features are out and then we'll do a recap. But thank you for calling in. And it was a pleasure to have you on. Everyone weweb.io if you want a web application, a no code web application builder that makes you much faster. I heard a lot of things were about speed today.

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Raphael - WeWeb (55:24)

Absolutely, yeah.

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Raphael - WeWeb (55:35)

Thank you so much for having me.

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Mike Mahlkow (55:46)

and that still gives you production grade applications, then you should check it out. Thanks for being here.

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Raphael - WeWeb (55:46)

Sure.

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Raphael - WeWeb (55:50)

Thank you so much, Mike.