hey everyone, happy to answer any questions you have! worth pointing out that we've also launched a new home page (check out the video, pretty fun), we have a pretty kick-ass new eCommerce platform we launched last Nov, and we're also launching some pretty awesome new themes this week -- you can see two previews here:<p><a href="http://purplehazetheme.weebly.com/" rel="nofollow">http://purplehazetheme.weebly.com/</a>
<a href="http://collectiontheme.weebly.com/" rel="nofollow">http://collectiontheme.weebly.com/</a>
It's interesting how some internet startup concepts seem to keep coming back. Website building tools have gone through a number of generations, but are still relevant now. Similarly Facebook was the second wave of social networking sites. I recently saw a "pets.com" clone launching in South Africa (they got funding from Google's local seed fund)!<p>Marc Andreessen's aggressive stance is that the dot.com bubble was basically a "mistake". If that's correct, how would one decide that an "old" idea's time has come?<p><a href="http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2012/11/01/marc-andreessen-the-dot-com-bust-was-basically-a-mistake/" rel="nofollow">http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2012/11/01/marc-andreess...</a>
There were and are a lot of web building sites besides Weebly, but weebly is the cleanest for its price by far. When I talk with small business owners I always recommend Weebly (unless I think they can do a lot of e-Commerce, in which case I recommend shopify). Weebly is the least frustrating and out of the box prettiest of the free web options.
drusenko was the first speaker during my YC batch. He had one of the more profound startup slides I've seen: an exponential growth curve with minor "blips" that correlated to tech crunch articles, but never affected Weebly's trajectory.<p>I didn't necessarily "get it" at first, but after 2 years of watching startups of my batch mates and friends succeed or fail, I see any <i>focus</i> on press as a negative signal.<p>A good team builds a good product. A good product begets success. Success begets news coverage. These things don't work in reverse.<p>And Weebly is a <i>great</i> product. A few years ago after coding a web app for a non-profit, I considered building a service to do that for small orgs. But then I chanced upon 1 year old weebly, and was like never mind.<p>Anyway, congrats, and hope to see even more!
It's refreshing to see a company like Weebly that is able to be successful and profitable without having to go down the "MULTI-BILLION DOLLAR UNICORN OR BUST" path that seems to be almost mandated by VCs nowadays.<p>It's something the guys at 37Signals preach as well - Better to be a "lifestyle business" that's profitable, makes millions of dollars in profit per year, and may take a decade or two to reach a $1 billion valuation, than to have a multi-billion dollar valuation a few years in (via large growth funding rounds) but not make a cent of profit for the first decade of your existence, all the while having your ownership of the business reduced down to 5% or whatever.
I've never used a site like Weebly, Wix, or Shopify, though I have seen Squarespace's interface when someone was building a site one time and my dad used Weebly after I recommended it to him (seemed easy to use).<p>I'm curious their main sources of customer acquisition. I assume a lot of its word-of-mouth and organic, but I'm curious how much marketing they do. Squarespace has been huge in the podcast space doing advertising and did that big Super Bowl ad splash. Wix seems to have been around for a while so I see many of their out-dated designed sites.<p>Edit: I did just get retargeted via Facebook ads exchange after visiting Weebly's site, so they are doing at least some advertising :)
<i>...now hosts more than 20 million sites that are seen by 175 million visitors every month.</i><p>With all the caveats about average numbers, it seems that on average each site is visited by only 8 visitors per month. Are those numbers correct?
I built my first website with Weebly, way back in 2010. They are one of the only ones doing it right. The clean templates, drag-and-drop features, and no-nonsense hosting is amazing. When you don't want to code a website and want to build it quick, Weebly is somewhat better than even WordPress, as long as you don't need to use a lot of plugins.
We made a basic weebly site for our small home daycare provider. Then she took it over, it was really easy for her and the site looks great. I'm very impressed with weebly.
What Weebly understands (that many website builders don't) is that a "blank canvas" is not the correct metaphor for building a website.<p>Instead a website needs structured sections (such as navigation, logo, footer etc.) as well as "blank canvas" areas (such as the body of the content).<p>They always seem to nail this tension.<p>Congratulations to David and Weebly- they consistently ship amazing features!<p>PS - My background: I've written in-depth reviews of 40+ website builders.
Weebly is the best marketing website builder on the planet for non-technical users, not surprised to see it's also growing quickly. I still use Wordpress (WPEngine) for my company, but it's really overkill for your average small or local business, unless the owner is into computers and the internet.<p>I sometimes do pro bono websites for local businesses I run into. I used to do Google AppEngine sites, but then I switched to Weebly for the last one I did (for my daycare lady). It was super-easy both for me to set up, and then when I handed it off to her, she was able to edit it and make it really what she wanted. Between a Weebly site, and getting the existing customers to leave Yelp reviews, she ended up getting a lot of new kids from the online presence.
I really love using Weebly for helping friends and family who are non-technical.<p>Getting a basic website up is simple. To contrast I tried other website builders and weebly was the most functional and intuitive for me.<p>Great job David and team!
Does anyone know if there's a way to hire a person or company to build a custom weebly template?<p>I think weebly offered this service themselves a few years ago but now I can't seem to find the option.
It's amazing to realize that even a monster success like Weebly (which among other things has made each of its founders vastly wealthy) is basically a roundoff error on Dropbox + Airbnb ($455m/($10b + $10b) = 0.02275).
I am trying to build a CMS which focuses on data architecture and powerful page generation using javascript on the server <a href="http://getsimplesite.com/" rel="nofollow">http://getsimplesite.com/</a> . It's still in beta though.