Nexo is buying Vauld, marking more DeFi consolidation

5

Webflow

Power Score: 39.51

Momentum Score: 71.76 (3)

HQ: San Francisco, CA

CEO: Vlad Magdalin

On Power

While many of the companies on this list have succeeded by offering broad-based tools that target dozens of use cases, Webflow has been more successful by focusing on no-code tools that make it easier for businesses to design and launch websites. Its drag-and-drop offering has been especially popular with small and medium sized businesses that want to launch a website but don’t want to hire a developer to do it for them. The company’s most-recent funding round a year ago saw it exceed a $2 billion valuation, and Webflow announced at that time that the company was cash flow-positive for 2020. With the cash injection though, the company at the time said that the focus would be on the pace of hiring, and seemingly delivered on that mission, expanding the workforce by nearly 70% in the last 12 months.

On Disruption

“What you see is what you get” (WYSIWYG) web tools have been popular for years and Wordpress dominates the web development space for those willing to add custom HTML to drag-and-drop offerings, but Webflow has dominated by offering more extensive customizations than typical WYSIWYG competitors while still requiring no coding, unlike Wordpress. This has helped it begin to target the larger enterprise market, which often requires extensive customization to website templates. The strategy has played out in two of the company’s most recent product launches , an offering called “Logic,” which gives Webflow users greater access to custom workflow automations, and “Memberships,” which expands logged-in experiences.

Tea Leaves

While Webflow’s been successful in the SMB market, it has yet to be broadly adopted by larger enterprises, which take up a larger portion of the potential no-code market. As of January 2021, enterprise customers were only about 5% of the company’s revenue , but its contract sizes with larger companies were “ orders of magnitude ” larger than those with smaller ones. That said, the company isn’t without any enterprise-level customers, counting Zendesk and Dell as users. Looking ahead, the company will likely be focused on courting more enterprise clients to its roster, which the company’s emphasis on its new “collaboration” features announced in November highlight. And from a more-philosophical perspective, CEO Vlad Magdalin has noted that he thinks companies with full teams of developers can still learn something from no-code platforms, hinting that the company’s broader view is that democratization of development is still in the early stages.

They Said It

“I want to see more power in the hands of individuals. It shouldn't take an entire company of people to create any product or get an idea off the ground. There are so many people who want to create an app, a solution, a product or service, a social network, or whatever it may be. And because the barrier to entry is so high, you have to form a company. You have to find developers or go to a bootcamp to learn that stuff. And it takes months, if not years, to build a set of skills and a team of people to make that dream a reality.” – CEO Vlad Magdalin in a 2019 interview

Return to the Low-Code/No-Code Power Index here .