Dreamforce 2024 | Craig Mestel | WebFlow

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Craig Mestel

Chief Financial Officer

Webflow

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play_circle_outline Maximizing Efficiency: Webflow's Salesforce Integration and Target Customer Base

play_circle_outline Webflow Launches New Partner Program for Operational Efficiency, Featuring Training, Localization, and Compliance Measures

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Craig Mestel | WebFlow

Craig Mestel

Chief Financial Officer Webflow

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>> Hello and welcome back to Dreamforce 2024 from beautiful San Francisco. We're here in the NYSE offices where we've built out a studio to break in on the information that's going on, looking at the ecosystem and how it's really working together. Rob Streche joined by Christophe Bertrand, who's a principal analyst with the Cube Research. And Craig Mestel is the CFO of Webflow. Thanks and welcome on board.

Craig Mestel

>> Oh, thanks so much for having me. It's great to be here.

>> Yeah. So I've known of Webflow, so I find it very interesting. You're the CFO. What has that journey been like to really be the CFO of something like Webflow and what is Webflow, for those who don't know who Webflow is? What is Webflow about?

Craig Mestel

>> Absolutely. So like I said, Craig Mestel, I'm the CFO here at Webflow. Prior to Webflow, was at a set of technology companies that were all in high growth mode. So companies like Google, Upwork and GitLab. And while I was there, I was in executive leadership finance positions, but the other thing that was unique about my background is I also had the opportunity to be CMO for a year at GitLab. So what that does is that provides me with the insight into what our buyers here at Webflow actually need to know. So it really sets me up for success from that point of view. I chose to come to Webflow for really three reasons. The product is really, really great. It is an awesome product, really easy to use. It's a platform that allows users to design, build, and optimize their websites, and I got certified on that product. Second, I believe we have a huge market opportunity to go after with our customers, and that's really exciting. And third, I think the company is great from a culture and people's perspective.

Christophe Bertrand

>> Yeah. Well, Craig, you mentioned you were a CMO, so let me double-click on that and ask you about the value proposition for Webflow, and if you could put this in the context of the work you do with Salesforce in general terms and maybe couple of use cases.

Craig Mestel

>> Yeah, absolutely. So marketing job's actually really hard. If you're a marketing leader today, you have to both be left-brained and right-brained. So it's gotten very data-driven. Also. You need to be creative. You have to be on brand. So marketers today have the challenge that they need to hit their revenue numbers all the time because they're being held accountable for that. And they need to do it with folks like me, the CFOs telling them they need to do that with less budget. From a pure Webflow perspective, marketers, they own the website, which is their most important asset. So consumers today require these digital experiences and these online experiences to be quite good and quite incredible. And even if you're selling B2B or B2C, you need those experiences to be fantastic. So marketers have that challenge. And where Webflow comes into that is these marketers are really struggling today with today's technology because they can't get their websites up-to-date as fast as they need to do it to hit their goals, both in terms of revenue and brand. So Webflow solves that problem for them.

Christophe Bertrand

>> Obviously, integration with CRM, lead capture, what type of businesses, what type of use cases do you serve? Are there some either limitations or are there some specific use cases you prefer?

Craig Mestel

>> Yeah, so for Webflow, we're at our best with companies that are services companies. So they want to use their website as that front door to educate their customers about what they do as a company, and then from that point of view, move them through a traditional marketing funnel, awareness and consideration. So Webflow works really, really great for that.

Craig Mestel

>> It would seem like you would tie into, because again, you're trying to bring customers through for your customers, obviously. And when you say services companies, what kind of size of companies or how many customers do you have, that kind of stuff. Who's that optimal customer?

Craig Mestel

>> Yeah, so the company has been around for 14 years. We have over 300,000 customers. We do really well with an SMB customer, but we also do really well with enterprise or top end of a mid-market customer as well. So our product, like I said, it's a platform. It allows our marketing teams to really take control of their destiny in terms of being able to use our visual first platform to update their website with extreme speed. Traditionally, if you were using other technology that's a little more complicated, you'd be a hundred percent reliant on developers to build that website. And here, like I said, the marketers can do it themselves visual first.

Craig Mestel

>> I would expect that, again, a lot of what people look at is also understanding and really they're learning from... You're getting a lot of community or word of mouth types of things where people are looking because it's a competitive market that you're in, how do you best help them understand what your value proposition is and what you can offer versus, say, your competition?

Craig Mestel

>> Yeah, absolutely. So when I look at the market, on one end, you have website builders and then the other end, we have what's called digital experience platforms. So on the website builders, they're easy to use, but they're usually more rigid, more templated, and very limited what you can do. On the other side, you have your digital experience platforms, which are very powerful, but are overly complex to use, usually need a lot of developers to maintain them. Webflow is the best of both worlds in that because while we're visual first, we still have the power that you can get from some of those other capabilities. So whether that's graphics, design, performance, and we also provide a set of APIs to allow companies to really extend their web experience.

Christophe Bertrand

>> So you mentioned it's essentially easy to use if you're a marketer. So do you need to be certified with Salesforce or what type of profiles marketer do you need? Because you need somebody who's going to be savvy enough to understand the visual components, understand the data piece as well. How does that all work out? And by the way, does that give these marketing organizations an operational efficiency advantage?

Craig Mestel

>> So it does, and we actually have a really large community of users. We've a community over 150 countries, people who are certified on our Webflow platform and marketing teams can also leverage a set of service providers and marketing agencies that are certified and do really, really well in terms of the build, design and optimization of websites. So we have a large community. It really sets us up for success, and it's something that's really exciting about Webflow.

Craig Mestel

>> It would seem that this also to what Christophe was saying, would help from a, those people who, like you talked about competition is some of its DIY and building all this infrastructure out yourself. But it would seem that, like you said, that API layer really simplifies how organizations are going to connect things like Salesforce and other products that they may be using. Is that a big advantage you see to your customers, is getting them up and running faster?

Craig Mestel

>> Yeah, it is. So some of our customers will just use the visual capabilities within the website platform, but for those who want to have the extensibility, we do have what we call our composable CMS, which is the core of our platform, and we have a set of APIs that people can use to go and access that data and information. And like I said, we have other APIs within our full platform where companies like Salesforce, we can have the CRM interlock.

Christophe Bertrand

>> How much do you do with GenAI because you probably have to talk about AI?

Craig Mestel

>> What an interview without AI.

Craig Mestel

>> We got almost all the way through it without asking.

Craig Mestel

>> I know.

Craig Mestel

>> We did pretty good.

Craig Mestel

>> So AI is a critical part to our company's strategy. And we have our upcoming Webflow conference on October 15th where we're going to be making some announcements about our AI strategy. Since I'm the CFO, not the CMO, I could put my hat on and flip that. I'll let our marketing team make those exciting announcements at the Webflow conference.

Craig Mestel

>> I'd say you're going to get kicked under the table next-

Craig Mestel

>> I can't.

Craig Mestel

>> Something like that if you went down. But no, I think again, it's when you start to look at all of the exciting people who are here, Dreamforce is a massive developer conference. It would seem that you help bridge that. And a lot of Salesforce's message to developers is simplicity. Do you find that that resonates with the people who are here for Salesforce as well?

Craig Mestel

>> I do. So I talked a lot about the fact that historically websites have been a hundred percent driven by web developers. Web developers actually love when Webflow comes into their organization. And the reason is because they get to work on the things that they love to do. So they get to do the growth hacking, working on integrations, playing with APIs, doing all that fun stuff, and the things that they don't like to do, such as updating content, changing fonts, they can leave that to the marketing teams when you have a platform like Webflow in place.

Craig Mestel

>> Sorry, go ahead.

Christophe Bertrand

>> I was going to say, so you're mentioning developers again now. So again, is that profile of the perfect user, somebody who's halfway between a developer and a marketer, or is there some sort of training maybe you provide for a marketer to get into more of the data structure and construct you really need to understand, not the API necessarily, but understanding what to use, how to use it?

Craig Mestel

>> So our mission is to bring web superpowers to everyone. That's the mission of Webflow, and that means everyone. So that includes a marketer who can use the visual experience to do that. It also means developers where they want to play and plug and play and work with our platform. We do provide training. We have a Webflow's University program, which is all available on our website and things like that. So we do have all of those things, and we have a certification program. So we have all that to really train our users.

Craig Mestel

>> One of the things that I think is really key to marketing, and you would know with your previous CMO had on, was that content is very dynamic. How do you aid people with that? Because it's not just throwing up a static website and was building websites in the 90s. And I remember hacking the HTML together and what, oh my God, going back and changing it out. How do you help people when they have very dynamic content that they want to deal with? Is that a big piece of what Webflow... I mean, it has the word flow in it, so I'm thinking maybe there might be something there.

Craig Mestel

>> Yeah, the number one value proposition for Webflow's platform is speed. And again, I mentioned this earlier, but at the core is our content management system or CMS. So for dynamic content, we have a visual-first CMS also, they said there's APIs in there as well. But you can really bring content into your website and keep it up to date, keep it fresh, and it allows you to move really, really... Webflow just helps whether you're marketing team, a web development team, you can move really, really fast by using Webflow for your website.

Christophe Bertrand

>> So I'd like to talk to the CFO for a second. Talk about compliance and governance. Obviously you will be doing more around AI, maybe GenAI, et cetera. But let's talk about where you at now with manipulation of data. How do you ensure that the data that you leverage on your website and or in your interactions with customers based on the platform, that those interactions are actually compliant?

Craig Mestel

>> So some of the compliance centers think about as a company, we're SOC two compliant, we comply with GDPR and things like that. The other thing within our enterprise capabilities or enterprise products is we have a set of controls and governance, audit, trail, those type of things that allow this flexibility of visual design. There's a lot of protection as well to ensure that all those changes that are made with such speed are done in what I'd say is a controlled way. So yeah, I think that we have really good privacy program, really, really, really good compliance program as part of it. And I think we give a lot of power to our customers.

Craig Mestel

>> You have a lot of customers, not a little customers.

Craig Mestel

>> A lot of customers, yeah.

Craig Mestel

>> When you look at it, are you around the world, all over the place? Is there a concentration of those customers or is it just all over the place, different languages and all of that?

Craig Mestel

>> Yeah, so we have customers all over the world, over 150 countries, like I said, and they're all there. We have a product that's called localization, which allows people to localize websites, which is also really, really important.

Craig Mestel

>> Yeah, big, huge.

Christophe Bertrand

>> And you mentioned agencies, so they are your channel essentially?

Craig Mestel

>> Correct? Yeah, they play a big part in our business. We have a great set of them who, we have over a thousand in our actual certified partner program, and we actually just launched a new partner program, which is very exciting, and we're looking to add more and more folks who want to build for Webflow.

Craig Mestel

>> Well, I think that that is a great place to leave this. Greg, I really appreciate you coming on board and really diving into this. It's been great. So let's do this again sometime.

Craig Mestel

>> Absolutely. Well, thanks for having me. Had a lot of fun. I'm really excited to work with y'all.

Craig Mestel

>> Well, thank you. And thank you for watching this episode of Dreamforce 2024. We're unpacking it from the NYSE's beautiful studio that we've built out here. Stay tuned for more with us this week.

Craig Mestel | WebFlow

search

>> Hello and welcome back to Dreamforce 2024 from beautiful San Francisco. We're here in the NYSE offices where we've built out a studio to break in on the information that's going on, looking at the ecosystem and how it's really working together. Rob Streche joined by Christophe Bertrand, who's a principal analyst with the Cube Research. And Craig Mestel is the CFO of Webflow. Thanks and welcome on board.

Craig Mestel

>> Oh, thanks so much for having me. It's great to be here.

>> Yeah. So I've known of Webflow, so I find it very interesting. You're the CFO. What has that journey been like to really be the CFO of something like Webflow and what is Webflow, for those who don't know who Webflow is? What is Webflow about?

Craig Mestel

>> Absolutely. So like I said, Craig Mestel, I'm the CFO here at Webflow. Prior to Webflow, was at a set of technology companies that were all in high growth mode. So companies like Google, Upwork and GitLab. And while I was there, I was in executive leadership finance positions, but the other thing that was unique about my background is I also had the opportunity to be CMO for a year at GitLab. So what that does is that provides me with the insight into what our buyers here at Webflow actually need to know. So it really sets me up for success from that point of view. I chose to come to Webflow for really three reasons. The product is really, really great. It is an awesome product, really easy to use. It's a platform that allows users to design, build, and optimize their websites, and I got certified on that product. Second, I believe we have a huge market opportunity to go after with our customers, and that's really exciting. And third, I think the company is great from a culture and people's perspective.

Christophe Bertrand

>> Yeah. Well, Craig, you mentioned you were a CMO, so let me double-click on that and ask you about the value proposition for Webflow, and if you could put this in the context of the work you do with Salesforce in general terms and maybe couple of use cases.

Craig Mestel

>> Yeah, absolutely. So marketing job's actually really hard. If you're a marketing leader today, you have to both be left-brained and right-brained. So it's gotten very data-driven. Also. You need to be creative. You have to be on brand. So marketers today have the challenge that they need to hit their revenue numbers all the time because they're being held accountable for that. And they need to do it with folks like me, the CFOs telling them they need to do that with less budget. From a pure Webflow perspective, marketers, they own the website, which is their most important asset. So consumers today require these digital experiences and these online experiences to be quite good and quite incredible. And even if you're selling B2B or B2C, you need those experiences to be fantastic. So marketers have that challenge. And where Webflow comes into that is these marketers are really struggling today with today's technology because they can't get their websites up-to-date as fast as they need to do it to hit their goals, both in terms of revenue and brand. So Webflow solves that problem for them.

Christophe Bertrand

>> Obviously, integration with CRM, lead capture, what type of businesses, what type of use cases do you serve? Are there some either limitations or are there some specific use cases you prefer?

Craig Mestel

>> Yeah, so for Webflow, we're at our best with companies that are services companies. So they want to use their website as that front door to educate their customers about what they do as a company, and then from that point of view, move them through a traditional marketing funnel, awareness and consideration. So Webflow works really, really great for that.

Craig Mestel

>> It would seem like you would tie into, because again, you're trying to bring customers through for your customers, obviously. And when you say services companies, what kind of size of companies or how many customers do you have, that kind of stuff. Who's that optimal customer?

Craig Mestel

>> Yeah, so the company has been around for 14 years. We have over 300,000 customers. We do really well with an SMB customer, but we also do really well with enterprise or top end of a mid-market customer as well. So our product, like I said, it's a platform. It allows our marketing teams to really take control of their destiny in terms of being able to use our visual first platform to update their website with extreme speed. Traditionally, if you were using other technology that's a little more complicated, you'd be a hundred percent reliant on developers to build that website. And here, like I said, the marketers can do it themselves visual first.

Craig Mestel

>> I would expect that, again, a lot of what people look at is also understanding and really they're learning from... You're getting a lot of community or word of mouth types of things where people are looking because it's a competitive market that you're in, how do you best help them understand what your value proposition is and what you can offer versus, say, your competition?

Craig Mestel

>> Yeah, absolutely. So when I look at the market, on one end, you have website builders and then the other end, we have what's called digital experience platforms. So on the website builders, they're easy to use, but they're usually more rigid, more templated, and very limited what you can do. On the other side, you have your digital experience platforms, which are very powerful, but are overly complex to use, usually need a lot of developers to maintain them. Webflow is the best of both worlds in that because while we're visual first, we still have the power that you can get from some of those other capabilities. So whether that's graphics, design, performance, and we also provide a set of APIs to allow companies to really extend their web experience.

Christophe Bertrand

>> So you mentioned it's essentially easy to use if you're a marketer. So do you need to be certified with Salesforce or what type of profiles marketer do you need? Because you need somebody who's going to be savvy enough to understand the visual components, understand the data piece as well. How does that all work out? And by the way, does that give these marketing organizations an operational efficiency advantage?

Craig Mestel

>> So it does, and we actually have a really large community of users. We've a community over 150 countries, people who are certified on our Webflow platform and marketing teams can also leverage a set of service providers and marketing agencies that are certified and do really, really well in terms of the build, design and optimization of websites. So we have a large community. It really sets us up for success, and it's something that's really exciting about Webflow.

Craig Mestel

>> It would seem that this also to what Christophe was saying, would help from a, those people who, like you talked about competition is some of its DIY and building all this infrastructure out yourself. But it would seem that, like you said, that API layer really simplifies how organizations are going to connect things like Salesforce and other products that they may be using. Is that a big advantage you see to your customers, is getting them up and running faster?

Craig Mestel

>> Yeah, it is. So some of our customers will just use the visual capabilities within the website platform, but for those who want to have the extensibility, we do have what we call our composable CMS, which is the core of our platform, and we have a set of APIs that people can use to go and access that data and information. And like I said, we have other APIs within our full platform where companies like Salesforce, we can have the CRM interlock.

Christophe Bertrand

>> How much do you do with GenAI because you probably have to talk about AI?

Craig Mestel

>> What an interview without AI.

Craig Mestel

>> We got almost all the way through it without asking.

Craig Mestel

>> I know.

Craig Mestel

>> We did pretty good.

Craig Mestel

>> So AI is a critical part to our company's strategy. And we have our upcoming Webflow conference on October 15th where we're going to be making some announcements about our AI strategy. Since I'm the CFO, not the CMO, I could put my hat on and flip that. I'll let our marketing team make those exciting announcements at the Webflow conference.

Craig Mestel

>> I'd say you're going to get kicked under the table next-

Craig Mestel

>> I can't.

Craig Mestel

>> Something like that if you went down. But no, I think again, it's when you start to look at all of the exciting people who are here, Dreamforce is a massive developer conference. It would seem that you help bridge that. And a lot of Salesforce's message to developers is simplicity. Do you find that that resonates with the people who are here for Salesforce as well?

Craig Mestel

>> I do. So I talked a lot about the fact that historically websites have been a hundred percent driven by web developers. Web developers actually love when Webflow comes into their organization. And the reason is because they get to work on the things that they love to do. So they get to do the growth hacking, working on integrations, playing with APIs, doing all that fun stuff, and the things that they don't like to do, such as updating content, changing fonts, they can leave that to the marketing teams when you have a platform like Webflow in place.

Craig Mestel

>> Sorry, go ahead.

Christophe Bertrand

>> I was going to say, so you're mentioning developers again now. So again, is that profile of the perfect user, somebody who's halfway between a developer and a marketer, or is there some sort of training maybe you provide for a marketer to get into more of the data structure and construct you really need to understand, not the API necessarily, but understanding what to use, how to use it?

Craig Mestel

>> So our mission is to bring web superpowers to everyone. That's the mission of Webflow, and that means everyone. So that includes a marketer who can use the visual experience to do that. It also means developers where they want to play and plug and play and work with our platform. We do provide training. We have a Webflow's University program, which is all available on our website and things like that. So we do have all of those things, and we have a certification program. So we have all that to really train our users.

Craig Mestel

>> One of the things that I think is really key to marketing, and you would know with your previous CMO had on, was that content is very dynamic. How do you aid people with that? Because it's not just throwing up a static website and was building websites in the 90s. And I remember hacking the HTML together and what, oh my God, going back and changing it out. How do you help people when they have very dynamic content that they want to deal with? Is that a big piece of what Webflow... I mean, it has the word flow in it, so I'm thinking maybe there might be something there.

Craig Mestel

>> Yeah, the number one value proposition for Webflow's platform is speed. And again, I mentioned this earlier, but at the core is our content management system or CMS. So for dynamic content, we have a visual-first CMS also, they said there's APIs in there as well. But you can really bring content into your website and keep it up to date, keep it fresh, and it allows you to move really, really... Webflow just helps whether you're marketing team, a web development team, you can move really, really fast by using Webflow for your website.

Christophe Bertrand

>> So I'd like to talk to the CFO for a second. Talk about compliance and governance. Obviously you will be doing more around AI, maybe GenAI, et cetera. But let's talk about where you at now with manipulation of data. How do you ensure that the data that you leverage on your website and or in your interactions with customers based on the platform, that those interactions are actually compliant?

Craig Mestel

>> So some of the compliance centers think about as a company, we're SOC two compliant, we comply with GDPR and things like that. The other thing within our enterprise capabilities or enterprise products is we have a set of controls and governance, audit, trail, those type of things that allow this flexibility of visual design. There's a lot of protection as well to ensure that all those changes that are made with such speed are done in what I'd say is a controlled way. So yeah, I think that we have really good privacy program, really, really, really good compliance program as part of it. And I think we give a lot of power to our customers.

Craig Mestel

>> You have a lot of customers, not a little customers.

Craig Mestel

>> A lot of customers, yeah.

Craig Mestel

>> When you look at it, are you around the world, all over the place? Is there a concentration of those customers or is it just all over the place, different languages and all of that?

Craig Mestel

>> Yeah, so we have customers all over the world, over 150 countries, like I said, and they're all there. We have a product that's called localization, which allows people to localize websites, which is also really, really important.

Craig Mestel

>> Yeah, big, huge.

Christophe Bertrand

>> And you mentioned agencies, so they are your channel essentially?

Craig Mestel

>> Correct? Yeah, they play a big part in our business. We have a great set of them who, we have over a thousand in our actual certified partner program, and we actually just launched a new partner program, which is very exciting, and we're looking to add more and more folks who want to build for Webflow.

Craig Mestel

>> Well, I think that that is a great place to leave this. Greg, I really appreciate you coming on board and really diving into this. It's been great. So let's do this again sometime.

Craig Mestel

>> Absolutely. Well, thanks for having me. Had a lot of fun. I'm really excited to work with y'all.

Craig Mestel

>> Well, thank you. And thank you for watching this episode of Dreamforce 2024. We're unpacking it from the NYSE's beautiful studio that we've built out here. Stay tuned for more with us this week.