Meet Bryant Chou, Co-founder of Webflow, and Ryan Morrison, Brand Design Lead as they take us behind the scenes of the inner-workings of Webflow. In an exclusive video interview, team Webflow shares their most effective marketing strategies and explain how they go about launching new products and features.
Product launches at Webflow…
Ryan: For product launches here, usually they revolve around a product that we would use with Webflow. You know, maybe it’s about interactions and we’re going to be using Webflow interactions to sell the feature of interactions. What do people actually want to see here? What’s the best way we can show it off? And we just incorporate that into our marketing material.
Bryant: Webflow goes about our product launches mainly considering that Webflow is a very different product. We focus on making sure that all of our marketing assets are visually breathtaking. We want to make sure our assets are valuable. We’re communicating something to our users that our designers can learn from. Webflow is about bridging design and development and we’re creating a tool to make that gap ever smaller. By incorporating elements of education into our marketing assets, we hopefully show and not necessarily just tell users exactly what Webflow can do for you.
Bryant: We really want to put Webflow front and center. So the way we do that is, we just build everything in Webflow. Every single page that you go to from any one of our product launches, you’re going to see them made in Webflow tag in the bottom right corner. It’s going to be a website that a designer would appreciate. It’s going to be a website that developers are going to look at and they’re going to be like, “Man, I actually don’t even know how I would write code to build this website.”
Ryan: So from a design perspective, it’s a lot of iteration. There’s usually one constant prototype. We’re presenting basically the live site. You know, it looks and feels like a site because it is. With that, it just means we can constantly just iterate and make things better.
Challenges at product launch…
Bryant: Webflow product launches are not easy. There’s a lot of moving pieces. A lot of people are involved. At the face of it, there’s at least one designer. On the Webflow marketing team, our designers are actually called Visual Developers. Our designers come from a Visual Design background, a Motion Design background, but now using Webflow as the tool, they are now essentially responsible for the end-to-end creation of all of our marketing assets. And by using Webflow, they don’t need to involve a developer in creating exactly the vision of whatever the marketing asset is.
Ryan: It’s treated more like an iterative prototyping process. We’re jumping into Webflow pretty early. Constantly duplicating the site, making new versions of it, trying new things. It’s a challenge to not have a sense of completion at any stage. But I think it makes for a better product—so I’m not mad about it.
How does the team work together?
Ryan: We’re all generalists. Every designer has got the skill that they’re really good at but everyone can do just about everything. We all know a little bit of code, we all know how to use Webflow, we can all illustrate. We all have pretty different points of view so we can bring a lot to the table.
What has worked well?
Ryan: We had a product coming out that we were actually going to make a video for. We ended up at the last minute deciding to just make a website out of it. What we started with was a script rather than a copy document talking about features. It was a script that talked a lot more about the benefits and the larger vision behind what we were doing. And we were able to shape that page around that.
Bryant: Those were typically campaigns that had a heavy dosage of just visual splash. So, we’ll make sure we’re creating something super frickin’ crazy. Like whoa, “You built that with Webflow?” Our Brand Designers are actually developers. They’re the ones that are super connected to the medium that our end users are going to be experiencing our products with, and they’re going to be doing everything from not just the visuals but the interactions, the animations on the page.
What’s the secret at Webflow?
Bryant: We have a small team of four Brand Designers that are working a lot in Webflow. They are doing everything for Webflow.com, for all of the different landing pages that we have, for all of the different feature pages that we have. And it’s a very small team that works across multiple Webflow projects, creating assets that you know, would take developer teams weeks, if not months, to create. But they can do it in hours, if not a day or two.
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