- Weebly is a platform for creating websites easily and without coding
- Weebly has been successful in helping various individuals and organizations create attractive and functional websites
- The founders of Weebly started working on the idea in 2006 and faced challenges in the early stages
- They applied to Y Combinator and were accepted, leading them to drop out of college and move to San Francisco
- Weebly experienced ups and downs in user sign-ups, but eventually gained traction and raised funding
- Being featured in TechCrunch and Newsweek helped boost Weebly's visibility and user numbers

- The speaker discusses the ups and downs of their startup, Weebly, over a period of several years.
- They mention being featured in Newsweek and Time, but note that these features did not lead to significant growth.
- After 20 months, they finally start seeing traction and an increase in users.
- In July 2008, they launch Weebly Pro and start making money.
- They face financial challenges and have to carefully manage their bills to stay afloat.
- In January 2009, they reach break-even and start seeing profitability.
- By February 2010, they have a working business model and are experiencing significant growth.
- In March 2011, they partner with Sequoia Capital to further grow the business.
- They currently have a significant market share and a high net promoter score.
- The speaker emphasizes the importance of perseverance and not giving up on a startup.
- They invite others to join them in building the future of Weebly.

David Rusenko, founder of Weebly, at Y Combinator Startup School on October 20, 2012.

Presented in Stanford Memorial Auditorium by Y Combinator and the Stanford Technology Ventures Program.

So I wanted to start by just going over the Weebly story a little bit telling you Kind of how we got to where we got to today and some of the lessons we learned along the way.

So What is Weebly first of all, if some of you guys haven't heard of it.

Weebly is a simple and powerful way to create a site.

People want to create a site, they want to create a blog, they want to sell things online, and they just want it to work.

They don't want any of the frustrations around it.

So Let me show you a couple of Weebly sites.

The first site is a photographer from Toronto showcasing their photography.

The second site is an interior designer from Oregon.

They've actually been featured in Dwell magazine for their interior designs run their website on Weebly.

The third site is a graphic designer from California.

You can see all these sites just look great.

And not 1 line of HTML or CSS was written for these sites.

He retired, and his passion is building ukuleles.

And he started doing it in spare time, went on Weebly, and created a website.

And he could build a couple ukuleles out of a shop per month He now has 3 to 6 month back order of ukuleles And this last site is really special to us.

You may have seen the Longanaw initiative I think last year.

But this group of students who had volunteered in Kenya heard this story about Omari that had been brutally attacked while trying to defend his orphanage and they didn't even have a fence to defend themselves.

So they created a Weebly website about this, posted it to Reddit and were able to raise over $100,000 in less than a week for the orphanage.

And They built a wall and a fence and much more than that.

And that's actually now helping out that orphanage in Kenya.

So a little bit about our story and how we got to where we are today.

In early 2006, as part of a class project at Penn State, We came up with the same idea.

6 years ago, we thought, why is this so hard?

Why is it still so hard to build a website?

We're seeing people all around us that were just struggling.

Now, I'm going to introduce you to the theme of the presentation here.

This is a graph of our new sign-ups per day.

And you can see up at the top, it's 6 months after we started working on Weebly.

So 6 months, 6 months after we wrote our first line of code, our grand sign of day, we got 12 new users.

And it was just kind of friends and family.

This wasn't something that was easy to pump out in a month.

It was something that was difficult that took some time to build.

So over that summer, Dan and I and Chris were working on it.

So we've now been writing code and working on the idea for 8 months.

We posted a private beta invitation on some forums, and we thought, man, this is going to blow up.

And we got about 30 people to sign up that day.

So, you know, around this time, I was up pretty late at night, was browsing Slashdot.

That kind of tells you also, you know, that was the most popular tech news site back then.

And I was reading an article on Y Combinator.

And I said, you know, I think I've heard about this company before.

So, well, I thought, you know, what the hell?

I'll put something together really quick.

Now I didn't actually have enough time to call up Dan or Chris to ask them if they'd be willing to drop out of school and move to San Francisco.

I figured, you know, Chris would probably do it.

Dan's a pretty wild guy, too, but I figured he might want to finish his college career.

So, you know, we applied to YC with literally less than an hour to go on the clock.

Incidentally, the morning of the interview, I wake up, check my phone, I'm reading email, all bleary-eyed, and I got an email from someone, congrats on the TechCrunching.

So Open TechCrunch has just so happened that TechCrunch were written by us that morning.

I'm sure it definitely didn't hurt with the interview.

This is not normally what a TechCrunching looks like.

Normally, it goes straight up and straight back down.

We had an invitation system in place to make sure our servers didn't crash.

So that's why you see it spread out over more time.

But later that night, Paul told us, expect a call from us by 7 p.m.

We'll let you know if you made it or not.

We went out to dinner and we sat down and literally I remember 7 p.m.

Rolled around and we were all just staring at our plates of food in front of us, like we literally couldn't eat.

We're like, this is it, we're definitely not making it in.

They've called everyone they've accepted and now they're just calling the losers that aren't getting in.

So I think around 9, 9.30 the phone call from Paul comes and I answer it and literally his first words were, I'm calling to end your college career.

So, you know, funnily enough, you know, I ended up talking to Dan later and said, hey guys, do you wanna, do you wanna, you know, I know we have a semester left, but it sounds crazy, but how about we just drop out of school, move to San Francisco, what do you think of it?

And Chris was like, hell yeah, let's do it.

And I asked Dan, I'm like, Dan, what do you think, this is pretty crazy?

He's like, yeah, I'm on board, this sounds awesome.

So, this is a picture of us that we took right after we got that phone call.

I think this picture was also right after we each took 3 shots at the bar to celebrate.

So we move out to San Francisco, start the Y Combinator program.

It's now 11 months after we started working on Weebly.

This is almost a full year after we started writing our first line of code.

And I want you to take a look at this graph, and I want you to notice something.

It goes straight up, it comes straight back down.

Maybe you got a couple squiggles here that are a little hopeful but things aren't looking great.

We're getting less than 100 people per day signing up right now.

Almost a year after we started working on Weebly.

You can tell how long ago this was because of the old ass TV in the lower right-hand corner and the 15-inch monitors.

We pushed 3 desks together, put it in the living room, and this is what startup looks like.

We had 1 important rule, which is we took Saturday off.

But otherwise, every other moment, every other waking moment was 24-7 work.

We had a great view of the San Francisco Bay.

This is a little display that Chris hacked up and he just put it in the middle of the table.

So it showed load average, which you don't see right here.

But it also showed total users and logged in users and There's 3 login users here.

That's because it was the 3 of us around a table using Weebly And 1 of 1 of our biggest moments still I think in company history was 1 night we were sitting there and it went 4, you know.

So you know, In January 2007, we also got featured on TechCrunch again.

It goes straight up and straight back down.

And again, 11 months after we started working on Weebly.

And there's a couple of hard times I also want to share.

Because sometimes you just hear about the good stuff.

You don't hear about the times that were really hard.

This is 14 months after we started working on Weebly.

Now the first thing I want to address on this slide is the signup graph.

I kind of want you to look at the end there and notice, you know, I think We were just oblivious and very hopeful at the time, but that kind of looks like it's heading down.

It's actually heading in the wrong direction.

At this point, April 2007, we were just finishing the YC program.

We were really hopeful that we could raise money, but talking to some angel investors, but at 1 point we had less than 100 bucks in our bank account and That's all the money we had We you know, we spent money on 2 things early on we spent money on rent and we spent money at the bar And and and that's pretty much it and You know, we were pretty hopeful but rent was coming up in 2 weeks, and we had to pay rent in 2 weeks.

So we started talking about raising a friends and family round.

We started talking about moving to San Jose to save 800 bucks a month in rent.

And, and, you know, luckily sort of right in the nick of time, we ended up raising a 650K angel round from Ron, from Steve Anderson, Mike Maples, a bunch of angels.

This is another thing that really dates this story.

That big stack of paperwork is what an equity financing looks like.

These days, all the financing, most early stage financings are done via convertible note, 2, 3 pages tops.

This is a fat stack for an equity financing.

So, the next big thing for us was being featured in Newsweek now this used to be a really big deal I I don't know today if it's as much of a big deal, but back then this was a huge deal This is the thing that your parents like bought 10 copies the magazine and forwarded to everyone they knew And so this was a really big deal 15 months in that that was definitely a high point and That's what that looks like.

So now you're seeing the effect of what being featured in Newsweek looks like, you know again It's a very similar pattern it goes up and it comes right back down You're now noticing, you know, it settles higher.

This is 15 months after we started working on Weebly.

Here's a shot of our office here in July 2007.

And that's also our stats dashboard that you can kind of see what's going on.

Next big moment for us around the same time was being featured in Time.

So we're featured in Time as 1 of the 50 best websites of 2007.

So this is 18 months after we started working on Weebly, a year and a half after we started working on Weebly, and things still aren't taking off.

Things are actually going in the wrong direction now.

Raise your hand if you're currently working on a startup.

Now keep your hand up, no, keep your hands up, now keep your hand up only if you've been working on it for over 18 months.

And we didn't have any we didn't have too much positive.

We were naively hopeful that things were working out.

And we knew it was a good problem to be solving.

We were getting feedback from our users, but you know the metrics weren't entirely there yet And this is where it changes.

This is this is 20 months in finally Finally 20 months after we start working on we were seeing our first real traction now.

This is good This is where your your rate of acquiring news per day is increasing linearly.

And 1 thing to notice, you might think, hey, if only I get on TechCrunch, I'll blow up.

My company will be successful if I just get on TechCrunch.

Just via word of mouth now, we are now getting more users every single day than if we were featured in Newsweek, Time or TechCrunch.

In July 2008, we moved into our first real office, 29 months after we started working on Weebly.

Funny story, that TV on the wall got stolen.

Our office got broken into the first week we moved in.

That was fun, getting a call from the police officer at the next day being like, you got to come deal with your office.

We ended up fitting I think about 12 people there and and You know around the summertime.

We started looking at our bank account balance and and you know, we're like, okay Well, you know, how much runway do we have?

This is an important thing to know if you're not profitable.

And we said, OK, well, we really need to start raising money in September.

Maybe October, November, we're going to run out of money.

Let's give it a shot at least, start making some money.

So July 2008, we choose Weebly Pro, we also sell domain names now, and when we started that time, and things were looking good, but if you know anything about the fall of 2008, it was just a really bad time to be raising money.

So we went out there and you know it might have worked but but the the terms were just not what we were looking for.

So this is a graph of our company bank account balance.

I actually hacked up Vanguard's graphic you know like flash graph to plot an XML feed to graph this for you guys.

This is 34 months after we started working on Weebly.

And this is, you know, this is another hard time.

We basically we looked at our bank account balance and said, okay, well, you know, revenue is increasing and things are going in the right direction and we're pretty hopeful we can squeeze through but, you know, but we can't pay all our bills next month.

If we had to cut our own salaries, that was going to be 1 thing, but for people we employed, that was not an option not to pay that.

I remember getting out a big calendar on a piece of paper and mapping out all our bills on which days they were due and how much money we thought we were going to make in the meantime to just barely squeak by.

And then there was really 2 types of bills that we labeled.

There was 1 that was the type of bill that if you didn't pay it, you got a late fee.

And the second type of bill, if you didn't pay it, they shut your servers off.

So obviously we had to pay that second category, but you know in January 2009, which is which is a great month for us You know, we finally hit break-even This is where things started turning in the in the profitable direction and You know, this is where you first start seeing a working business model It finally clicks and you can see a little bit of history out there 35 months That's 3 years after we start working on it.

This is February 2010 and now things are looking great.

This is 4 years after we started working on Weebly.

I want you to notice all the way in the back that Newsweek, that Time, you know the TechCrunch articles, they're just blips on the radar.

You know now every day We're getting about 5,000 new users per day all of you word-of-mouth.

It's all organic growth In March 2011 61 months after we started We partnered with Sequoia capital We love them as partners and brought them on board to help grow the business and that brings us to today.

Today, we believe power is about 2% of the active websites on the internet.

That's all based on public data from net craft every month 15% of the United States visits a Weebly website.

And my favorite stat here is our net promoter score.

Now, if you're not familiar with what a net promoter score is, that means 88% of people who answered this survey said 9 or 10 likely they're gonna recommend we we do a friend as a point of comparison I think apples is 67% that's considered excellent So this explains everything about our business a quick tour of the office here moved in this office about a year ago This is what it looks like when you walk in.

This is a quick snapshot of our lobby and conference room at the front.

And we really like this because you can really talk and communicate, but obviously it gets noisy.

So 1 of the things that We give everyone who works at Weebly as Bose noise cancelling headphones to block out the noise.

It's a TV room, great for catching a big game, especially the Giants games that have been on lately.

And this is our kind of, you know, kitchen slash rec area downstairs.

We get super competitive on ping pong, pool, foosball.

1 thing I want you to notice is that bookshelf in the back Actually, if you go up to that and you know the right book to pull it actually opens up I'm not sure how well you can see that but It's it's it's policy.

We can't show anyone pictures of inside the secret room unless you come visit So we'd love to have you over to check that out So, you know just for shits and giggles I pulled our bank account balance from this morning That's what our company bank account balance looks like now and this is 80 months after we started working on Weebly.

I think the important message here is that it's still an unfinished story.

You know, I mean, as large as we've been able to grow, this is just the beginning.

Well, 6 years ago, we thought the same thing.

And today people are just as frustrated, just as confused, and all they really want to do is participate in the Internet.

Most people can't participate in the Internet the way they'd like to.

People just want to showcase their business, showcase their art or their talents, and sell things online.

So, you know, as much as we've done in the last 6 years, we think we've just built a foundation.

And what's most exciting is what we're building right now, and there's just a whole lot of work left to do.

So I think the number 1 takeaway of everything is you can't succeed if you quit.

Too often I've seen people that build something for 6 months, and then they launch it, and then 2 months later, they stop working on it.

Behind every, and I think we've seen it today, behind every quote-unquote overnight success, you see people who have been working for years and years and years.

And if you want to build a truly big and meaningful company, it's going to take you 7 to 10 years of your life.

Even at the early days, for everyone, including us, It didn't look great.

You just had to push through and know that you're working on a valuable problem and keep pushing through.

So last thing I'll close with, if you'd like to help us finish the story that's still in progress, we'd love to talk to you, but I won't go on too much about that.

If you have any other questions, please e-mail me.

Hope to see you at the party tonight, and thank you very much.


Speaker 0: Well, thanks for having me guys. You hear me? All right Cool. So I wanted to start by just going over the Weebly story a little bit telling you Kind of how we got to where we got to today and some of the lessons we learned along the way. So What is Weebly first of all, if some of you guys haven't heard of it.

Weebly is a simple and powerful way to create a site. People want to create a site, they want to create a blog, they want to sell things online, and they just want it to work. They don't want any of the frustrations around it. So Let me show you a couple of Weebly sites. The first site is a photographer from Toronto showcasing their photography.

The second site is an interior designer from Oregon. They've actually been featured in Dwell magazine for their interior designs run their website on Weebly. The third site is a graphic designer from California. You can see all these sites just look great. And not 1 line of HTML or CSS was written for these sites.

This next site is pretty special. This is Brian. He's 80 years old. He retired, and his passion is building ukuleles. And he started doing it in spare time, went on Weebly, and created a website.

What do you know? The word got out. And he could build a couple ukuleles out of a shop per month He now has 3 to 6 month back order of ukuleles And this last site is really special to us. You may have seen the Longanaw initiative I think last year. But this group of students who had volunteered in Kenya heard this story about Omari that had been brutally attacked while trying to defend his orphanage and they didn't even have a fence to defend themselves.

So they created a Weebly website about this, posted it to Reddit and were able to raise over $100,000 in less than a week for the orphanage. And They built a wall and a fence and much more than that. And that's actually now helping out that orphanage in Kenya. So a little bit about our story and how we got to where we are today. In early 2006, as part of a class project at Penn State, We came up with the same idea.

6 years ago, we thought, why is this so hard? Why is it still so hard to build a website? We're seeing people all around us that were just struggling. And so we came up with the idea. We started working on it.

Now, I'm going to introduce you to the theme of the presentation here. This is a graph of our new sign-ups per day. This is August 2006. This is real data. And you can see up at the top, it's 6 months after we started working on Weebly.

So 6 months, 6 months after we wrote our first line of code, our grand sign of day, we got 12 new users. And it was just kind of friends and family. It was still alpha stage. This wasn't something that was easy to pump out in a month. It was something that was difficult that took some time to build.

So over that summer, Dan and I and Chris were working on it. Here's October 2006, 8 months later. So we've now been writing code and working on the idea for 8 months. We posted a private beta invitation on some forums, and we thought, man, this is going to blow up. And we got about 30 people to sign up that day.

So, you know, around this time, I was up pretty late at night, was browsing Slashdot. That kind of tells you also, you know, that was the most popular tech news site back then. And I was reading an article on Y Combinator. And I said, you know, I think I've heard about this company before. I'm not really sure.

Started reading the article. Oh, this sounds really cool. This sounds interesting. Oh, application deadlines in 2 hours. So, well, I thought, you know, what the hell?

I'll put something together really quick. You know, it doesn't hurt to apply. Now I didn't actually have enough time to call up Dan or Chris to ask them if they'd be willing to drop out of school and move to San Francisco. So I took a guess. I figured, you know, Chris would probably do it.

He's a pretty wild guy. Dan's a pretty wild guy, too, but I figured he might want to finish his college career. So, you know, we applied to YC with literally less than an hour to go on the clock. Got accepted for an interview. Drove up to Boston.

Interviewed. We thought it was great. Incidentally, the morning of the interview, I wake up, check my phone, I'm reading email, all bleary-eyed, and I got an email from someone, congrats on the TechCrunching. What the hell is this about? So Open TechCrunch has just so happened that TechCrunch were written by us that morning.

I'm sure it definitely didn't hurt with the interview. But I also have to explain this graph. This is really important. This is not normally what a TechCrunching looks like. Normally, it goes straight up and straight back down.

We had an invitation system in place to make sure our servers didn't crash. So that's why you see it spread out over more time. But later that night, Paul told us, expect a call from us by 7 p.m. The same day. We'll let you know if you made it or not.

We were pretty nervous. We went out to dinner and we sat down and literally I remember 7 p.m. Rolled around and 8 p.m. Rolled around and we were all just staring at our plates of food in front of us, like we literally couldn't eat. We were so nervous.

And then by 9 p.m. We're like, this is it, we're definitely not making it in. They've called everyone they've accepted and now they're just calling the losers that aren't getting in. So I think around 9, 9.30 the phone call from Paul comes and I answer it and literally his first words were, I'm calling to end your college career. So, you know, funnily enough, you know, I ended up talking to Dan later and said, hey guys, do you wanna, do you wanna, you know, I know we have a semester left, but it sounds crazy, but how about we just drop out of school, move to San Francisco, what do you think of it?

And Chris was like, hell yeah, let's do it. And I asked Dan, I'm like, Dan, what do you think, this is pretty crazy? He's like, yeah, I'm on board, this sounds awesome. So, this is a picture of us that we took right after we got that phone call. I think this picture was also right after we each took 3 shots at the bar to celebrate.

And this is with our friend Dana. So the next graph is January 2007. So we move out to San Francisco, start the Y Combinator program. It's now 11 months after we started working on Weebly. You know, this is a pretty long time.

This is almost a full year after we started writing our first line of code. And I want you to take a look at this graph, and I want you to notice something. This isn't straight up and to the right. It goes straight up, it comes straight back down. Maybe you got a couple squiggles here that are a little hopeful but things aren't looking great.

We're getting less than 100 people per day signing up right now. Almost a year after we started working on Weebly. This is a picture of our first office. We literally moved into an apartment. We put 3 desks together.

You can tell how long ago this was because of the old ass TV in the lower right-hand corner and the 15-inch monitors. We pushed 3 desks together, put it in the living room, and this is what startup looks like. We just worked our asses off. We had 1 important rule, which is we took Saturday off. But otherwise, every other moment, every other waking moment was 24-7 work.

It wasn't all bad. We had a great view of the San Francisco Bay. And, you know, this is a fun story. This is a little display that Chris hacked up and he just put it in the middle of the table. And it showed kind of some basic stats.

So it showed load average, which you don't see right here. But it also showed total users and logged in users and There's 3 login users here. That's because it was the 3 of us around a table using Weebly And 1 of 1 of our biggest moments still I think in company history was 1 night we were sitting there and it went 4, you know. And like we were excited. That was exciting.

So you know, In January 2007, we also got featured on TechCrunch again. This is much more normal. It goes straight up and straight back down. And again, 11 months after we started working on Weebly. This is April 2007.

And there's a couple of hard times I also want to share. Because sometimes you just hear about the good stuff. You don't hear about the bad stuff. You don't hear about the times that were really hard. This is 14 months after we started working on Weebly.

Now the first thing I want to address on this slide is the signup graph. I kind of want you to look at the end there and notice, you know, I think We were just oblivious and very hopeful at the time, but that kind of looks like it's heading down. It's not heading up. It's actually heading in the wrong direction. At this point, April 2007, we were just finishing the YC program.

We were really hopeful that we could raise money, but talking to some angel investors, but at 1 point we had less than 100 bucks in our bank account and That's all the money we had We you know, we spent money on 2 things early on we spent money on rent and we spent money at the bar And and and that's pretty much it and You know, we were pretty hopeful but rent was coming up in 2 weeks, and we had to pay rent in 2 weeks. So we started talking about raising a friends and family round. We started talking about moving to San Jose to save 800 bucks a month in rent. And luckily we didn't do that. And, and, you know, luckily sort of right in the nick of time, we ended up raising a 650K angel round from Ron, from Steve Anderson, Mike Maples, a bunch of angels.

This is another thing that really dates this story. That big stack of paperwork is what an equity financing looks like. These days, all the financing, most early stage financings are done via convertible note, 2, 3 pages tops. This is a fat stack for an equity financing. So, the next big thing for us was being featured in Newsweek now this used to be a really big deal I I don't know today if it's as much of a big deal, but back then this was a huge deal This is the thing that your parents like bought 10 copies the magazine and forwarded to everyone they knew And so this was a really big deal 15 months in that that was definitely a high point and That's what that looks like.

So now you're seeing the effect of what being featured in Newsweek looks like, you know again It's a very similar pattern it goes up and it comes right back down You're now noticing, you know, it settles higher. That's definitely a good sign. But it's still going down. It's not going up. This is 15 months after we started working on Weebly.

Here's a shot of our office here in July 2007. And that's Dan sitting there. And that's also our stats dashboard that you can kind of see what's going on. Next big moment for us around the same time was being featured in Time. So we're featured in Time as 1 of the 50 best websites of 2007.

So this is 18 months after we started working on Weebly, a year and a half after we started working on Weebly, and things still aren't taking off. There's no hockey stick here. Things are actually going in the wrong direction now. I want to try something out here. Raise your hand if you're currently working on a startup.

Now keep your hand up, no, keep your hands up, now keep your hand up only if you've been working on it for over 18 months. Okay, right, That's what I thought. It's a long time. This is a really long time. And we didn't have any we didn't have too much positive.

We were just sort of naive. We were naively hopeful that things were working out. And we knew it was a good problem to be solving. We were getting feedback from our users, but you know the metrics weren't entirely there yet And this is where it changes. This is this is 20 months in finally Finally 20 months after we start working on we were seeing our first real traction now.

This is good This is where your your rate of acquiring news per day is increasing linearly. That's a pretty good thing. And 1 thing to notice, you might think, hey, if only I get on TechCrunch, I'll blow up. My company will be successful if I just get on TechCrunch. Well, Look all the way back there.

Just via word of mouth now, we are now getting more users every single day than if we were featured in Newsweek, Time or TechCrunch. In July 2008, we moved into our first real office, 29 months after we started working on Weebly. Funny story, that TV on the wall got stolen. Our office got broken into the first week we moved in. That was fun, getting a call from the police officer at the next day being like, you got to come deal with your office.

It's busted. So, you know, here's another picture. And this was just it. It was small. It was 1,400 square feet.

We ended up fitting I think about 12 people there and and You know around the summertime. We started looking at our bank account balance and and you know, we're like, okay Well, you know, how much runway do we have? This is an important thing to know if you're not profitable. How much runway do we have? And we said, OK, well, we really need to start raising money in September.

Maybe October, November, we're going to run out of money. So we said, well, what the hell? Let's give it a shot at least, start making some money. So July 2008, we choose Weebly Pro, we also sell domain names now, and when we started that time, and things were looking good, but if you know anything about the fall of 2008, it was just a really bad time to be raising money. So we went out there and you know it might have worked but but the the terms were just not what we were looking for.

So this is a graph of our company bank account balance. I actually hacked up Vanguard's graphic you know like flash graph to plot an XML feed to graph this for you guys. This is 34 months after we started working on Weebly. And it was pretty low. And this is, you know, this is another hard time.

We basically we looked at our bank account balance and said, okay, well, you know, revenue is increasing and things are going in the right direction and we're pretty hopeful we can squeeze through but, you know, but we can't pay all our bills next month. So what are we going to do about it? Obviously payroll was never an option. We were obviously going to pay payroll. If we had to cut our own salaries, that was going to be 1 thing, but for people we employed, that was not an option not to pay that.

The next step was to get out a calendar. I remember getting out a big calendar on a piece of paper and mapping out all our bills on which days they were due and how much money we thought we were going to make in the meantime to just barely squeak by. And then there was really 2 types of bills that we labeled. There was 1 that was the type of bill that if you didn't pay it, you got a late fee. And the second type of bill, if you didn't pay it, they shut your servers off.

So obviously we had to pay that second category, but you know in January 2009, which is which is a great month for us You know, we finally hit break-even This is where things started turning in the in the profitable direction and You know, this is where you first start seeing a working business model It finally clicks and you can see a little bit of history out there 35 months That's 3 years after we start working on it. We finally hit a working business model. This is February 2010 and now things are looking great. Now we're off to the races. This is 4 years after we started working on Weebly.

I want you to notice all the way in the back that Newsweek, that Time, you know the TechCrunch articles, they're just blips on the radar. You know now every day We're getting about 5,000 new users per day all of you word-of-mouth. It's all organic growth In March 2011 61 months after we started We partnered with Sequoia capital We love them as partners and brought them on board to help grow the business and that brings us to today. So where are we now? Today, we believe power is about 2% of the active websites on the internet.

That's all based on public data from net craft every month 15% of the United States visits a Weebly website. And my favorite stat here is our net promoter score. Our net promoter score is over 80%. Now, if you're not familiar with what a net promoter score is, that means 88% of people who answered this survey said 9 or 10 likely they're gonna recommend we we do a friend as a point of comparison I think apples is 67% that's considered excellent So this explains everything about our business a quick tour of the office here moved in this office about a year ago This is what it looks like when you walk in. This is a quick snapshot of our lobby and conference room at the front.

Here's our open work plan area. And we really like this because you can really talk and communicate, but obviously it gets noisy. So 1 of the things that We give everyone who works at Weebly as Bose noise cancelling headphones to block out the noise. It's a TV room, great for catching a big game, especially the Giants games that have been on lately. And this is our kind of, you know, kitchen slash rec area downstairs.

We get super competitive on ping pong, pool, foosball. 1 thing I want you to notice is that bookshelf in the back Actually, if you go up to that and you know the right book to pull it actually opens up I'm not sure how well you can see that but It's it's it's policy. We can't show anyone pictures of inside the secret room unless you come visit So we'd love to have you over to check that out So, you know just for shits and giggles I pulled our bank account balance from this morning That's what our company bank account balance looks like now and this is 80 months after we started working on Weebly. I think the important message here is that it's still an unfinished story. You know, I mean, as large as we've been able to grow, this is just the beginning.

So what's next for Weebly? Well, 6 years ago, we thought the same thing. Making a site is just hard. And today people are just as frustrated, just as confused, and all they really want to do is participate in the Internet. And you know what?

Most people can't participate in the Internet the way they'd like to. People just want to showcase their business, showcase their art or their talents, and sell things online. And it's still too difficult for them. So, you know, as much as we've done in the last 6 years, we think we've just built a foundation. And what's most exciting is what we're building right now, and there's just a whole lot of work left to do.

So I think the number 1 takeaway of everything is you can't succeed if you quit. Too often I've seen people that build something for 6 months, and then they launch it, and then 2 months later, they stop working on it. How do you expect that to work? Behind every, and I think we've seen it today, behind every quote-unquote overnight success, you see people who have been working for years and years and years. And if you want to build a truly big and meaningful company, it's going to take you 7 to 10 years of your life.

Don't give up so easily. You've just got to keep going. Even at the early days, for everyone, including us, It didn't look great. You just had to push through and know that you're working on a valuable problem and keep pushing through. So last thing I'll close with, if you'd like to help us finish the story that's still in progress, we'd love to talk to you, but I won't go on too much about that.

If you have any other questions, please e-mail me. Hope to see you at the party tonight, and thank you very much.

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David Rusenko at Startup School 2012