Build In Public: Spotlight Edition ⭐️ (Raphaël Goldsztejn, CEO of WeWeb)

Hi everyone, welcome to the latest Spotlight edition of the Build In Public newsletter. In this recurring Spotlight series, I invite and interview one new startup founder each round to unpack insights and actionable advice from their story that can be helpful in your own journey. 

In today’s edition, I wanted to feature Raphaël Goldsztejn, co-founder and CEO at WeWeb. (a YC 2021 Winter batch startup)

I first found out about WeWeb 1.0 when the team just graduated out of YCW21 during a 1:1 with Raphaël who was introduced to me through a mutual contact. He shared the initial idea of building a backend agnostic platform and that piqued my interest immediately. The founding team is incredibly talented, committed, and community-oriented. In my opinion, WeWeb is a super powerful and versatile tool. As a fan of the emerging new no-code tools, I agreed to help them with their public Product Hunt launch today. Check it out here and go support them!

RG: My name is Raphaël Goldsztejn, and I am the co-founder and CEO of WeWeb.io. I have a background in finance and worked for a few years in the corporate world. Fortunately, I met my co-founders early in my career. They introduced me to the web, which is way more exciting for me! We built a few side projects together and after a few iterations, we ended up creating WeWeb, giving up our jobs and taking the leap into the startup world.

RG: We are building WeWeb.io which is the fastest way to build and deploy a beautiful front-end using any system as a back-end.

It’s a big claim but, thanks to our no-code editor that includes business logic workflows and off-the-shelves back-end integrations, users can deploy the front-end of their web application 10x faster, without sacrificing performance.

RG: Until now, users were required to type Javascript to create logic and workflows in their WeWeb project.

Today, we’re launching our no-code workflow builder, which means users can now add business logic, create, read, update, or delete items from their database right from their WeWeb front-end, without writing a single line of code. They can still write Javascript functions, but they don’t have to.

RG: Well, initially, back in 2018, my co-founders and I got excited about the JAMstack, the idea that, by decoupling the backend from the frontend and tapping into the API economy, you would be able to build much faster and more robust websites. So we built a no-code website builder that integrated super well with headless systems. But when we did Y Combinator in Winter 2021, we realized people who want to build simple static websites already had plenty of options. And we noticed that our users were bending WeWeb all kinds of ways to build web applications. What they really wanted was to be able to build the front-end of robust web-applications that would play well with their external data sources like Airtable, REST APIs or their own SQL databases. Talking to our existing customers and paying more attention to what they were already doing was the game changer we needed.

RG: Our power users are product people and technical people who need to build a front-end faster using their own back-end stack. We also have a lot of web agencies who use our product because it allows them to say yes to more business opportunities.

RG: There are a number of awesome no-code web app builders out there but WeWeb is the only one that serves professionals with the perfect trilogy of:

You can set up workarounds in other tools, but WeWeb does all that by design. Which makes it more scalable and efficient.

Number 1: taking a few breaks is important!

All jokes aside, I’d say my key takeaways were:

RG: Great question! We’ve only just started to “officially” implement the principle of “build in public” at WeWeb and it raises a lot of questions: what are we comfortable sharing? what would we rather not? How much time shall we spend sharing more about our journey?

We strongly believe in transparency by default in our relationships but, at the same time, it’s kind of scary to share all kinds of confidential information when there’s so much competition out there.

RG: Launch faster, strive for speed of iteration, and among all, enjoy the ride.

RG: Twitter is a great place to connect, my DMs are open (https://twitter.com/raphgoldz)feel. OR feel free to shoot me an email. I reply to every single one: raphael.g@weweb.io

KP: Where can people find your newest product launch/release? And do you have an ask for the community?

RG: Our website is: https://www.weweb.io/

As was mentioned before, today, we are “live” on Product Hunt. We would love your support, feedback, and comments. Come join the discussion at https://www.producthunt.com/posts/weweb-2-0

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