Open letter to the C-level of Webflow

Dear Webflow C-Level Team

Linda Tong (CEO)
Vlad Magdalin (CIO)
Rachel Wolan (CPO)
Alan Leinwand (CTO)

Just like yesterday, you have made numerous announcements about upcoming features over the past few years. Unfortunately, many people have already lost faith in you due to your frequent shortcomings to deliver on your promises.

Some examples:

• Ecommerce: Half-baked. 🛒
• User Accounts: A disaster. 🔑
• Logic: Even worse. 🤯

You’ve admitted that further development on Logic has stopped, but the existing functionalities should work correctly and make sense for basic use cases. Unfortunately, this is often not the case. Even the simplest use cases can turn into a nightmare, and the resulting poor user experience causing a loss of trust and potential customers.

A Disconnect with the Community

Rachel, you mentioned several times that speaking with customers has guided your development. However, it seems you’re mainly communicating with companies like Finsweet, Memberstack, and alike, and developing features that benefit them, while seemingly ignoring the needs of your broader community.

What Your Community Wants:

• Building basic use cases with user accounts, memberships, and gated content using native Webflow features—without paying extra for Memberstack or Outseta.
• Building simple internal logic and workflows—without paying extra for Wized or needing to learn how to code.

Sure, Webflow has those features, but they are a nightmare. No matter what kind of common real-life use case you want to build, you are running against a wall or end up with a lousy user experience.

A Call to Action

Allan and Rachel, please collaborate closely to build features from real-world use cases that truly help your customers seize their business opportunities.

Build the right things, AND build things right.

Currently, it feels like you’re running a feature factory churning out functionalities from a developer’s perspective, without addressing the most common use cases. For us webflow customers using these poorly executed features results in providing a frustrating user experience to our customers. And therefore in brand damage and losing customers.

The Path Forward

The most frustrating aspect is that it does not require much effort to resolve. Many solutions are clear and relatively easy to implement. You even have a wealth of user insights in your forum.

Linda, before reaching for the stars, please focus on fixing the basics. I understand the pressure from investors, but completing your homework is essential.

Vlad, one of your branding quotes is “doing it the webflow way”. Big time announcing features and not delivering them properly became “the webflow way”.

Let’s make “the Webflow way” synonymous with quality and reliability once again.

I wrote this letter quickly and it may seem harsh, but it comes from a place of wanting to see Webflow succeed. This weekend, I’ll set aside time to list the most critical shortcomings of User Accounts and Logic and provide potential solutions. Stay tuned for my next article.

Stay tuned and don't miss an update.

Georg

Update June 24th: This open letter got the attention of the CPO Rachel Wolan on LinkedIn. So feel free and join the conversation and spread the word. The more engagement we create in this conversation, the more leverage we gain. Link