Webflow, the web design and hosting platform, has quickly become one of today’s most iconic PLG brands. The company joined the $100 million ARR club last year and has been on the bleeding edge of PLG trends such as:

But the Webflow we know today isn’t the Webflow of only four years ago. As of early 2019, the business had been operating under-the-radar for seven years. Apart from a small $2.4 million seed round, Webflow bootstrapped to $10 million ARR and had roughly 60 employees at the time. 

Bruno Estrella, Webflow’s head of growth marketing, joined in those scrappy early days. He was initially brought in as a growth marketer where he wore many hats like validating paid channels, scaling SEO efforts, setting up a B2B sales motion for the enterprise product, and scaling  programs like Webflow for Education.

Bruno just hit his four year mark with Webflow. The company is now 10x the size (600+ employees) and has raised more than $300 million in funding. Bruno and I chatted about the role of growth marketing in a PLG startup and his lessons learned navigating hypergrowth.

I was brought in as a growth marketer, but in such an early stage you need to wear so many hats and that was my case. 

I was brought in to validate new channels and build a system to scale them after validation. Because of that, I was able to touch different areas and bring them from 0 to 1. From there I would build a system to bring them from 1 to 10, and hire great people to bring it from 1 to 100.

I was involved in trying to validate paid advertising, build a B2B sales motion with the enterprise product, and build systems to scale programs like Webflow for Education (the student audience).

As the first growth marketer, you need to be comfortable with having a lot of problems to solve and identifying which you think are the biggest, then doubling down on those. A lot of times you don’t have the right skillset and so you need to adapt and learn how to approach the problem. That’s one of the key things that makes an early stage growth marketer successful.

Before you start to test channels, take advantage of having much access to the business itself including execs, initial data, and so on. Understand the business model of the company, how it has been growing from a unit economics perspective, and which channels you can leverage. 

Even today, there’s always a conversation about a new channel coming up or a new tactic, but most of the time this channel doesn’t line up with your business model or you can’t find your audience there. Understanding the business itself is the foundation before you start to validate these channels.

For B2B PLG products, it’s hard to find paid channels that work and that have traction. Many of the scalable paid channels are on mobile. But there’s a high friction level from getting from mobile into a desktop software product. 

For us, we are looking at channels that have high intent and also strong attention. With that in mind, we started with paid search and SEO, including editorial SEO and programmatic SEO. Whenever you can match user-generated content with SEO for your product, that’s a really strong channel for a PLG product. That’s what we tapped into with Webflow Showcase and the Template marketplace. 

Growth marketing at Webflow is responsible for new customer acquisition and new ARR. 

Our team is structured into a few functions:

While SEO and paid channels are common, affiliates is an additional channel that can work for PLG companies if you have a really strong community. It’s an incentive for people to create more content around you. 

People will create something in Webflow Showcase and then share it with their audience through affiliate links. We have them join the program to continue to create content and in return they get a revenue share incentive (12 month period). Our team is mostly focused on YouTube creators, blogs, and so on. 

Almost any PLG business should start their paid marketing on the paid search side of things. It is the channel that has the highest intent and the highest level of attention from the user’s perspective. It’s a no-brainer for new user acquisition.

When it comes to paid social, people need to understand that for B2B prosumer or PLG motions, you need to get creative to make that channel work. There is a level of friction with people browsing social media on their phones, then asking them to start to build a website. We had to understand the user’s level of intent and how do we grab their attention to start building something. 

What we learned is that if you drive someone from a Facebook feed or Instagram story straight to a landing page to build a website, there’s too much friction. But if you can allow them to utilize a template they can save to use later or a “free resources” approach, you can find more success. We’d try to take users to Webflow University, for example, to teach them how to learn something so that they could come back later and build.

From a social standpoint, we started with YouTube because of its ability to target high-intent users. What we learned is that we can better attract users from these channels by offering a free resource that indirectly gets them to the product. For example, we promote Webflow’s University Portfolio Course as well as Webflow’s University Figma course. Both of these courses teach users something extremely valuable for free and utilize Webflow as the main solution.

This is a very common tactic on sales-led motions, offering eBooks, webinars, and whitepapers through gated pages. From a PLG perspective, we are offering a resource that integrates well with our product.