The best Hacker News stories from All from the past week
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Google Safe Browsing can kill a startup
Thanks HN: You helped save a company that now helps thousands make a living
Dear HN,<p>I’m feeling a deep sense of gratitude this morning, and wanted to share it with you all.<p>On this day in 2013, the Webflow co-founders were huddled around our usual desk that we claimed every early morning at the Hacker Dojo (a co-working space) in Mountain View, working like hell into the evenings to get something off the ground.<p>We had quit our jobs about 6 months prior, and totally underestimated how long it would take to build even a beta. I had personally convinced my wife that we’d only have to be income-less for 3 months – the amount of savings we had in the bank – but that time had now doubled, and those savings were long gone.<p>The Kickstarter campaign we had poured all of our savings into producing had fallen through, never even making it live because we hadn’t read the Terms of Service to learn that they didn’t allow SaaS subscriptions to be funded. We had high hopes about getting into YC for the winter batch, but were rejected since we only had a non-functional demo of a product and zero traction.<p>On top of all that, my oldest daughter (3yo then) was diagnosed with a life-threatening condition, requiring expensive surgery that didn’t get much help from our cheap “catastrophic” health insurance plan with an ultra-high deductible. Credit card cash advances became the way we were paying for rent and food.<p>So with all this, we started contingency planning to try to get our old jobs back. As a last ditch effort, we sold two of our cars and pulled out what equity we had in them to buy a little more runway. Then we had to come to terms that we couldn’t actually build a full product in the time we had left, and decided that the best we could do was to create a demo or playground that could hint at what the future product could be – and hope for the best.<p>In March of 2013, we finally finished that demo and put it up live. It’s still there: <a href="http://playground.webflow.com/" rel="nofollow">http://playground.webflow.com/</a><p>Now came the time to get users. We were targeting mostly designers and non-technical folks – so we posted it on Digg (heh, remember those days?), Reddit, and several designer-centric forums. But none of those posts got any meaningful traction. We were at a loss.<p>Then, with tempered expectations about how a visual development tool for designers would be received in the hacker community, we posted here to HN. The title was “Show HN: Webflow – design responsive websites visually” [1] and we crossed our fingers really hard at this last-ditch effort.<p>What happened next was nothing short of life-changing. The post took off like wildfire, staying at #1 for the entire day. Incredible words of encouragement were all over the comments. Over 25,000 people signed up for our beta list. VentureBeat wrote a story about us that same day. Tons of people started talking about Webflow on Twitter, Reddit, etc as a result. This led to a ton of word of mouth and even more signups.<p>This amazing traction helped us get into YC several months later, gave us momentum to raise some funding from some angel investors, and most importantly gave us the confidence that we were truly on to something that can be really valuable for the world.<p>Since then, Webflow has grown to millions of users, over a hundred thousand customers, and over 200 team members. I still have to pinch myself when I see that Webflow has somehow become one of the top YC companies of all time. Out of our customers, tens of thousands use Webflow exclusively to make a living – to run an agency, build websites and light applications, create websites for clients, or for their own startups. Tons of YC startups (e.g. lattice.com, hellosign.com, many many more) now use Webflow to run their marketing.<p>I’m 1000% convinced that if that HN post did not take off, we would have gone back to our jobs and that early Webflow demo would have been a mere mention on our resumes somewhere. Thousands of people wouldn’t be empowered to build for the web the way they can now. I can’t imagine what that alternate future would be like, and it hinged seemingly on just one submission to this community.<p>So this is a very belated, but very huge THANK YOU to HN for being kind to a trio of co-founders who wanted to make something valuable for the world, and were at the end of their rope in many ways. You gave us confidence, hope, encouragement, and a lifeline that got us through the lows of building a startup.<p>Thank you, thank you, thank you!!!<p>[1] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5407499" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5407499</a>
Signal is having technical difficulties
Ask HN: How to increase SWE salaries in Europe?
It is often mentioned that Software Engineer salaries in Europe are significantly lower compared to US salaries, even adjusting for lower Cost of Living.<p>The consensus on why that is seems to be:
* Individual contributors in Europe are not as valued as much as managerial professions, due to cultural/historical reasons<p>* Salaries in the US are skewed due to the presence of FAANG companies and VC money, which inflate salaries through the large amount of capital they inject in the system<p>* Europe has less freedom of enterprise (debatable), is in general more risk averse, and has a less dynamic job market (more difficult to fire lower performers), which results in lower wages to compensate for these factors.<p>Reasons aside, how can the European tech job market become more competitive?
Ask HN: What are you working on?
Hi HN, I'm curious to see what cool things everyone's building. What side projects are you developing? What are you applying to HN with?
Signal community: Reminder: Please be nice
Europe Is Guaranteeing Citizens the Right to Repair
Stealing Your Private YouTube Videos, One Frame at a Time
70TB of Parler users’ messages, videos, and posts leaked by security researchers
GNOME has no thumbnails in the file picker and my toilets are blocked
Amazon, Apple and Google Cut Off Parler
Permanent suspension of @realDonaldTrump
No meetings, no deadlines, no full-time employees
Poll: Switching from WhatsApp
So many choices, so much discussion. Looking for the "Wisdom of the Crowd" from the HN community. Other options in the comments would be welcome
Facebook Indefinitely Suspends Trump
WhatsApp gives users an ultimatum: Share data with Facebook or stop using app
U.S. Capitol Locked Down Amid Escalating Protests
GitHub is fully available in Iran
A group of Google workers have announced plans to unionize
Uber discovered they’d been defrauded out of 2/3 of their ad spend