507: Wix Co-Founder Shares Website Tips from 250M+ Users | Avishai Abrahami

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2:00Welcome to the Founder Podcast with Nathan Chan.

2:06So Abishai, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today. The first question that I want to ask you is what did the first 60 days of business look like for Wix? How did you start the company? What did the first 60 days look like? Well, we actually started by having a different idea. So we had a concept about sharing a way to do, a smarter way to do file sharing. And we raised money for that. And then my partner at that time was supposed to, who had two ideas. There was one of them that was only agreed on. And the other one was, we thought about there is an issue of editing web content.

2:50and then I said, you know what, I'm going to test your idea. I'm going to try and build a website for the file sharing thing. And it really sucked. I felt that, you know, I'm a developer, but proficient, and I've been doing it for so many years on different platforms. I tried to actually edit HTML and CSS myself. At that time, we dream with Dreamweaver, and I was such a bad experience, went back to the investors. and I told them, well, we're not going to do that thing anymore. We're going to do something else. And it was kind of an interesting thing because all the investors said, yeah, absolutely.

3:27It sounds like a really good idea. We'll back you on this new thing. So this is how we started. So the first day of the month was probably just changing everything. And you wrote an article on entrepreneur.com in 2014 where you said that the early days of Wix was like treading a minefield of potential catastrophes. What were they and how did you avoid them? Could you talk us through some of that? Well, I don't remember what I was thinking about in 2015. But I can tell you one of the hardest challenges we had is that we had this thing where you could easily, at that time it was Flash, you could easily build Flash content, right?

4:10And it was a drag and drop interface that you could build these beautiful flash widgets or pages. And I think the hardest challenge in the beginning was to choose what to do. And we had a lot of concepts. And fun as it is, about, I think, I would say about 40 % of them were related to MySpace. And so luckily, we didn't choose that, right? If we would, we would not be existing today. There was another portion, which was a building for designers, and we actually thought about something similar to Canva. And we didn't do that as well. We think at that time it was actually much harder if we would go down that path.

4:55And we ended up doing websites. So this is really how the company started. A lot of it came from the fact that we failed to understand the business model and that we are not depending so much on other companies like MySpace. And so that was one of the hardest challenges, I think, to pick up. We had 11 different options of how we're going to use the same technology to create a product. So we had this base product, right? But how we package it, how we make it into a company was something that we had 11 different options of what to do with. And I think for many companies, this is one of the hardest challenges.

5:38The concept of how do you... So you have this technology, but now how do you package it and how do you market it and how to take it out is very tricky to do in the beginning. You kind of have to understand what's going to be the easiest path where you still maintain control of your life and your dependence on the one hand and then on the other hand that you can actually generate a business model for. So, I mean, we got lucky that we chose the right one. Yeah. And how did you get your first customer? Who was Wix's first customer? How did you get your first customer? So that was actually interesting.

6:13The second that we actually launched All Day 11 in the beginning. So we launched All Day 11 and the concepts and built a page and we wrote about it in different places, approached a few blogs in every relevant area. and the website thing and the MySpace thing just took off. Yep. So we kind of was always to choose probably one of those two. We had also another one with those greeting cards. So we had this really good way of creating greeting cards. We did and the design aspect, so you can actually just create really beautiful design, not necessarily websites, but more for print or for other things.

6:55An investor, but in particular, I love that last one. Anyway, so we just, you know, probably the first day we started closed beta for Wix, we started to have people that registered and it's kept growing every day. Yeah, got you. And you guys started the company in 2006. There's been a lot of tools that are like competitors to Wix. There's been a lot of website builders come and go. So what do you think has been the number one thing that has ensured the company's growth, survival? And, you know, it's almost 20 years. This is an incredible company. You guys are listed, like massive market cap. What do you think it's been that if you could boil it down to a couple of things that has ensured the sustainability of Wix?

7:45I think it's a different focus on what is the customer. And there were so many tools when we started, right? There was Dreamweaver, which is very hard to use tools for editing HTML. There was YOW Website Builder, or FreeWebs, which kind of like, what the concept behind it was that your grandmother can build a website. And there were Apple had iWeb, which was another tool, Microsoft had FrontPage. There was a lot of them. Google had Google sites. At that time, it still did websites, not just back-end. But I think we picked a different approach because we said that we wanted customers to be people that know how to use a computer.

8:32We didn't believe that making a website for grandmothers is a sustainable business plan. Essentially, we said, well, we think our customers are the smart guys, so we're going to build product for smart people. And even today, which is something that you have to learn how to use, If you don't know how to use a computer, you don't have a chance. If you don't know how to use the level of knowledge that you would have to use Excel, PowerPoint, then Wix is probably too hard for you. But if you are one of those people that we come to a funnet computer, Wix is an easy experience. But you don't, I mean, front page, and then you always ended up making ugly websites.

9:11We didn't think anybody wanted that. So the first thing we said, we want to aim at intelligent users that are computer savvy, that are not necessarily technical, they don't need to understand HTML, they don't need to understand CSS, they don't need to understand Flash, they don't need to know anything. If you know how to use computers, we need to give you a way to create stunning websites. And the emphasize on stunning website was one of the places we've been unique, I think, because we realized that people really care about the design of what they do. It might look utterly for me and you, for us, but if we give people the ability to generate their vision and to make it as beautiful as they want, then we have a winner.

9:59And that was pretty much the key, I think, from day one. I still remember, you know, every time we're sitting in product, in a load mark meeting on the product, and people got to, well, you know, we don't have an undo. Do you think we need to do an undo? and I would always go back to all those really smart features and I would say, no, no, no. We need to have better galleries. We need to have the better font. We need to have more effects and then make info them crazy. But that became very successful for us as a strategy because you can really create things that you are proud of. Yeah, I see. So for founders that are listening to this right now and they're in the early stages, is how can they stand out in a crowded market for their business?

10:44What advice would you give? Well, I think the number one is that don't ask too much about who is the customer. Care more about what they are trying to do. And I'll try to explain. And this is the first thing every product of lecture I usually listen to. They always say, well, you should think about who is the customer. Who is the customer of an iPhone? Who is the customer of Chrome? Who is the customer of Facebook? Who is the customer of Instagram? Who is the customer of, well, the answer is everybody. So if all the good products are built on the concept that it's for a huge amount of people, then why would you focus on that?

11:28Then the other side of it is that, well, it's very easy to say what those people want to do. When you have an iPhone in your head, we kind of know what you want to do. I don't want to use an application. Or maybe talk, right? It's not that common anymore on the phone. And then if you use Chrome, we know what you want to do. If you're using Excel, we know what you want to do. So it's very easy to define what the customer wants to do. And that usually leads to great products. It's supposed to, who is the customer? And then try to build something around that. So that's number one. And then ask yourself, what is the most important thing for the customer when you want to do it?

12:05so for example in weeks it would be create a stunning website and and so that makes your product stand above everybody else because you deliver a product that gets us to what your customers want to do and not to what you think they should be yeah so i love that um because the thing that comes to my mind is they say that you if you try and create it for everyone you create it for no one and the riches are in the niches what's your statement to that what's your what's your thoughts around that none of the great products on the planet was ever built with that mentality i do believe that a lot of great products were created by finding what is it that you want the product to do very well but somebody wouldn't use that right what is it that they want to achieve.

13:01Take a look at example PowerPoint, right? Or slides. Well, you want a greater presentation, but you want to make a beautiful presentation probably. So I would say all of them are lacking in that. This is just one example. And there are many of such examples. Again, my personal belief is that great products are always focusing on what the customer want to do and how it should be, what's the best way to do it and now it should end up looking as opposed to who is the customer yeah i love that so when it comes to work and passion uh i read that you used to work 18 hours a day now you've dropped it to 12 is that correct well i don't measure time right so uh so i sleep about five six hours i have about six hours uh four or five with my family and the rest of it is work.

14:00So probably that is about the right amount of hours. I actually don't think that it's like, I don't feel that it's a lot. How many hours do you spend with your friends every day? Or what do you do for the rest of the time? And so I don't know how many hours you sleep, but assuming you sleep six hours or seven hours, then you end up living a lot of free time if you work for nine or eight hours a day. In fact, if you sleep for eight hours, right? Sorry, if you, yeah, sleep for eight hours, work for eight hours, and you have eight hours free. So, like, I don't know how much free time do you need, but for me, five hours a day is more than enough, usually a lot less than that.

14:50so if I sleep for five hours then I have 19 hours four hours free still leaves me a huge amount of time to spend focusing on what's more important for me so do you think that if anyone's listening to this that's in the early stages of their business they have to be prepared to work 80 hours a week if they want to build something of true worth and significance I've never seen anybody has managed to do it without it I don't know maybe you are talking to a lot more founders than me but every founder I've seen is always obsessed and I think that obsession is tremendous power I agree they're not only obsessed but they're hungry desperate that that hunger you cannot you cannot like put a price on because that's where it's at like if you are hungry enough you will find a way where does your hunger come from what fuels it i don't know i always since i remember myself i knew what i wanted to do and it would go to me probably the age of nine i already knew what i wanted to do when i grow up i knew that i want to build technology companies at that time there was no name for of course software companies so i knew exactly what i wanted to do from the age of I don't know, eight.

16:13How? I'm sure for my family, I want to do it. I got for me. My dad loves science, loves technology. You have a few degrees in that, that he did it later on in life. But that was the conversation around the dinner table. So the conversation on the dinner table would usually be around invention and technology and science and coming with ideas and how to solve things. And so I just guess I grew into that. And I guess tell us about your first company because Wix wasn't your first company. You started another company. Your first business in 1993, AIT Inc. It was a web management company. Yeah, it was actually, we did software projects for other companies and ended up doing, we did, you guys from Australia, right?

17:12I don't know how old you are, but there was a city around that had all the yellow pages and white pages on it in Australia. I'm almost sure that was our first project. We did it for a company in Israel that did it for a company in Australia. We actually implemented that. That was our first big project. We did a bunch of those. We ended up specializing in creating, as opposed to building software for somebody, building products for other companies. So that was a very good school for me.

17:52And we ended up with a product that we called Magic Kit, which was a set of components for developers to build advanced user interface and very pretty user interface. So that was our own product, which was sold pretty much around the globe. And the company was sold in 1997. Yep. And a terrible deal. I was so naive there. I just think about how little I knew about business in those days. and so when I joined the purchasing and the company that bought us left that, then built, started a different company called Spheera, which did a management layer for hosting companies. We did the first virtual server technology.

18:51So it was even before VMware existed. it, I believe. And we started to sell that, got hit very strongly, of course, with the dot-com collapse. Which made me realize that I need to unlearn about economy, because one day everything was great, and then the next day everything was bad, and nothing changed in my business. And it was like this external thing that happened, and everything changed and what either. So I spent quite a while after that trying to learn as much as I can about economy because it was obvious that it is a significant, big significance for my life. And the next company that I founded was Wix.

19:41Yeah. So you've been building technology companies for over 30 years. Yes. Yeah. More than that because when it's a kid, you know, I have this crew that we were doing things together, Right. Not practical things, but we've been doing things. Yeah. Yeah. And all of those companies you've always built with your brother? No. This is the first company I did with my brother. Okay. You said something interesting that I'd love to unpack. I'd be foolish not to. You said you spent a lot of time studying the economy and you said you realized around if the market shifts or where the economy is at, it can affect your life, your business, et cetera, et cetera.

20:21um you know the economy right now is you know it's 2024 and the economy right now is a bit up and down you know it's probably since covid it's been pretty up and down rocky up down here there everywhere um people say that during this time period has a similar resemblance of of the previous tech boom and bust, especially with the introduction of AI, cryptocurrency technologies, blockchain technology, cryptocurrency, blockchain technologies. What's your take? Well, I think obviously there was a big bubble that burst, right? I think that we saw the market crashing and I think that in many places it's still too low to what it should be.

21:15But we have an issue, right? That interest rates are high, which makes it hard to fund companies, right? Because money is another place to go to. So as a company, you get less resources. Debt is more expensive. Less small businesses or medium-sized businesses are being created, which is usually a big part of the customer that you would have early on in any kind of a software business. So I would say we're still at the down of the cycle. Maybe starting to climb up, but we are not there yet. I think the government's not necessarily doing a good job of managing it. Yeah. So you guys are on the forefront of AI technology.

22:05Last year you launched an AI website builder, and you can basically build your own website in Wix through prompts. Where do you see that technology going? I love that. I think that we released our first AI-based website builder in 2016,

22:27and you just go in, type a few things on your business, and we would search the web for more information and just generate a website for you basically. Well, today it looks like very naive algorithms, but at that time it was like really cutting-edge algorithms. And I think that when I look at AI, of course, there are many very intelligent people that try to predict it, but I am a strong believer. I think that there's a long way for us to advance there. My one prediction is that none of us will remember NLMs in five years. That's one of my small predictions. I think we're going to get to much more interesting algorithms.

23:13As for WIS, the hardest part in building a website is that it takes a lot of effort to do the first version and a lot of different kinds of efforts because you have to do textual content, you have to have visual content, you have to do decomposition between them, you have to get storytelling right about your website. And it doesn't matter if it's a podcast, right, or if it's a website about selling T-shirts or if it's a yoga studio. Everyone has a different story and different way to talk about it, different way to present it. And this is what you want to carry into your website. that personal feeling with the story around it.

24:00And I believe that AI is a fantastic tool to make it easier for you to start, for you to change things, to edit things later. So I'm a strong believer in that. We've already seen great results with AI. We're seeing now with the current side generation and funnel that help you. And so I'm a strong believer that by reducing the friction and the amount of effort you need to build a website, we're going to get great results for our customers. And that in turn will lead to growth. Yeah. Yeah, of course. But beyond that, it's the thing about that you can come and say, well, I want to tell my story and I'm a yoga and I'm specializing in a studio in Brooklyn and I'm specializing in neuropa meditation and this kind of a thing.

24:50This is my philosophy. And to do that today, right? Well, you might be able to, but my English is definitely, even my Hebrew is not that good, that I can actually write it in a very proper way that I'll make people look wild. That's really an interesting story. And with AI, I can do it easily. So I think that this is a, I can probably even do it in Chinese now, right? Because the AI can translate to any language. So I think it's an incredible amount of power that we can give our customers. and I love that. I love every time we can do something like that to just get me excited. Are you hesitating to take the next step in your e-commerce journey?

25:31Founder Plus has you covered. With proven frameworks tailored to your business needs for fast results, a supportive community of over 30 ,000 like-minded entrepreneurs and weekly live mentorship sessions, Founder Plus is your key to success. Try Founder Plus today for just$1 for seven days and start building your dream business with confidence. You can visit founder.com forward slash start dollar trial or click the link in the description to claim your trial. So you went public over a decade ago. What's kept you motivated to lead Wix and continue to lead Wix? Well, because I think a couple of things.

26:09First of all, I said that was my, I always known what I want to do. so I didn't even wake up one day find myself leading weeks and I'm like oh my god I just want to sell it and do this other thing that I wanted to do with the rest of my life I'm doing the other thing I wanted to do with the rest of my life already so I think that's a very important thing the other side of it is that I believe there's so much potential so I actually get excited about a lot of the thing we do I go to work and a lot of time I'm waiting for the meeting because I'm excited about what we're going to do today, what we're going to work on today.

26:48And so I think that's a lot of it. And it was a big part of it, which was I knew that if we are able to go, because Wix is one of the few companies that IPO'd in Israel at that time from Israel, the larger companies, I think that I understood that it's going to be transformative to the local economy, which I'm sure is going to happen more and more in Australia because I see brilliant companies coming from there, right? And I think this is something that all of us care about, the environment around us. So all of those things, but mostly because I'm doing the thing I love to do. I'd love to hear your concept around decision-making.

27:34you said before that you only have to make around four decisions every quarter how is that possible can you talk us through that yeah absolutely so and this is something i say a lot there are many ceos that i mean mostly young ceos that are the data side everything in the company and and they know what is every customer problem the support problem is how much the pizza cost how much the flying course, they know all those things. I know none of that. I never approved a flight, I think, in my life to anybody. I never ordered the pizza, or I actually never checked the bill for the pizza if I ordered it, or a huge amount of other things, even in the professional side.

28:16I believe that good CEOs should hire fantastic people. You need to make it visible for them what you want to achieve, and what are the KPIs they have to look at. And you need to create this environment where you push the decisions down. So you can actually leave, you know, your mind, you can focus on the things that really matter, right? So we built this beautiful campus. And I saw the plan, but I was not involved. And the reason is mostly because I need to worry about the income, not the expenses, right? So that's already two-thirds of the decisions that they don't have to do. And I know I have really smart people to do that.

29:05And then there's a lot of things when it comes to the product and marketing that they have really smart people. So I know they approach me if they want to hear my thoughts about something. But if I didn't trust them, why did I hire them? and I always like to think about it that if I go to a room at Wix, to every meeting in Wix and I think that I'm the most intelligent person in that room I'm a shitty CEO if I go to a room and I think that oh my god, most of those guys are way smarter than me and know so much more about what they do than me then apparently I'm doing my job well so So I need to empower people to have the tools to make decisions and to have a framework by which we can measure the decisions, see the decisions, see the results of things.

30:00And I mean, that is a lot of what my job is. I'm not sure I'm taking four decisions a quarter, maybe sometimes less. Yeah, that's crazy. So it's something that I find so interesting and it's not talked about enough publicly is businesses are built by people. And you said shitty CEOs, they make too many decisions. They're too involved in the day-to-day. And I love what you said around, if you don't trust that person, why did you hire them in the first place? Then the question goes to naturally, how do you find great people? Like a lot of founders really, really struggle with this. I think this is probably the hardest point in founding a company.

30:47getting this team that will stay with you for a very long time with fantastic people. And I believe that you interview a lot of people, you hire, and you hire the one that you believe are superstars, and then you have to be realistic about it and know that it's very hard to know if somebody is a superstar when you hire them, but it's very easy to do it a month later. Let's say I'm hiring somebody who looks like a superstar. It's very hard to know if it's true or not. You get better at it, but you're not going to always hit it. But a month later, when you work with somebody, you know if it's a superstar or not.