David Rusenko at Startup School 2012

Well, thanks for having me, guys. Uh, you can hear me all right? Cool.

So, I wanted to start by just uh, going over the Weebly story a little bit, telling you uh, kind of how we got to where we got to today and some of the lessons we learned along the way.

So, uh, what is Weebly first of all? If some of you guys haven't heard of it, uh, Weebly is a simple and powerful way to create a site. People want to create a site, they want to create a blog, they want to sell things online, and they just want it to work. They don't want any of the frustrations around it.

Um, so let me show you a couple Weebly sites. Uh, the first site is uh, a photographer from Toronto showcasing their photography. Uh, the second site is an interior designer from Oregon. These they've actually been featured in Dwell magazine for their interior designs run their website on Weebly.

Uh, the third site is a graphic designer from California. You can see all these sites just look great, and uh, not one line of HTML or CSS was written for these sites.

Um, this next site is pretty special. This is Brian; he's 80 years old. Uh, he retired and his passion is building ukuleles. He started doing this in his spare time, went on Weebly, and created a website. Uh, what do you know? The word got out, and, you know, he could build a couple ukuleles out of his shop per month. He now has a 3 to 6-month backlog of ukuleles.

And this last site's really special to us. Uh, you may have seen the Long Anda initiative, I think, last year. Um, but this group of students who had volunteered in Kenya heard this story about Omari, who had been brutally attacked while trying to defend his orphanage, and they didn't even have a fence to defend themselves.

So they created a Weebly website about this, posted it to Reddit, and were able to raise over $100,000 in less than a week for the orphanage. They built a wall, a fence, and much more than that, and that's actually now helping out that orphanage in Kenya.

So a little bit about our story and how we got to where we are today. Uh, in early 2006, as part of a class project at Penn State, um, we were uh, came up with the same idea. Six years ago, we thought, you know, why is this so hard? Why is it still so hard to build a website? We're seeing people all around us, uh, that were just struggling, and so we came up with the idea. We started working on...

Now, I'm going to introduce you to the theme of the presentation here. This is a graph of our new signups per day. Uh, this is August 2006. Uh, this is real data, and you can see up at the top it's six months after we started working on Weebly.

Uh, so, six months after we wrote our first line of code, our grand signup day, we got 12 new users. And, uh, you know, it was just kind of friends and family. It was still alpha stage. This wasn't something that was easy to pump out in a month; it was something that was difficult that took some time to build.

Uh, so over that summer, Dan, and I, and Chris were working on it. Uh, here's October 2006—eight months later. So we've now been writing code and working on the idea for eight months. Um, we posted a private beta invitation on some forums, and we thought, man, this is going to blow up.

Uh, and we got about 30 people to sign up that day. Um, so, you know, around this time, I was up pretty late at night, was browsing Slashdot— that kind of tells you also, uh, you know, that was the most popular tech news site back then—and I was reading an article on, uh, why.

A commentator said, you know, I think I've heard about this company before, I'm not really sure. Started reading the article, oh, this sounds really cool, this sounds interesting, oh, application deadlines in two hours. Uh, so, uh, well, I thought, you know, what the hell, I'll put something really quick.

Uh, you know, it doesn't hurt to apply. Now, I didn't actually have enough time to call up Dan or Chris to ask them if they'd be willing, uh, to drop out of school and move to San Francisco.

Um, so I took a guess. Uh, I figured, you know, Chris would probably do it; he's a little... he's a pretty wild guy. And Dan's a pretty wild guy too, but I figured he might want to finish his college...