David Rusenko at Startup School 2012

Rusenko describes Weebly as a simple way to create websites, blogs, and online stores. He shows examples from a photographer, an interior designer, a graphic designer, a ukulele maker whose orders grew to a three-to-six-month backlog, and a student group that raised over $100,000 for an orphanage in Kenya.

Rusenko and his co-founders began Weebly as a class project at Penn State in 2006. After months of work, they were getting only 12 signups on one day, then about 30 after a private beta invitation. He applied to Y Combinator shortly before the deadline, and the team moved to San Francisco after being accepted.

During the YC program, Weebly had fewer than 100 daily signups, and features in TechCrunch, Newsweek, and Time produced temporary spikes. By April 2007, the company had less than $100 in its bank account, but raised a $650,000 angel round. Rusenko says the first sustained increase in daily signups came about 20 months after the project began, through word of mouth.

Weebly launched its Pro product and domain sales in July 2008, but the financial crisis made fundraising difficult. The founders mapped bill due dates against expected income and prioritized payroll and server costs. In January 2009, Weebly reached breakeven, about three years after work began; by February 2010 it was gaining roughly 5,000 users a day organically.

Rusenko says Weebly partnered with Sequoia Capital in March 2011 and, at the time of the presentation, powered about 2% of active websites. He describes the company’s growth as unfinished and says many people still find it too difficult to participate online. His central advice is to keep working on a valuable problem: building a large company can take seven to ten years.