I’m going to talk about products here, not companies - the companies have since merged. But really, I’m talking about two types of products:
- Traditional no-code website builders, like Wix, Webflow, Squarespace, and others.
- AI-native website builders, like Bolt, v0, Lovable, Base44, and others.
Why did the first category lose to the second one?
On the surface, it’s strange that the incumbents didn’t integrate AI faster and better. They already had great website-building products, and they had access to the exact same AI models every new startup uses. Couldn’t they just bolt on an assistant? Did they somehow miss what was happening?
A shallow analysis says big organizations make decisions slowly. That’s sometimes true, but it’s not the reason.
This isn’t about organizations. It’s about products and how they were built.
Before AI, the traditional products solved the “how do you build a website without code?” problem with very sophisticated systems for assembling sites and apps through visual drag-and-drop editors. It was a great approach - for people.
But it’s a terrible system for AI, which codes like an elite engineer on an espresso drip, yet operates a UI like a panda with a concussion.
The new generation, in contrast, built systems that let AI simply write code - the language it knows best.
In a wonderful irony, the incumbents lost because they built for people who, it turns out, no longer want to use their interfaces.
Couldn’t the incumbents adapt their products to the new technology?
Not really. These are massive products, and this is the core of what they are.
But couldn’t they build an entirely new product?
They could, and many did.
But that strategy erases most of the advantages of being a company with an established product, while preserving every disadvantage of being one. Reality has proven this unambiguously: there were plenty of strong incumbents, and there are plenty of companies today with insane growth. The intersection of those two groups is empty.
Credit to Wix for a company-saving acquisition. One of the legendary ones.
The exact same thing is happening in the no-code automation market. n8n, Zapier, and Make are the Wix, Webflow, and Squarespace of the automation world.
Good luck to them.
So why haven’t we seen the new generation’s automation unicorns yet?
The short answer: it’s a harder problem than websites.
Why is it harder? That’s a topic for another post. The short answer is verification.
Verifying a website or an app is natural for non-coders. They can just use it. That’s why new-generation website builders show you the rendered website on most of the screen.
Verifying a “backend” process has no natural interface.
Someone needs to invent that.
That’s us.
