Webflow CEO explains why she builds vertical AI for marketing teams, not everyone
aakashgupta · x · 2026-11-11
Webflow CEO Linda Tong told The Growth Podcast that narrowing from a horizontal website company to serving marketing teams of dozens-to-hundreds was "terrifying" but the right call.
- The box got drawn around actual usage: developers and PMs using the product turned out to be web devs and growth PMs for marketing teams, so they count as marketing users.
- On vertical AI: ChatGPT or Anthropic won't ship an analytics platform or targeting wired into your customer data out of the box — "you don't need a model that knows Washington was our first president." Teams are training mini models because they're far more effective for narrow use cases.
- On frontier labs: the domain "probably isn't their first priority right now," though she admits they may eventually enter — "I think they all think there's going to be one company in the future."
- Her agents should keep learning from in-product workflows: treat the agent like an intern, with the hope it's not an intern 60 days later.
She picked the customer first; the moat came second.
Related event: Webflow CEO embraces vertical AI strategy and "boomerang" vibe coders(3 posts)→
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