"Growing Businesses Gives Me a Sense of Purpose." says Flow Ninja Founder/CEO

HackerNoon: What is your company in 2–5 words?

Uros Mikic: Full-service Webflow agency, one subscription.

Why is now the time for your company to exist?

We’ve built Flow Ninja by leveraging Webflow as a platform to power our product and marketing website and to offer Webflow to our customers. I believe Webflow’s CMS will become the go-to choice for all CMOs. It allows marketing teams to operate independently from engineering departments, providing greater control and flexibility over their websites.

Currently, there are many excellent CMS solutions available. However, once your website traffic exceeds 100,000 visits, you need a robust tool to manage your marketing efforts. At this scale, Webflow stands unrivaled.

Moreover, the ongoing challenge of expanding marketing teams involves hiring roles that are not required full-time. Our company addresses this issue by offering an entire team of design, development, and growth experts for the price of a single employee, all included in one subscription.

What do you love about your team, and why are you the ones to solve this problem?

I’m truly grateful that the team has been with me since our company was founded and that trust is still going strong. As I was 19 when we started, there were many bumps in the road, and were it not for the team surrounding me, it would have been a much more difficult journey.

We were among the first to start working in Webflow in 2015, around two years after it was launched.

If you weren’t building your startup, what would you be doing?

I’ve fallen in love with the game of growing businesses, and I think this will stick with me forever. It gives me a sense of purpose. It makes me seize the day. If it wasn’t for Flow Ninja, I genuinely believe I would look for a potential partnership to help another business or start a new one from scratch.

I must admit it: I’ve been daydreaming about running a traditional business. I think everything we do in the startup world would be ten times more effective if applied to a traditional mom-and-pop shop type of business. Introducing all of the systems related to HR, sales, marketing etc, would allow me to grow a traditional business to new heights.

One thing I would love is to spend more time in my garden. Suppose time were to stand still, relieving me of all accountability in my business. In that case, I'd likely indulge in ample moments tending to my garden, allowing my mind to unwind and rejuvenate

At the moment, how do you measure success? What are your metrics?

We have different metrics for different departments. We try to hold people accountable for specific metrics.

COO & CPO

• Customer churn
• Team attrition
• Company billability

CTO & Design

• Late tickets
• Billability
• Client initiatives
• Client reviews

Finance & Sales

• Number of closed leads
• Number of daily reachouts to cold clients
• Cashflow (We are a fan of profit-first)
• Net profit margin
• Projected vs actualized revenue

In a few sentences, what do you offer to whom?

We offer a full-service Webflow team, including strategy, design, development, QA, SEO, account management, and more — all within a single subscription via our custom client relationship management platform.

Our clients are usually product-led growth companies with more than $20M in revenue or funding and marketing teams of more than five people. We also work with enterprises and sales-led companies.

What’s most exciting about your traction to date?

As I write this, we are entering the most exciting period. As a profitable business, we are currently heavily investing in our team and strategic roles.

Still, one of my favorite accolades to date is the 2023 Webflow Enterprise Partner of the Year, awarded by Webflow.

Where do you think your growth will be next year?

We hope to increase our growth from 30% to 60% by the end of this year and expand even more next year. We recently onboarded a new sales team and a Chief Revenue Officer, so I am confident we could grow much more than this.

Tell us about your first paying customer and revenue expectations over the next year.

Ah, the first paying customer. No one likes to hear about that.

It was a website for an education institution that was built using a simple template. Another agency outsourced this project to us, presenting our work as theirs. They wanted the template to look like they'd built everything custom. On top of that, their budget barely covered our basic expenses, so we worked for peanuts, basically.

There were countless revisions, and everything took five times longer than expected. No one quit in the process, and everyone was happy in the end. Those were rookie mistakes, but you live and learn, I guess.

As for the expectations — we have aggressive plans to scale to $15M+ in the next five years. We’ve set a cornerstone for that: we focus on our custom-built in-house client relations platform and concentrate on our product. Finally, we ensure that our delivery puts us among the top 1% of all agencies offering similar services. With all that working well, we can now safely invest in growth.

We expect to be in the $2-3M range next year.

What’s your biggest threat?

There are a lot of threats, and we keep them at bay.

One might think that the biggest threat to the business is that we rely solely on Webflow to develop all of our websites. But I strongly disagree.

I truly believe that Webflow is the only competitive platform in the complex website builders market. I’m confident I can push all of our developments into that platform, and I sleep well because I’ve met every single member of the Webflow leadership team, and they really know what they are doing.