Interview of Avishai Abrahami, an Israeli entrepreneur co-founder of Wix.com, a web development platform empowering users with tools to create professional websites quickly and efficiently without skills in design or programming. The start-up was launched in 2006 and is now a multi-million dollars company that raised on November 2013 $127 million in Nasdaq for its initial public offering.The interview was conducted through a mail exchange, a few months ago, for another course.

Yoni Dayan

1) How have they got the idea to create Wix? What problems have they addressed and how are they meeting the needs?In 2006, Avishay and his two co-founders, Giora Kaplan and Nadav Abrahami, were working on another start-up idea and had already raised seed investment for it. Being a techie and an experienced start-up person, Avishay volunteered to develop their website thinking it would be very easy. But they were all surprised how challenging it was. This difficulty made it clear for them that they had to go in a different direction in terms of business: simplifying website creation so that anyone could do it.The Wix platform was therefore the result of an “accidental fate”. They realized that there was a real need to let anyone easily create professional and beautiful websites, and the offer for such service was rather limited around that time. But they wanted to do more than that, so they gave birth to a platform that empowered users to truly express their personality, brand, hobby, business, art or event in a meaningful way for little or no cost at all.

2) What was the initial process followed to get started? (competencies used? what about the technical aspect and the funding?)Wix was founded with an "all hands on deck"/lean start-up approach with everyone getting involved in all areas of the business. For example, in the early stages, the co-founders understood that the best way to improve their value proposition was by interacting with and listening to their users, so they made sure that everyone no matter of their position in the start-up, was viewing and answering user support queries.

Wix has since grown to over 500 employees, some of whom have been with the co-founders since the very beginning. Avishai is proud of the working environment that they’ve created at Wix. He reported me that their employees are valued for their talents, their energy and their passion, and that the company is leveraging their creativity. The whole is making their office a dynamic place to come to in the morning.

Wix prides itself in never staying put. They believe that their very product is their best marketing tool and their aim is to continue developing amazing and more powerful ones that predict and respond even more to their users’ needs and provide them with the best experience possible. The customers are really at the heart of their business model.

To reach this situation, they had to gather funding before going public in November 2013, so they were backed by investors Insight Venture Partners, DAG Ventures, Mangrove Capital Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners and Benchmark Capital, that they progressively managed to convince with their value proposition and the early success of their platform with already 3.5 million of users by 2010.Regarding their structure, they are headquartered in Tel Aviv, and the more they have grown (now counting 40 million users across 190 countries), the more they have opened offices in other parts of the world like in San Francisco and New York.

3) Is your current business model and activity much different than the one you came up with initially (in other words, the difference between the pre-seed/seed stage and the current days)?Their business model remained more or less the same since their beginning. Wix was built on a freemium revenue method (meaning users don’t pay to use their services), and earns its profit through premium upgrades that allow users to connect their sites to their own domains, remove Wix branding, add eCommerce capabilities and more. The core idea, which persisted from 2006 to now, is that everyone should be able to get their business or brand an online presence by their own means, without any technical or budgetary constraints. The experience and features that their free users get from the Wix platform is identical to what their Premium users get. Their users can keep their free websites for as long as they’d like, but from what Wix staff has seen, as their businesses grow, users often upgrade to a Premium plan so they can benefit from a more branded online presence.

While the backbone of Wix remained roughly untouched since 2006, obviously they were multiple improvements in terms of technology and offer since 2006, with upgraded “drag & drop” tools (the way users can intuitively create their websites), an enhanced interface, the switch from Adobe Flash technology to HTML5 for their site builder, and the addition of more functionalities to design websites suited for mobiles devices, with for example their Wix App Market.