April 30, 2019
To launch our community leaders’ webinar series, we started off with a bang, inviting Ariel Klikstein, Elementor Co-founder and CTO, and Yoni Luksenberg Elementor Co-founder and CEO to share their personal journeys that later became the story of Elementor.
As web creators themselves, at a small garage in Bnei Brak, Yoni and Ariel single-handedly designed and developed the Elementor Editor, after struggling to find a solution that met their needs.
Fast forward to 2020, Elementor powers more than 6M websites with more than 180 employees.
Kicking off the project, we had some technical glitches, so following the recording, you can also read our q&a transcript.
In this first-ever live webinar, we asked Ariel and Yoni the questions that interested you, leaders, to know. Here is their story
Q&A transcript
Q: What are your responsibilities within Elementor?
Ariel: I’m the CTO of Elementor. I’m responsible for the product and the technical support, among other things.
Yoni: And I’m the CEO of Elementor and I’m responsible for the design, marketing, education, content and so on.
Q: Has your role changed from the beginning of Elementor? What did you do when you just started out and what do you do now? What’s the scope?
Yoni: What you need to understand is that we started Elementor with three people in a garage and today we are 81 people. When we started, me and Ariel and Yakir Sitbon, I designed the interface of Elementor and, together with Ariel, we planned the product. How was it going to work? What were we going to put inside? What was the method? How were people going to design with Elementor? And, based on our perspective, how should designers in the industry using WordPress work? Yakir isn’t here, but he’s the genius behind the scenes as he’s responsible for the technology and, thanks to him, you can do all this magic with Elementor. Today, I’m no longer a designer. Today we try to employ amazing people to do what needs to be done, better than us. In our daily job, we prefer to be behind the scenes. We have a lot of work to do, and we have a talented guy to be in the front. But behind the scenes, we have a lot of things in development that we are creating for the amazing community of Elementor.
Q: What do you think made Elementor so unique? What created its success in such a competitive market?
Yoni: To answer this question, I need to go back about eight, nine years, when I just met Ariel. It was 2010. I was a designer, I started developing on WordPress. And together, we started to build websites for small companies. Together, we’ve built hundreds of fully customized WordPress sites. After we did that for a few years, we realized that something was wrong with the system. We had good clients and local brands, but something wasn’t right. We weren’t working right. Because, at the end of the day, every designer all over the world has a professional tool. PhotoShop for example. And every finance guy has Excel to create tables, they don’t work with paper anymore. So every industry has its professional tool. But what about our industry, the website building industry? Why was every web designer working on his own environment, in his own method and could not base his job around a strong product? On average, every website builder builds tens of sites a year. Every one of these sites has to be different, and sometimes you have to change websites and update them from time to time, or if you want to expand your business and you hire one more designer… Something was wrong about how it was working back then. At the same time, we saw the growth of companies like SquareSpace or Whibley or Wix that provide amazing user experience for people who want to build their own websites and don’t need any help. So we decided to create our own professional tool and came up with Elementor.
Yoni: Because of this background, we as professional web designers, still know what our users need. We listen to them and we talk to them, so we are still up to date and understand their needs and their pain, and that’s one key point. The other key point is that there are three main aspects to building each site. There’s the marketing aspect, the development aspect and the design aspect. Every site has a marketing mission. You build a site or a landing page because you want to do something; you want it for downloads, for leads, for branding, for listening, for podcasts –
Ariel: And for commerce, for business.
Yoni: Yes, to sell something, to promote something, and so on. And the design, it’s your way of promoting your mission. This is the language, this is how to express your marketing needs. And the development aspect is in enabling and allowing you to do what you need. We are in an interactive world. We are not in the print world. So, in every website, you need to combine these three aspects. In the past, the designer only knew how to work with design software, like PhotoShop. He didn’t know about the web, so he sent his work to the developer; and the developer only knew the coding, he knew nothing about the design. So he would do his bit, but then the marketer got it and all he cared about was funnels and conversions…
Our point is – you need to work together. It doesn’t matter if you are three people doing three different jobs or one guy doing all three things; the idea is to bring this professional, strong tool that combines those three aspects together in one space, and that is Elementor.
Q: Can you share your vision about Elementor? Did you foresee Elementor and what it is today? And do you know where you will be five years from now?
Yoni: I don’t know what the exact date of the future I foresee, but I’ll try to share my vision. When we started Elementor, our mission and our vision was to create the best tool for professional web designers that will help them to work more efficiently, enjoy their work, and earn money doing so. That was one of the key parameters for us, when we started Elementor. So for us, every additional feature that we can include that helps professional web designers to work more efficiently, is a necessary addition to Elementor. And in the past three years, we’ve been getting feedback from web designers that they are actually starting to earn money from their jobs and they’re no afraid or ashamed about it, because they deserve this, and that is the first step for us. But, if we compare it to other suites, like the Adobe suites, like the Microsoft Office suite, other professional suites, we still have a lot of work to do. Because, there is so much pain in the process, so many places in the web building system that are broken. Websites are dynamic and everything changes all the time; the technologies, the browsers, the devices, and the things that you can do, the trends… we need to be up to date every day. So we have a lot left to do. Think about the process, how you start a website, how you share a site. How are you starting your twentieth site of the year? Are sites fun for you?
You can work in collaboration with others on every platform today. You can write documents together, you can share documents in Dropbox, in Google Drive, and so on. You can work together on the same product in many areas, but when it comes to websites… you cannot. There is so much pain. Think about people who are creating hundreds of sites every year. Every site has a unique identity. You can’t share anything, you can’t work in one environment. We are so far away from our target.
In five years, which is a lot of time, I want to see a better place for all of us; because, if you will allow me to be a bit cliché here, we are creating a better world. Because if we are helping people create a better website – because they can focus on design, on content, instead of fighting with the system – then they can create a beautiful site, or a better site, which will have better performance and better conversions. Everything will be better. Our mission is far from complete.
Q: One of the major issues that you raised is about the roadmap. Mick from the Australia community just asked, “What is the process of planning Elementor’s roadmap? Do you take into consideration requests from the community?”
Ariel: Is GitHub Issues not a roadmap?
Q: Sort of.
Yoni: I don’t know if… Can someone tell me why it’s so important to share the roadmap? I don’t know, I like secrets. It’s part of the idea.
Okay, it’s a good question because we have gotten this question many times in the last three years. So first, let’s be very open and clear. We are in a very competitive industry, and our competitors, or wannabe competitors, are listening to everything. They are part of the community. They are part of the GitHub issues. They are listening to every commit that we are uploading to GitHub. Even features that we are working on, they are trying to release them before us and to be more competitive and more up to date.
When we started Elementor, we saw other products and other things and we tried to be like them and develop the same features and widgets and so on. But after about two year, I think we accomplished this mission. And, as of last year, we are trying to be the first in everything we do, and do it our way. We were the first ones who added popup to the system. Not the first time that someone did popup, but the first time someone did popup together with the editor. Every one of you tried to work with this. We are getting amazing feedback from the community. For the first time, people can design popups and make beautiful popups, not just ugly ones.
There’s the example of the motion effect or the theme builder, our unique method of the theme builder, and we have a lot of surprises in the upcoming months. Many things that we did in the last year are things that we are still working on and we want to take the time to do them right, because our responsibility is not to release it too early, like we did in the past. You need to know that in the last year, every release we had was after months of work and weeks of betas, internal betas and beta testers. We’re trying to find all the bugs before but it’s impossible, it’s Mission: Impossible, because of the way WordPress works. But the idea behind not sharing the roadmap is that it allows us to think and take our time when needed.
Sometimes we don’t release stuff because it’s not ready or it’s not cooked yet. And if you have an open roadmap, you get comments like “You promised last month that you will release XYZ”, and this is not how we want to work. We’re trying to do the best, we try to release the additions that we think will improve the way millions of users work; not just because someone mentioned it, or someone voted for it. Think about one of the most popular requests we get, of adding one more breakpoint. If we were to create some kind of a poll, or voting system, this will probably be one of the top three requests. Yeah, it’s very easy for us to do it, by the way. We can do it in our hour.
Ariel: I don’t know. (laughing).
Yoni: (laughing) You don’t know. It’s not that difficult to do it. But we realized that we can create damages –
Ariel: Don’t promise anything…
Yoni: I’m not promising. Maybe one day we will do it, because millions are asking for it every day. But we decided that the damage it can create is more significant than the benefit it will create. So sometimes, when you share the roadmap, or put something up for vote… it impacts the decision of what feature to publish. I don’t know if 80 percent or 70 percent of our features are from community requests. Every day we get comments and requests. We read everything and we collect all requests. We get them through the support and GitHub and Facebook and private emails, we get them on many platforms. We have a long list of feature requests. And we are trying to combine them all and learn from this list what we should do.
Q: Angel from the Madrid Meetup Group just asked, “What plans are there for future integration or additional alternatives to Gutenberg?”
Yoni: Last month we won the Torque Plugin Madness competition, and it was very nice to see the Elementor communities voting and getting involved in this competition to help us to win. It’s always great to win, even if it’s a small prize. But it was between Elementor to ACF. And if you think about the past, how people built sites, ACF was one of the most popular ways the professionals preferred to build websites. Because, whereas Elementor wants to give its users freedom and full flexibility, there are many professionals that said, “No. We won’t give our users the flexibility, we want to build them custom fields and tell them ‘Put your content here, there, here, there. This is what you’re going to do’.”
For me, in the year that everyone was talking about Gutenberg and the future of WordPress and the new editor – whether it’s good or bad – for me it’s not a competition. For me, it’s a democracy of the editor. Because we are all living in WordPress. Why is 30 percent of the internet based on WordPress? Why are you working on WordPress? There are so many site builders out there. Part of them, by the way, are very good; with a very good editor, very good user experience, performance, they’re good in many aspects. But, the open source idea – open source, period – is what brings everyone together, because of the idea that everyone can build in the same platform but in their own way. For me, if I think about the future of WordPress, on the past, present and future, it’s the ability of every person to choose their own way of working in WordPress.
One person prefers to work with Elementor. The other person prefers to work with ACF. Part of them prefer to work with other big page builders also. Which is good. And yeah, some of them prefer to work with the Gutenberg editor which, by the way, is a content editor, it’s not a design editor. But for us, this is the freedom. This is democracy, and our mission is to make Elementor so good, that this will not be your question. It will work for you perfectly and you will be able do everything with Elementor. So, someone will prefer Gutenberg, good luck for them.
Q: Louise from the Elementor Brazil community asks, “How about add-ons to Elementor?”
Yoni: We really like add-ons for Elementor.
Ariel: We have about 200 of them.
Yoni: I can tell you that when we thought about where Elementor would be two years from now or five years from now, one of our wishes was to create this ecosystem around Elementor. I’m talking about an ecosystem that includes experts, templates, add-ons, extensions, widgets, whatever. An ecosystem means two things; it means that every professional can find what they need. It doesn’t matter if you are going to create a site for a restaurant or you need a widget for a calendar – you will find it. And this is one of the keys that makes WordPress so big.
The other thing is that we as Elementor help every designer or every developer make money by using Elementor. And if you are a talented developer or a talented designer, you can create templates or add-ons and sell them and do business using Elementor, just like we did and like we are now doing. Think about it, we are a plugin for WordPress. Yeah, it’s not the average plugin and not the typical plugin but, at the end of the day, we are a plugin for WordPress and we have a nice business around it. So for us, to see people creating templates for Elementor and add-ons for Elementor, this is why we have invested time in our API. And we are working on tutorials for developers, and we are working on creating a unique blog for developers. Because this is something that is very important to the future of Elementor, because everyone can do their own interpretation of what a price table is and how to create a call to action and what needs to be the animation of the button.
So you’re more than welcome. And maybe we should release kind of a guideline. How to create…
Ariel: A guideline and a place for publishing.
Yoni: Yeah.
Q: Our final question will be from Verdi. “Is it conceivable for there to be a complete, stand-alone install of Elementor? One that does not even need a CMS.”
Yoni: I don’t know. This is a good question, but I don’t know what the answer should be. Because the answer is what the user will want. Because, Verdi, why did you choose WordPress? I don’t know why. You have your own answer why you chose WordPress, but you’re not alone. Millions, or tens of millions, or hundreds of millions of people all over the world chose WordPress as their own CMS. And they didn’t choose SquareSpace, or Drupal, or Wix, or Webflow, or whatever CMS or just custom code on bootstrap. And because of it, we respect your choice, and the other community people’s choice to work with WordPress. And because you want to enjoy other parts of WordPress too… The power of the community of WordPress is that they have 50,000 different plugins for every need. So if we were to get out from WordPress, I don’t know if it would be so good for you. Because you wouldn’t be able to enjoy other good products that are on the market. And you know what? We created a version of Elementor for Drupal. I don’t know if you know. But there is no market over there. So we are where the people are, and if the people choose WordPress, then so do we.
But, yes, we are trying to improve, and to continue to improve the way you work with WordPress. And we can do amazing stuff over there to improve the entire WordPress environment, not just the editor itself. Think about it: we started with the page, later with the post, then the header and the footer and the forms and the popups. And we can continue to expand it to many other places. It can be to the emails and it can be the dashboard, as well. We can expand the experience wherever we want, to what we think will answer the pain and the needs of our users. So, right now, I don’t see any reason to disconnect from WordPress. We love WordPress, by the way.
Q: So, thank you guys so much for being with us. Thank you guys for listening. I hope this was as informative as you expected. If you have any more questions, please reach out. Please post them on the video, or contact me directly, and we will continue this later on inside our group. So thank you, thank you Ariel and Yoni.
Ariel: Thank you.
Q: And have a great day.
Yoni: And a final note from me, to you. The communities are a strong part of Elementor. And when we think about the future, the communities are very, very important. The communities, discussion groups, the local meetups, local websites, the entire ecosystem. I saw that someone asked about the Elementor Experts that we were going to release in the upcoming months, which will be an arena for Elementor experts to share their job and to find other experts. And the expert platform will be part of the community too. We’ll have a unique way of combining the two, because we think that the community is part of Elementor. This is part of the reason that people are choosing Elementor. It’s because of the community. We are seeing it every day. Because, think about it – no one wants to choose a product that no one else knows about. And the community makes Elementor bigger. So thank you guys, every one of you in your community. Thank you guys.
Q: Bye, thank you guys.