The History of Weebly

“How many people have good information that they would like to put on the web, but currently don't know how?” is a quote from Weebly.com’s first blog post by their founders.  Penn State grads David Rusenko, Dan Veltri and Chris Fanini decided to start up Weebly.com, an Ajax (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) site creator, after deciding to create a software that made website creation simple.  Co-founder Veltri says in one of his blog entries: “So instead of worrying about the code, you worry about the content,” describing an advantage of Weebly.  Weebly was given its name because “it sounded good and the domain name was open”. 

To gain funding they applied to a Silicon Valley type boot camp called Y Combinator described by a Newsweek article as “‘American Idol’ meets Wired magazine”.  They were accepted to the program and received funding to begin their site.  After the program the “Weeblies” were funded $650,000 from Conway, tech investor Mike Maples and Gmail writer Paul Buchheit.  Their next task was graduating Penn State and officially launching Weebly in the summer of 2006.

They had their first private launch (because of their limited start-up capacity) on September 12, 2006.  Their next big step was a re-launch on March 7, 2007 introducing a new design and new features.  Weebly continued to gain success and in July they were voted one of Time’s 50 Best Websites of 2007.

Two-thousand and eight brought the most exciting news for Weebly and in June they announced the addition of Adsense to their features.  They hit 1,000,000 users in December, a huge milestone.  Weebly continues to grow and flourish each day with new users and new features.


Founders: Chris Fanini, David Rusenko and Dan Veltri

Links and Citations

http://www.newsweek.com/id/34734

http://www.time.com/time/specials/2007/article/0,28804,1633488_1633608_1633636,00.html

http://blog.weebly.com/

http://www.crunchbase.com/company/weebly