Waffle: AI operating system for SMBs starting with Wix replacement — 700 websites built in 3 weeks with no marketing
Jun 11, 2025
Key Points
- Waffle launches AI website builder for SMBs and reaches 700 projects in three weeks with zero marketing, driven by YC visibility and word-of-mouth.
- The platform bundles website building, email, bookings, and payments by wrapping existing developer tools like Resend and Stripe rather than rebuilding infrastructure.
- AI-generated design remains a constraint; founders acknowledge default output is generic, and even with UI component libraries, results are still "quite generic."
Summary
Waffle is building an AI operating system for small and medium businesses, starting with a Wix replacement. The company launched its AI website builder three weeks ago and has already built 700 projects with zero marketing spend. Growth has been driven entirely by YC launch visibility and word of mouth, expanding at 14% week-over-week.
The core product combines website building, email, bookings, and payments into a single platform. Rather than rebuilding infrastructure from scratch, Waffle wraps around existing developer tools. The company uses Resend for email (cheaper than Mailchimp at developer pricing) and integrates with Stripe for payments, capturing margin on the underlying tools.
Design quality
Default Claude output is generic and unopinionated. The founders are working with 21st Dev, a tool that stores UI components and offers remix functionality, to push beyond template-like results. The work is "pretty good at UI" but still "quite generic," suggesting design remains a constraint rather than a solved problem.
Target customers
Near-term focus is small family-run businesses such as travel agents and law firms who need basic digital presence. Long-term, e-commerce is the real opportunity because those businesses care more about their website's functionality and quality.
Team
Both founders are computer science graduates from Oxford and École Polytechnique Lausanne who met in London. Neither has prior full-time work experience outside of Waffle, where they have been coding full-time since launch.
700 projects built in three weeks with zero marketing is a strong early signal of product-market fit among price-sensitive SMBs who do not want to learn traditional website builders.