Who actually uses these products,
and what made them stay.

The Spline Web 3D Designer

A product designer, visual designer, or creative developer who started using Spline because they wanted 3D on their website or product and Blender was too much. They have a 2D design background — Figma is their native language. Spline felt like Figma with a Z-axis. They've built at least one thing they're proud of: a 3D hero section, an interactive product visualization, a floating element that reacts to cursor position. They use it for client work and personal projects. They consider themselves an early adopter of the idea that 3D should be accessible to product designers, not just motion designers.

“They're redesigning a SaaS product's marketing homepage.”

The Webflow No-Code Designer

A designer — visual, brand, or marketing — who uses Webflow to design and build production websites without relying on a developer. They came from Figma or Sketch and discovered that the gap between design and the live site was where everything good went to die. Webflow closed that gap. They have strong opinions about how websites should look and work, and Webflow lets them act on those opinions directly. They are faster in Webflow than any developer who doesn't know the design would be.

“It's launch week for a new product campaign.”

The Webflow Design-to-Production Designer

A web designer or design agency owner who ships production websites directly from Webflow — no developer handoff, no code translation step. They think in layout, typography, and spacing, but they've also learned Webflow's class system, CMS collections, and interaction triggers. They are a designer who became a builder. They're proud that they can ship a client site in a week, but they're aware that their Webflow projects are sometimes held together with class naming conventions only they understand.

“A teammate asked how they managed build responsive, pixel-perfect websites that match the design vision exactly.”

The Wix First-Time Website Owner

A small business owner, freelancer, event organizer, or individual who needed a website and chose Wix because they wanted to design it themselves. They are not technical. They have no interest in becoming technical. They evaluated Squarespace and liked Wix's drag-and-drop freedom more — the ability to place anything anywhere without template constraints. They've built a website they're proud of. It has some inconsistencies that they can't see but a designer would notice immediately. This is fine. The website does what they need it to do.

“The shift was quiet.”

The Spline 3D Web Designer

A web designer or creative developer who uses Spline to add 3D to their web projects without the learning curve of Blender or Cinema 4D. They create 3D hero sections, interactive product visualizations, animated icons, and immersive landing pages. They are a designer who crossed into the third dimension. They appreciate that Spline runs in the browser, exports to the web natively, and feels like a design tool rather than a 3D modeling application. They are the person making websites feel like they have depth.

“A SaaS company wants a landing page that stands out.”

The Liveblocks Real-Time Developer

A frontend developer who needs to add real-time collaboration to an existing app — live cursors, presence indicators, shared document editing, or collaborative whiteboards. They chose Liveblocks because building WebSocket infrastructure from scratch is a project in itself, and they need to ship the feature, not the infrastructure. They understand React, they understand state management, and Liveblocks extends those mental models to multiplayer. They are building the "Google Docs" experience for their product.

“It happened mid-workflow — the developer is adding collaborative editing to a project management tool.”

The Squarespace Small Business Owner

A small business owner — a bakery, a yoga studio, a photography business, a consulting firm — who built their website on Squarespace because they needed something that looked professional without hiring a designer or developer. They chose a template, swapped in their photos, wrote their copy, and launched. They're not technical, but they figured out the editor. They update the site monthly — new photos, seasonal hours, blog posts when they have time. The website is their digital storefront, and they treat it with the same pride they treat their physical one.

“A potential customer finds the small business owner's Squarespace site through Google.”

The Squarespace Small Business Owner

A photographer, therapist, consultant, restaurant owner, or small retailer who built their own website on Squarespace because it was the best option they could manage independently. They are not a developer. They do not want to be. They want a website that looks professional, is easy to update, and doesn't require a support ticket to change the menu. They've succeeded at this mostly. There are two things on their site that have been wrong for three months because fixing them would require understanding something they don't want to learn.

“The shift was quiet.”

The Wix Small Business Builder

A small business owner — a personal trainer, a photographer, a bakery, an accountant — who built their website on Wix because they could drag and drop their way to something that looked professional enough. They aren't designers. They aren't developers. They are business owners who need an online presence. They picked a template, moved things around until it looked right, added their text and photos, and hit publish. They update it when they remember to. It's not perfect, but it exists, and it brings in customers.

“A potential client searches "photographer near me" and finds the business owner's Wix site on the second page of Google.”

The Zoom Event Producer

An event coordinator, marketing ops person, or executive assistant who runs 5–20 Zoom events per month for audiences of 50–2,000 people. They're not a video producer by training but they've become one by necessity. They know how to spotlight a speaker, manage breakout rooms, and recover from someone sharing the wrong screen — all while monitoring chat for questions. They have a pre-event checklist that's 30 items long because they learned the hard way.

“It happened mid-workflow — it's 5 minutes before a 500-person webinar.”

The Framer Motion Designer

A product designer or motion designer who gravitates toward Framer because it treats animation and interaction as first-class design elements. They don't just design screens — they design how screens transition, how elements respond to hover, how content enters and exits. They've used Figma for static design but find it limiting when the design's value is in how it moves. They are the person who insists that the ease curve matters and that a 200ms delay feels different from a 300ms delay.

“A teammate asked how they managed design and prototype complex animations and transitions that developers would struggle to implement from specs.”

The Stripe Integration Developer

A full-stack or backend developer at a startup or mid-size company who built and maintains the Stripe integration for their product. They integrated Stripe once — it took a week in dev, two days in staging, and then went live and mostly just worked. Now they're the person who gets the Slack message when a payment fails. They know the Stripe docs well enough to find what they need. They have a complicated relationship with webhooks.

“A teammate asked how they managed understand what happened when a payment fails before the customer reaches support.”

The Zapier Power Automator

A RevOps lead, marketing ops specialist, or operations manager who has become their company's automation architect without the title. They've connected 15–30 apps through Zapier and built workflows that the entire company depends on but nobody else understands. They started with simple two-step Zaps and now build multi-step workflows with filters, paths, formatters, and webhooks. They are the person who gets called when "something stopped working" — which means a Zap failed and nobody noticed until the damage was done.

“A teammate asked how they managed build multi-step automations that handle edge cases without breaking.”

The Sanity Content Architect

A developer or content architect who uses Sanity because they think about content as structured data, not pages. They design content models that serve web, mobile, email, and API consumers from a single source. They've built custom studios, created real-time collaborative editing environments, and used GROQ to query content in ways traditional CMS query languages can't express. They are the architect of the content layer, and they treat content modeling with the same rigor as database schema design.

“Not a single dramatic moment — more like a Tuesday at 3pm when they realized they hadn't thought about customizing the Studio deeply requires significant React knowledge, raising the bar for non-senior developers in two weeks.”

The Make Integration Architect

An automation specialist, operations engineer, or technical ops manager who builds complex workflows in Make because Zapier wasn't enough. They connect 10–30 tools with branching logic, iterators, aggregators, error handlers, and data transformations. They build automations that look like flowcharts, not if-then rules. They've learned Make's visual interface deeply — routers, filters, webhooks, custom HTTP modules. They are the person who automates what everyone else does manually, and they take quiet pride in systems that run for months without intervention.

“A teammate asked how they managed build multi-step automations with branching logic that handles different cases (approval/rejection, success/failure).”

The Framer Interactive Designer

A product designer or creative developer who uses Framer for either high-fidelity interactive prototypes or production marketing sites — often both. They came from Figma and knew it wasn't built for interaction. They came from Webflow and wanted more design control. Framer sits between those two worlds and they've made it home. They are comfortable with the code escape hatch. They don't use it unless they have to. When they have to, they can.

“The shift was quiet.”

The Contentful Content Manager

A content manager, digital editor, or marketing manager at a company with a developer-built Contentful implementation. They publish product pages, blog posts, campaign content, and documentation through Contentful's web interface. They did not design the content model — a developer did. They live inside that model every day and have a detailed understanding of which fields do what and which ones are a mystery. They are not a developer but they've learned to think in content types.

“A teammate asked how they managed publish and update content quickly without waiting on a developer for every change.”

The Google Analytics Marketing Manager

A marketing manager or digital marketer at a company of 10–200 people who is responsible for understanding how the website is performing and why. They are not a data person. They've been through the GA4 migration and have not recovered emotionally. They know enough to navigate the interface but not enough to build custom reports without three tabs of documentation open. They check analytics several times a week and leave most sessions with more questions than answers.

“The VP of Marketing wants to know if the new landing page is performing better than the old one.”

The Contentful Headless CMS Developer

A frontend or full-stack developer who integrates Contentful as the content backend for a website, app, or digital experience. They set up the content models, build the delivery layer, and create the bridge between what content editors want to publish and what the frontend can render. They appreciate the API-first approach but have learned that "headless" means they're responsible for everything the CMS traditionally handled — routing, preview, caching, image optimization. They build the head.

“A marketing team wants to launch a new campaign page type.”

The Liveblocks Collaboration Developer

A frontend or full-stack developer at a SaaS company whose product needs real-time collaboration — multiple users working in the same document, canvas, or interface simultaneously. They've looked at building it themselves. The WebSocket infrastructure, the conflict resolution, the presence system, the storage — it's 3–6 months of work that isn't their product. They chose Liveblocks to compress that into a week. They are now the person at their company who knows how Liveblocks works. This is a niche form of expertise they didn't expect to develop.

“The shift was quiet.”

The Roam Research Networked Thinker

A writer, researcher, or knowledge worker who uses Roam Research as an extension of their thinking. They don't organize notes into folders — they write, link, and let the graph reveal connections. They use daily notes as their entry point, double-bracket references to build a web of ideas, and block references to connect thoughts across pages. They've read about Zettelkasten, spaced repetition, and evergreen notes. They've adopted some of these ideas and adapted others. They are building a thinking system, not a filing system.

“Not a single dramatic moment — more like a Tuesday at 3pm when they realized they hadn't thought about performance degrades with large graphs — search and page loads slow down over time in two weeks.”

The Readwise Knowledge Synthesizer

A voracious reader — books, articles, newsletters, podcasts, Twitter threads — who realized that reading without capturing is forgetting. They use Readwise to collect highlights from Kindle, Instapaper, podcasts, and the web, then Readwise Reader for their daily reading queue. They've built a workflow where everything they consume flows through one system, highlights are tagged and resurfaced, and insights compound over time. They are the person who can always find "that article I read about X" because they highlighted the key passage six months ago.

“It happened mid-workflow — the knowledge worker is writing a strategy memo about pricing models.”

The Vercel Agency Deployer

A developer at a web agency or a freelancer who deploys and manages 20–100 client projects on Vercel. They chose Vercel because the developer experience is excellent and Next.js deploys are zero-config. But managing 50 projects across 15 clients has turned deployment into project management. They spend as much time in the Vercel dashboard organizing teams and domains as they do writing code. They know every deployment preview URL is a demo link, and they've sent the wrong preview to the wrong client exactly once.

“A client emails asking why their site is showing an old version.”

The Readwise Highlight Librarian

A voracious reader — typically a knowledge worker, researcher, writer, or lifelong learner — who realized that reading without retention is expensive entertainment. They started using Readwise because they kept forgetting what they'd read. They now have 8,000–30,000 highlights across Kindle books, web articles, PDFs, and podcasts. They do the daily review. Not every day — most days. The review takes 5 minutes and resurfaces things they've completely forgotten. Occasionally a highlight resurfaces at exactly the right moment for what they're working on. This is not magic. This is why they pay for Readwise.

“It happened mid-workflow — tuesday morning.”

The Google Analytics Marketing Analyst

A digital marketer, marketing analyst, or growth lead who uses Google Analytics as their primary source of truth for website performance. They lived in Universal Analytics for years — they knew where every report was, how sessions worked, and what their bounce rate meant. Then GA4 happened. The interface changed, the data model changed, sessions became events, and reports they relied on disappeared or moved. They're learning GA4 because they have to, not because they wanted to. They are adapting their expertise to a tool that feels like it was rebuilt for data engineers, not marketers.

“Not a single dramatic moment — more like a Tuesday at 3pm when they realized they hadn't thought about the GA4 interface is unintuitive — reports that took one click in UA now require custom explorations in two weeks.”

The Cal.com Developer Scheduler

A developer, indie maker, or privacy-conscious professional who uses Cal.com because they either self-host it or value that they can. They were on Calendly and either hit a pricing ceiling, wanted customization Calendly doesn't allow, or made a deliberate decision about data ownership. Cal.com is open source. They can read the code. They can modify it if they need to. The fact that this is possible — even if they never do it — matters to them in a way that influences their tooling choices.

“It happened mid-workflow — they're building a product that includes embedded scheduling — customers can book time with their su.”

The Mailchimp Small Business Owner

A small business owner, solopreneur, or creator who sends a regular email to their list — weekly newsletter, promotional email, customer announcement. They are not a marketer by training. They set up Mailchimp because it was recommended and free. They've been using it for 1–4 years. They care about their list and think of it as their most direct connection to their customers. They are not fully sure what open rates mean in a post-Apple-MPP world but they still check them because it's the only signal they have.

“A teammate asked how they managed send emails their list looks forward to, not emails that get unsubscribed from.”

The Fly.io Container Developer

A backend or full-stack developer who needs to run server-side applications — not just static sites and serverless functions — and wants them deployed globally without managing Kubernetes or paying for managed Kubernetes overhead. They found Fly.io and found a platform that takes a Dockerfile and runs it near users. They `fly deploy`. It works. They have opinions about Fly.io that include real affection and specific frustrations, which is the relationship one has with a platform they actually depend on.

“It happened mid-workflow — they're deploying a Phoenix application — Elixir, with WebSockets and a persistent database connecti.”

The Stripe Platform Builder

A technical founder or senior developer building a platform where money flows between multiple parties — a marketplace, a SaaS with payouts, or a platform that onboards sellers. They chose Stripe because the API is good, but they've discovered that Stripe Connect is a different animal entirely. They understand payment intents but still get confused by the relationship between accounts, charges, and transfers. They are building financial infrastructure and it keeps them up at night.

“The first time a seller on their platform got paid automatically — money flowed from buyer to platform to seller with the correct fee split, no manual step, no CSV export.”

The Craft Personal Document Creator

A professional in the Apple ecosystem — Mac, iPad, iPhone — who uses Craft for everything from meeting notes to project proposals to personal journals. They chose Craft because it feels native to macOS and iOS in a way that Notion and Google Docs don't. They value beautiful typography, smooth block-based editing, and the ability to work offline on an airplane and sync when they land. They are a writer who cares about the writing environment, not just the output.

“The shift was quiet.”

The Cal.com Scheduling Power User

A consultant, agency owner, or team lead who uses Cal.com because Calendly was too simple for their scheduling needs. They manage round-robin scheduling for a team, paid consultation bookings, multi-timezone availability, and custom booking forms that collect information before the meeting. They chose Cal.com because it's open-source, self-hostable, and extensible in ways Calendly's paid tiers can't match. They are the scheduling architect for their team.

“It happened mid-workflow — a consulting agency needs different scheduling for three scenarios: free 15-minute discovery calls (routed to available consultant), paid 60-minute strategy sessions (It happened mid-workflow — a consulting agency needs different scheduling for three scenarios: free 15-minute discovery calls (routed to available consultant), paid 60-minute strategy sessions (The aha moment happened the first time they used Cal.”

The Substack Independent Publisher

A writer, journalist, or subject-matter expert who has turned their expertise into a Substack newsletter with paying subscribers. They are not a blogger — they are running a media business. They write 2–4 times per week, manage a growing list of free and paid subscribers, and check their subscriber metrics more often than they'd admit. They chose Substack because it was the simplest path from "I should write" to "people are paying me to write." They appreciate the simplicity but worry about what happens if the platform changes its terms.

“The shift was quiet.”

The Replit Coding Educator

A coding instructor, bootcamp teacher, or CS professor who uses Replit because it eliminates the "but it works on my machine" problem. Every student gets the same environment, in the browser, with no setup. They can see student code in real time, run it, and give feedback without cloning repos or debugging local environments. They've taught programming long enough to know that environment setup kills motivation faster than any algorithm does. They chose Replit to remove the barrier between "wanting to code" and "coding."

“A teammate asked how they managed eliminate setup and environment issues so students can focus on learning to code, not configuring tools.”

The Kajabi Course Creator

A consultant, coach, or subject-matter expert who has turned their expertise into an online course business on Kajabi. They teach everything from business strategy to photography to fitness. They chose Kajabi because they didn't want to connect Teachable + ConvertKit + Stripe + WordPress + Zapier just to sell a course. They build landing pages, host video lessons, manage email sequences, process payments, and track student progress — all in one platform. They are a teacher who became a business owner, and the business runs on Kajabi.

“A teammate asked how they managed create and deliver online courses with video, text, quizzes, and downloadable resources.”