David Chen

A website builder for people who were never invited to build one.

David Haisha Chen runs Strikingly, the platform that turns a blank screen into a published, mobile-ready website before your coffee gets cold. The pitch is small and the ambition is not: hand the web back to people who only ever consumed it. A baker, a photographer, a high-school club, a one-person consultancy - each gets a site that looks deliberate instead of default.

The company is split across two time zones, Shanghai and San Francisco, and so is Chen. He keeps the calendar of an operator: interviews most of the day, decisions between them, and a single afternoon block reserved for the one project he refuses to delegate. He talks about products the way other founders talk about funding rounds - as the only thing that actually matters.

His measure of success is unfashionable. Not reach, not impressions, but affection. He would rather have a hundred people who love the product than a million who sort of like it. Strikingly grew 40% month over month for more than a year on that bet alone, without buying a single ad.

It is worth pausing on the path that got him here, because it does not read like a tech founder’s. Before Strikingly, Chen co-founded Moneythink, a nonprofit teaching financial literacy to urban high schoolers that earned a nod from the White House. He spent a summer in derivatives at Goldman Sachs and a year directing programs for Chinese social entrepreneurs at an organization called ECSEL. Economics at the University of Chicago was the through-line, until the website builder pulled him out of the lecture hall for good.

The web has plenty of readers. It needs more writers.

Strip away the funding history and the accelerator badge and Chen’s entire career points at one sentence: he wants to turn consumers of the web into creators of it. For most of the internet’s life, publishing meant either hiring a developer or surrendering to a template that fought you at every turn. Chen’s bet was that the gap between “I have something to say” and “here is my website” should be measured in minutes, not weeks.

That is a harder problem than it sounds. A tool simple enough for a first-timer usually disappoints anyone with taste; a tool powerful enough for a designer usually terrifies everyone else. Strikingly’s answer was to make the easy path also the good-looking one - mobile-ready by default, responsive without a setting to toggle, presentable the moment you hit publish. The constraint is the feature.

The customer Chen kept in his head was never the agency or the enterprise. It was the person who had been quietly locked out: the freelancer, the small shop, the side-hustle, the club that needed a page by Friday. Build for them, he argues, and the product stays honest. Build for the spreadsheet, and it slowly stops serving anyone at all.

Loyalty compounds. Reach evaporates.

The “superfans, not customers” line is more than a slogan; it is the growth strategy that carried Strikingly for its first years. Instead of buying attention, the company tried to earn devotion - support that answered fast, a product worth recommending, and users who turned into a sales force without being asked. Forty percent month-over-month growth, sustained for over a year, came almost entirely from word of mouth.

Chen’s framing is mathematical and a little contrarian. A million lukewarm users churn quietly and tell no one. A hundred people who genuinely love the product stay, pay, and bring friends. In a market crowded with Wix, Squarespace, Weebly and WordPress, he chose to compete on affection rather than ad spend - a slower curve that bends harder over time.

Push-ups before email.

Chen opens the day with sixty push-ups and sit-ups - he says it clears his head before a single message gets answered. Then breakfast, then the people work: HR meetings and a long stretch of interviews that eat most of the calendar. Decisions and email get squeezed into the gaps between candidates.

The afternoon holds one protected block for a project he champions personally, the part of the company he will not hand off. If he’s home before ten, there’s a short evening workout. Before bed, he writes down tomorrow’s priorities so the next morning starts already pointed in a direction.

His tools are deliberately boring - Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendar, a form builder. The philosophy underneath is less boring: when the work is a calling, you stop trying to wall it off from the rest of your life, because there’s nothing to protect yourself from. Find the job, career or calling you’re actually passionate about, he says, and you never have to think about how to keep work limited.

The interview-heavy calendar is a tell. Chen spends more of his day on who joins the company than on almost anything else, which is its own kind of product decision - the people are the product behind the product. He admires founders like Elon Musk who run several companies at once and still seem to enjoy the ride, and he keeps a running interest in scaling impact across more than one venture.