How Iron Horse turned Webflow into the heartbeat of a new business

Uzair Dada, founder and CEO at Iron Horse, has been in growth marketing for 26 years. He's seen platforms come and go — the excitement, the energy, the eventual disappointment. So when someone told him he should check out a company called Webflow at a conference in San Francisco in October 2024, his first reaction was skepticism.

"Who is Webflow?"

He went anyway. And somewhere between watching the keynote and talking to people in the hallways, something shifted. 

"The energy was electric," he says. "Throughout sessions and even in the halls, we were talking about what (web teams) want to hear, showing them what they want to do."

Two months later, Iron Horse — the 40-person growth marketing agency Dada founded — was all in. And not just as a customer. They built an entirely new business around it.

The problem that's been hiding in plain sight

There's a problem that almost every marketing organization encounters, and it's been there so long that most people have stopped noticing it. They've accepted it as the cost of operating on the internet.

The way most companies are set up, the website becomes a shared resource with more demand than capacity — and marketing ends up competing for time alongside product, IT, and a dozen other priorities. A new landing page might take two weeks. A copy update might take three days and two meetings. A redesigned section might take a quarter.

Legacy CMSs were built for a different era — for IT teams, for specialized developers, for organizations when the website was infrastructure, not a marketing channel. They're incredibly powerful and configurable, but that power comes with complexity that requires dedicated technical resources most marketing teams don't have — or shouldn't have to have.

"Marketers had almost no say in how to do it," says Dada. "They were so restricted because they had such a lack of resources."

Iron Horse had been navigating this reality for decades, inheriting clients' existing setups and working within their constraints. They were good at it. But being good at working around a problem isn't the same as solving it.

Redistributing who can do what

Webflow represents a shift that isn't only technical. It's organizational as well.

What the platform does is redistribute who can do what. A designer can build pages that would have previously required a developer. A marketer can publish and iterate without filing a ticket. A developer, freed from the constant low-level work of making small changes, can do what developers actually want to do: solve hard problems, build new things, and work at the edge of what's possible.

It sounds small, but the impact compounds over time. 

AI is accelerating everything. Competitors are iterating faster. Customer expectations are rising. And most CMOs are still waiting on a dev sprint to update their homepage hero.

When a team is enabled to operate independently without bottlenecks at the ground level, the chances of meeting the rising expectations are much higher. 

Showing, not telling

There's a story Dada tells about a client that captures why this matters beyond the mechanics.

The firm's web team was chronically backlogged. Every business unit had requests. Good ideas were dying in queues. Tech debt was accumulating. They knew they needed to change something, but the prospect of a CMS migration felt daunting, to put it nicely.

"Historically, talking about a CMS change is akin to a root canal," says Dada. "People are very afraid to go down that path because it's very hard and invasive."

Rather than explaining this big change with a deck or a business case, the Iron Horse team took a more practical approach. They showed what it looked like to make a change in Webflow — live, in front of the team. What used to take a day or two took an hour. Work that used to require pulling a developer away from higher-priority projects could now be handled directly by the marketer who needed it done.

"When you can see it and you prove it, everyone's like, I'm all in."

The website as the new middle funnel

Dada thinks about the website differently than most people in his industry. He calls it the new middle funnel — the critical point where discovery becomes consideration and consideration becomes a decision.

In his framework, modern marketing has two jobs. The first is getting discovered — showing up in search, in paid media, in AI-generated answers to questions your customers are asking. The second is getting chosen — converting that awareness into something real once someone arrives. Most organizations invest heavily in the first job and ignore the second. They spend real money to get someone to the door, then greet them with an experience built two years ago that treats everyone the same.

"Catch and release," he calls it. "That's the most expensive part of the demand journey."

Where Webflow Optimize comes in

Webflow Optimize addresses the second job directly — giving teams the ability to run experiments, serve personalized experiences, and test what actually works for different audiences while freeing engineering to focus on higher-order work like building new product features, integrations, and the technical infrastructure that requires their expertise. Iron Horse now opens nearly every client conversation with the case for optimization. It's not an optional add-on in their view. It's table stakes for any company serious about making their website do real work.

Webflow’s AI features and Webflow Cloud added a third dimension: the developer experience. When Iron Horse's engineers can bring in code components, work with MCP servers, and build agentic workflows inside the Webflow ecosystem, the platform stops feeling like a constraint. Developers get to do the work they find genuinely interesting.

"Developers want to problem-solve," says Dada. "They want to do something hard, something new, something inventive."

Webflow gives them the space to do exactly that — by taking the routine, high-volume updates off their plate so they can focus on the work that actually benefits from their expertise.

A new business born from a bet

The most concrete proof of Webflow's impact on Iron Horse? The creation of a whole new company.

Iron Horse Studio, the dedicated web and CX division of Iron Horse, didn't exist before Webflow. 

Today it's the fastest-growing arm of the broader agency, focused entirely on Webflow services and helping enterprise and mid-market companies migrate off legacy platforms and build for what's next. From optimization and personalization to AEO-ready site architecture and brand design and development, Studio is focused on all the ways to turn the website into a growth engine. 

It serves clients with 30,000-page enterprise and mid-market customer sites across 15 locales, and high-growth tech companies that need to move fast but don't have the internal headcount to do it.

Win rates on Webflow-led deals are running roughly double the firm's baseline. New customer segments opened up. And the retained services business changed shape — technical resources pointed at harder, more valuable problems, delivery that scales without adding headcount, and margins that reflect it.

"Because of Webflow, we have an Iron Horse Studio services arm that allows us to do web and CX work for our customers that didn't exist prior to Webflow," says Dada.

What partnership actually looks like

What strikes Dada most, reflecting on the past 20 months, is how the relationship with Webflow itself has felt different from every other vendor partnership in his 26 years—and he’s had a lot of them. Iron Horse joined the Webflow Partner Program early, and the access that came with it was more than what he expected.

"I truly think there is a real partnership here. Not a vendor. A partner."

He describes being integrated with Webflow from its leadership down to individual account executives and customer success managers — direct access that comes with being part of the Partner Program. Slack huddles happen in minutes when something needs to get resolved. Feature feedback comes back in the product roadmap months later.

When he was first evaluating Webflow for enterprise clients, he told the team directly: show me the full picture — the strengths and the gaps. It's a test he gives every platform he considers. The Webflow team engaged honestly, helped Iron Horse get comfortable fast, and the support was real before the contract was signed. It's stayed real since.

Looking ahead

Iron Horse is operating with a clear thesis: the enterprise is ready to displace legacy CMSs that are losing ground to platforms built for speed, agility, and cross-functional collaboration. The Webflow agentic web marketing platform — built to serve humans and LLMs, brand and demand, discovery and selection — is the story they're telling at every door they knock.

"The website is the growth engine," says Dada. "It just never performed as such. I think that's the key unlock — it was always meant to be, but it never did."

Iron Horse named itself after the machine that ended one era and started another. Dada is betting — loudly, publicly, with a whole new division of his company — that the website is about to do the same thing.

‍