In direct response to: http://designerfund.com/infographic
I’ve created products / services in the past that have garnered praise for their design. I love good design in all forms - copywriting in particular fascinates me. I’ve never called myself a designer.
Here’s my pitch. This talk of designers as the new kings of startups is becoming increasingly overblown. You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake. For a startup, design is merely the barrier to entry to your product not getting lost in the primordial soup of startups. It is simply your ticket to a seat at the table of possible contenders.
Focus on value creation. Design enhances value, it does not create it. Stop creating shitty startups that look amazing. A product or service that is indispensably useful yet looks like ass is infinitely more likely to be successful than a product that solves zero problems but looks like a work of art. Stop this cycle of creating beautiful novelties, getting your 15 minutes, then disappearing. Create value.
I’m going to pull back the curtain. Here’s why so much smoke is blown up designer’s asses in the startup community:
1. Designers tweet and blog
We’re witnessing a simple selection bias. Designers are expressive creatures, they pontificate, tweet and blog about what they do. Ergo, in our little echo chamber of the web we hear more about the importance of design in startups than we do about sales, business dev, ops etc.
2. Design is a cheap way to appear like you’re creating value
It is to a massive degree much, much easier to spend a week designing a new landing page or launch email or signup flow than it is spending a week getting out of your office, finding people who actually give a shit about what you’re doing and figuring out how to solve their problem to the point where you become so indispensable that if you didn’t exist they wouldn’t be able to fucking live.
3. Everyone’s a fucking designer now
If there’s one thing you can bet everyone having an opinion on, it’s how something should “look & feel” from the layout to the user journey to the copy. That kind of stuff is the easiest, dumbest scapegoat for your time if you’re an early stage startup still figuring out what the fuck your customers actually want and how you can deliver it.
My life changed after reading Lean Startup. You should read it too. Whilst nowhere in Eric’s book does he claim Design is Horseshit, the whole point of the book is that above all else, figuring out value creation FAST is the one true rule of playing the startup game. In fact in the book Eric gives multiple examples of startups who in their very early stages were successful at creating value with zero visible product: no fancy website, no shimmering design, they just provided a service over the phone or in-person that people / companies really, really needed and wanted to use.
In the original list at http://designerfund.com/infographic there are successful companies - but these are ones who have solved a real customer problem. Their value is enhanced by their design, it is not caused by it. Chest-beating about design from a startup fund sends a misleading message to early stage startups about where their priorities should lie.
In the past I have been guilty of putting far too much emphasis on polish and design and not enough on value creation. I’m now even embarrassed by some of the things I’ve built, despite them garnering praise for their “design”. They didn’t solve problems! Who fucking cares how it looks!
No more pretty, shitty startups.
I’m not going to use their products, I’m not going to give them my attention, and if I ever catch myself accidentally starting one I’m going to punch myself in the face.
Update:
Some final words on this. Some people have interpreted this as me not understanding the value of good design. I assure you I do from experience, tweet at me if you want specifics.
However - create value before exploring how design can enhance the experience. Solve a real customer problem. If you’re an early stage startup with no revenue, don’t even think about design! Think hard about what problem you can solve that a customer will give you $10 for and work your ass off at delivering that $10 of value as fast and as cheaply as possible. It doesn’t even matter if you’re not aiming to make a paid service. If people won’t give you money to solve their problems, it’s not a real fucking problem. It’s just another novelty echo-chamber startup that you might get a chance to flip to a bigger fish if you win the startup lottery. Don’t be an idiot and buy into that. Solve a problem, live forever. The idea that design is what early stage startups should be busying their time with is a notion I find utterly wrong.
Update #2:
Ok here’s the last word. Only because I thought of a clever anecdote.
People are using Apple as a prime example of design being of vital importance to a company. You’ve missed the point. Apple is not a startup, they are a publicly-listed company that provides value to customers in a number of different ways, not just through good design. Your startup is not fucking Apple.
Your startup is like Apple when Apple was a startup. When Apple was a startup they sold computers made of wood and nailed together in a garage. Apple wasn’t concerned with design when it was an early stage startup. Goal #1 was figuring out if people even gave a shit about compact personal computers. So in 1976 they built computers, out of a garage, from wood, and sold them to people.
Don’t compare your scrappy startup to Apple the now publicly-listed company with superstar design team. That’s not how Apple started.