• DESIGN FOR FOUNDERS · 01
You skipped the designer. Your users didn't skip the design.
Abhinav Dhankar · 3 min read
Many startups skip hiring a designer in the early stages of a product. I keep coming back to this and wondering what it actually says about design. Does it mean design brings little value early on? Or that money spent on how a product looks won't bring any more money back?
Maybe that's not the right question. Let me rephrase it. Does people's willingness to avoid something tell you what it is worth?
NO.
A lot of people avoid going to the doctor too. That doesn't make medical advice any less valuable. A doctor's value is measured by what happens to our health, not by how many people are willing to book an appointment.
So what are you actually skipping?
When you skip the designer, you don't skip the design. Somebody still decides what the first screen says, which button comes first, what happens when the user makes a mistake and what the empty dashboard looks like on day one. If it isn't a designer, it is the developer at 11 pm before a release, or the founder between two investor calls. The decisions get made either way, they just get made without anyone asking how the user will feel in that moment.
Your users never see your org chart. They only see the result.
Early-stage design was never about how the product looks
It is about whether the first users understand it, trust it and come back. At the early stage you don't have many users, so every person who signs up and goes quiet is a lesson you paid for and couldn't read. Most of the time they don't leave because a feature is missing. They leave because they couldn't find it, didn't know what to do next, or did everything right and still saw nothing happen.
None of that is visual polish. It is decisions about how the product behaves, and those decisions are design.
• TRY THIS ON YOUR OWN PRODUCT THIS WEEK
Sign up for your product with a new email address. Forget what you know as the founder and be the customer who found you yesterday. On every screen, write one line: what am I supposed to do here, and how will I know I did it right?
If you can't answer either in a few seconds, that is a design decision nobody made. Fix the one closest to the moment your user is supposed to get value first.
The value of design is measured in the experience it improves, not in how many people are willing to hire designers.