Design can be a minefield for the un-initiated founder. Where do you start? What even is the benefit of good design?
It’s often impossible to quantify, but what is possible is to approach design with the right mindset and the right knowledge to minimise the amount you spend, all while maximising design’s output and impact on your startup.
It’s important to understand that good design isn’t about fancy graphics or flashy websites. Fundamentally, good design always starts with problem solving, with any designer as a partner to your vision and mission.
So how can you get started with design as a startup? And how do you know when it’s the right time to spend money on design?
Well, the answer isn’t to learn how to use Figma or to take a design course, it’s about having the right mindset and approach to design, and understanding the key areas in your startup that design can have an impact.
The right approach to design
1. Think of design as a problem solving discipline
Design ultimately, is not about pixels, or the way something looks. Design is there to solve a problem and to then design a solution to that problem.
Of course, some aspects of design are visual and aesthetic, but design should be driven by a problem that needs to be solved.
Approaching design this way gives you a clear way of measuring the impact. The output of any design done should clearly impact metrics related to solving the problem.
So if you’re trying to solve the problem of low conversion through your website for example, design can be used to identify areas to address that problem, and design a solution.
2. Use feedback and insight as a starting point
Often it can be hard to know where to start, and many founders operate on hunches or gut instinct in the early-days.
To be honest, these early hunches can often be absolutely right (I’ve lost count of the number of times founders have been absolutely correct with their gut instinct), but if you’re unsure or uncertain, lean on data and insight to back up any ideas you might have.
User feedback, customer reviews, user interviews are all great forms of insight that you can use. And if you don’t have any insight, put together some simple tests to gather information before you put a design brief together.
You want to validate both the problem and the solution before doing any detailed design work. Identifying these in advance not only reduces the amount of money you need to spend on design, but also increases the chances you’ll design and build the right thing for your users.
3. Don’t rush into spending on design
Going hand in hand with the previous step, it is important not to rush into design work. I’ve worked with multiple startups who have spent over 6-figures on design efforts (websites, apps, branding), only to have these designs fall flat when they were built and released.
The entire goal in the early stages of startup growth is to maximise the impact and minimise spending. This means:
- Validating problems before working on them
- Exploring multiple solutions before designing or building
- Doing this as quickly as possible to reach the right solution
Once you’ve done this as well as you can, and as quickly as you can, then you should be more prepared to engage a design partner. Alternatively, you can also work with design partners who will be able to help you explore problems and solutions through research, testing and other UX practices in order to get there faster.
4. Use design to amplify strategic initiatives
Design by itself will often not solve the problem, but when combined with the right product and growth strategy, can accelerate the results of any initiative or new product feature.
This is to say that just ‘redesigning your website’ will generally not magically be the salve to poor customer acquisition, but when combined with the right copywriting, marketing strategy, and used to help test multiple variations of creative and messaging as part of a larger user journey, can hugely improve the results you’ll see.
Working with design strategically in this manner allows you to not only clearly understand how design will help drive results, but also to get to those results faster.
And the faster you succeed or fail means the faster you can grow.
5. Give design ownership of impact
One thing I often recommend when working with design in the early-stages of startup growth is moving away from a project-based mentality and more towards a results-based mentality.
Project-based design work can feel safe because you know exactly what deliverable you‘re getting and the timeframe you’re getting it in, however, I almost always see better results when design is briefed on the impact you want to create as opposed to the deliverable you want to receive.
This often means working with designer/s as a flexible partner rather than on a fixed timeline, but can lead to much better (and often unexpected) results!
Instead of briefing a designer or design team on a ‘landing page redesign’ for example, instead create a brief to ‘increase conversion on our website’.
You can still set a timeframe for this, and you can still define the deliverable that you want, so ‘redesign the landing page to increase conversion’ for example.
Approaching design in this way does 3things:
- Moves the designer into a creative problem-solving space, allowing them to produce more interesting and impactful work.
- Gets the designer more invested in the work they are doing because they have ‘skin in the game’.
- Gives you a much more impactful result for the problem you are trying to solve.
The 5 areas where design can make an impact
After working with over 50 early-stage startups on design over the last 4 years, I’ve learned that the main impact of design for startups is primarily in 5 different areas:
1 — Design to build awareness (Branding)
This is about branding, mission, messaging and positioning. Design should be used to build awareness by amplifying your mission, aligning with what you stand for, and creating separation for your business in the market.
Your brand should stand apart from the competition and be a rallying cry for the customers you want to attract.
A great example of someone doing this incredibly well is the marketing agency Strong Brand Social, who have created a unique positioning for social marketing based around ignoring the algorithm instead of pandering to it, something that feels counter-intuitive to most other offerings in the space.
Ask yourself: what is your unique belief that you will always stand for? What counter-intuitive opinion do you have about the market you operate in, and how can you create a rallying cry around that? How can you use design to amplify that?
Good design that builds awareness is visually differentiated, amplifies the message you stand for, and captures the hearts and minds of your potential customers.
2 — Design to get customers (Marketing)
This is all about using design to leverage the differentiation and awareness you created above to get people to convert to users of your product/service.
Great design to get customers is straightforward, has a clear value proposition that feels like an absolute no-brainer to potential customers, and answers any questions a user might have before signing up.
Great design to get customers is also aligned across multiple touchpoints (social, print, email, website, events, etc), and builds trust through a personal relationship centred around your unique belief and position in the market.
Put yourself in the mind of your potential customer and ask yourself, what would be so valuable to me that I would be silly to not sign up for it? How would I like to see and engage with a company or person that stands for the same thing I stand for? What would be an almost immediate solution to my biggest problem? And what questions would I need to have answered before I signed up or paid for something?
Funnels are messy these days (hello, personal branding), so this stage is more about aligned messaging, creating a consistent presence that meets your customers where they are, building trust and authority, and then providing immense value, even before someone pays for anything.
3 — Design to create value (Product)
Once you‘ve started using design to get customers and have an idea of what problem you need to solve and how you can give value to your customers, you can start using design to amplify that.
Design to create value is about optimising and designing your product in such a way that the value your customer receives is immense, and the solutions that your product provides to your customer’s problems is immediately tangible.
Design to create value is done in 2 ways generally:
- Value as a pain reliever — This is usually by solving the user’s biggest problem/s up front, better or differently than competitors.
- Value as a gain creator — This is about generating more and more value for users over time so that they feel more and more invested in your product, are more likely to pay and are less likely to churn over time.
You can start here by adding in points in your user journeys (starting from the marketing journeys in the previous step) for users to give you feedback.
Regular, qualitative feedback from users is key at this step. This gives you insight into 3 things:
- Are you solving the right problem?
- Are you solving it well enough?
- Are you providing enough long-term value?
Think about where you can add these points of feedback into your user journeys, and if you already have feedback, what you can learn from that feedback about these 3 points of value creation.
4 — Design to keep customers (Retention)
Once you’ve got customers, you (generally) want to keep them around. Design can also help here.
In order to better retain customers, design can be used across the entire customer lifecycle to achieve the following:
- Increase the perception of value for the customer
- Increase the conversion of users to paying customers
- Create feedback loops that re-enforce user behaviour and build positive and valuable habits
- Engage users both in and outside of products for the entire customer lifecycle in order to incenvitise usage, habit forming, trust building and increase the value they are getting
- Creating memorable and delightful experiences that keep users coming back
- Testing and designing conversion journeys and pricing strategy to increase the customer lifetime and increase user value
Similar to the other areas, these are not design-specific, but design done well can amplify the impact of initiatives, features, campaigns, content and more that might achieve the above.
5 — Design to create advocates
Now you have design that has created awareness, converted customers, given them immense value, and kept them around for the long-term we finally want to convert them into advocates.
Design can be used here to convert users to advocates in many ways:
- Creating a delightful experience or magic moment
- Creating a loyalty or rewards program
- Creating a refferal mechanism
- Levaraging and incentivising user-generated content
Ultimately, it’s all about increasing the likelihood that users will bring more users to your product or service through referrals, content and loyalty.
Using the 5 areas of impact
Theoretically, these areas of impact become the focus one after the other. So first comes awareness, followed by customer acquisition, product, retention and advocacy, but the startup journey is often not linear.
Think about which of these areas you are struggling with the most, and what problems you are facing in each area. How could you empower design to help solve those problems? And which problems should you focus on first?
How design is done and delivered
Let’s get into the more functional aspects of design here.
Generally, for most digital products, Figma is the creation and delivery method for design, however, with the maturation of AI and the increase in the number of tools available for specific use-cases, we are seeing more and more fluid and flexible designer workflows that combine multiple tools across a range of different design tasks.
These tasks generally fall into these main areas (with examples):
- Whiteboarding — Whimsical, FigJam, Miro, Mural, RabbitHoles.ai
- Research and insight — Maze, Genway, Prolific, Lyssna, Coframe
- Wireframing and interface design — Figma, LottieLab
- Design systems — FigMayo, Storybook
- Design engineering — Bolt.new, Lovable.dev, Cursor, Webflow, Framer
- Traditional design — Adobe Creative Cloud
Most digital design projects will revolve around Figma, with other tools used for specific needs around it, and handover to development would be done with Figma. For other design needs expect output to be delivered via a range of tools depending on what you are looking for.
What to look for in a designer/design agency
So now we’ve gone through the right mindset and approach to design, the key areas design can have an impact in your business, and how design is functionally executed — how do you go about hiring your first designer or design agency?
For early-stage startups looking for design help, I’ve found that finding the right fit is absolutely critical to the success of any design work you do.
This should be someone or a team that:
- Aligns with your mission and has experience in the industry
- Has experience working with startups or is willing to jump quickly between multiple types of design tasks
- Is happy to work in a more iterative and exploratory way as a strategic partner and contributor, rather than simply executing a brief
- Has a great personal or team fit with the startup founders and team
The best founder relationships and design output I’ve done over the last 4 years at Telescope has come where all of these are true.
Beware of moving too fast just to get the job done quickly, or paying too much for a large agency who only see you as a small client, and take time to find the right design partner, as going with the wrong one doesn’t just slow down growth, but can have a huge impact to the overall success of your startup.
Conclusion
Design can be tricky for startups to do right, and often there is no ‘right’ answer, but what you can do is practice the right approach to working with design:
- Cultivate the right mindset and approach to design
- Use feedback and insight to inform where design can make an impact
- Don’t rush into spending on design
- Use design to amplify other strategic initiatives
- Give designer/s ownership of the impact they can have or the problem they are solving
- Apply design to one of the 5 key areas of impact in your startup
- Understand how design is done and delivered
- Find the right design partner
If you can approaching design with the right mindset, find the right designer/s, empower them to own the problem they are solving, and stay laser focused on how design can make an impact for you, you’re on the right track.