Common Mistakes Startup Owners Should Avoid When Designing a Product: Founder Interview

Designing for startups is challenging, as it is always pretty limited in terms of time, money, and other resources. It’s a combination of business-hypothesis-driven experimentation, iterative product releases, and validated learning. What are common startup design mistakes and how to avoid them to achieve the best performance? Sergey Krasotin, Co-Founder of Humbleteam and design mentor at TechStars, Seedcamp, Y Combinator, and other startup accelerators, has answered these questions in this interview.

Sergey Krasotin:

Before founding Humbleteam, I with my team tried to launch two products here in the Czech Republic - and I must say, we failed miserably. As a startup, we made many mistakes in business development, finding a market fit, and others. However, our definite advantage was always design. Everyone looking at our products loved the design, and it was one of the reasons why we founded a design studio later. 

Our first product was cloud storage software for game developers. It allowed bringing together scripts for games, voice-overs, multiple team comments, and more - all well-arranged in one place, making it way easier to manage than in Google Documents.  

However, our main mistake was targeting the problems of small game studios in the Czech Republic which is definitely not the biggest destination for game development in the world. Our solution wasn’t enough for bigger game studios in the US and other countries famous for game development. We actually developed a good product that was solving a customer problem, but the problem was that it targeted the wrong location with a too narrow customer base. 

Our second startup was a digital product very similar to Squarespace or WIX - a website-builder for small businesses. It helped automatically build a website based on the typed-in information about your business. The idea itself was great, but we lacked proper business development, and it was a reason for our second failure. Later, we mentored a startup in an accelerator that implemented exactly the same idea, but at a completely different level. They did business development and sales management much better and it made them successful. 

These are just a few of my experiences that helped me learn what you should not do as a startup. Over time, I have also been working as a design lead at several startups at different rounds. A common problem that I have noticed in almost every startup is the timing to find good designers and build a diversified design team. 

Every startup overcomes a full design cycle that includes design research, creating a design system, building a website, crafting illustrations, animation, icons, app screens, and more. The main complication is usually to hire a few designers that can cover all these needs. This is how we came up with an idea to build a dedicated design team that would meet all startup needs holistically.  

Sergey Krasotin:

  After mentoring over 300 startups in many accelerators like Y Combinator, TechStars, Seedcamp, and others, as well as providing design services for more than 100 startup projects, we concluded that the #1 startup’s mistake is creating the wrong functionality. 

Many startup teams design app screens and features that users won’t utilize anyway as it later appears. It leads to the dramatic waste of time, money, and human resources which are very limited for startups. Every month counts - for some startups, a month means a whole life and you can’t allow spending it on building a design team that creates the wrong functionality.

Sergey Krasotin:

First of all, you need to set a clear goal for every design exercise and track results. It will not guarantee that you will start creating great designs right away, but it will help you move in the right direction based on the feedback you get from design sessions. 

The second tip is validating the hypothesis of your design - for example, it means checking if your current onboarding screens perform better than previous ones. And it applies to pretty much everything.   

Case 1 — you need to design a dating app concept and check the product-market fit. You will have to create a set of app screens and test with real users whether they understand how to find their matches in the app, investigate how often they would use this application, and, finally, if they need this product at all. It allows you to define a product-market fit and validate a hypothesis that people would pay for this product. You can even test it with people who use Tinder to figure out if your product performs better than an existing solution. 

Case 2 — you need to redesign the actual interface of the loan application. In this case, you may want to verify a hypothesis that an app redesign will help convert more sign-ups or more applications for loans. You need to define clear KPIs at the beginning of the design process and track them at the end to define whether a redesign performs well. If a conversion rate was, let’s say, 5% before and now it’s at least 6% - your redesign worked out well. The same practice may apply to non-UX tasks like rebranding.

Case 3 — you need to create rebranding. Although for rebranding, it might seem that it’s difficult to name a particular KPI this parameter still exists, and it's brand perception. You may ask how to measure it: if the main goal of rebranding is to create a style that would make a company look more trustworthy, you may ask users to score from 1 to 10 on how trustworthy they think this brand is. And when looking at the company’s website, they scored it 3-5 points before rebranding and 6-7 points after it - that’s absolutely fine. You achieved your design goal at some grade. 

Case 4 - Keep in mind that you need to qualify everything: set a goal and track performance in even small design tasks like creating a pitch deck. As a designer, you have to make sure that it answers all investor’s questions - it’s the main goal. You can iterate on it and improve it after a few investor sessions. If they still have questions not addressed in a pitch deck, that’s the right moment to fix it.

The same applies to a huge variety of design goals, even to creating a design system. This task has a KPI too - it’s the speed of the development process. Ask developers if having a design system has speeded up the process, and if not - it means there is a lot of space for improvement of your design system. 

Sergey Krasotin:

Set a goal for your design session, choose a certain KPI for it, and track your design performance after 5-10 days. Make short design iterations, no longer than this period. If you don’t validate a design solution within 1-2 working weeks based on the target audience’s feedback, there is no sense in starting implementing it on full scale and spending 1-2 months on it. 

We usually break a design process down into short intervals, try to get numbers that demonstrate design performance, and compare them to those from a previous time interval to see progress. It gives you an understanding that you move in the right direction. In my opinion, that’s the best way to create a design that works because it gives you the privilege to timely understand if you do something wrong. This is what we always try to teach startups when mentoring them in accelerators.