Design for startups (part 2)

Now is the super practical section, of how to find and choose designers. We can get through this really quickly. Happy to answer questions afterwards about it. But, you know, the the basic questions we always, get asked is, you know, well, when when and how? The The reality of it is there are so many ways to answer this, but this is just, you know, super boilerplate advice.

It's that pre seed, seed, and probably pre a, you still need a cofounder probably to do it, and then you could probably get by with a little bit of consulting.

By series a, you should probably, unless you truly have nothing that has a user facing element, which is rare, I mean, even developer APIs today, you know, I would argue that you need a developer API designer who sort of runs through this whole process, but just for a developer experience. It's incredibly valuable. That's make or break for, you know, even highly technical products.

That's when you should really start thinking about your first hire. And then, know, by series b, what you really should think about is how do you hire a team. A lot of people reach series b and they're actually, you know, they're still at the first hire stage.

And the difficult part is if you actually have ten, fifteen engineers and you're trying to hire that first designer and you don't have, you're not going to hire a team, that's actually like a little bit of a nightmare for a designer to work at, which makes sense actually, To be the only person on that whole team charge of design and you versus 20 engineers is a very scary thing for a designer.

So this might be a little outdated, but this is sort of what I've always used in the past. They're just websites online to sort of find designers. So Dribbble is this incredible portfolio. You can get a lot out of LinkedIn. Look for, you know, companies in your space that have done design very, very well, and you just very point blank start reaching out to them.

Behance, Crop, mean, of these are websites that you should just go check out. AIGA even has a little database of member designers on there. When I'm thinking about hiring people directly for a full time role or even for contract, there are a bunch of schools that have worked well for me, CMU, HCI, NYU, MIT, RISD, Parsons, Stanford. But this is really not a comprehensive list.

And frankly, there are so many incredibly good designers, you know, who have never been to a design school. In terms of finding consultants, there's really two paths here. One is, to go ahead and find an individual. So, you know, it turns out that there are a lot of people who, you can kind of use this as a way to recruit them.

So some of the best folks, they actually really like to work on a lot of different projects all of the time. And there's actually a very large pool of individuals who are basically individual consultants. And they're hard to get, and you might have to email a lot of them, but you can reach out, you can hire them as consultants.

And if there's a really good fit, that could be a way to get to know them to come on board. A really cool trick that I've heard for people who just need low cost, like logo design and visual design, there's actually an incredible number of people out there in the world who are not first world designers.

And they're totally available on 99designs, Fiverr, I think this is not you know, there are probably a bunch of other places like that.

The trick that I've heard that you could use is you can actually take your job, put it on one of these job boards, and then don't just do it for, you know, one don't just hire one job, you could hire 20 jobs, and then look at the output of those 20 different people, and then personally befriend the person who does some of the best work.

And you'll find people in, you know, all around the world, Philippines, Thailand, Eastern Europe, everywhere, really.

I mean, Africa, Asia, Europe, like, you know, even in The United States, people who are incredibly talented, you know, actually well, they're just starting out in their careers, or they don't know how to actually get great jobs, and you can be that way to, that they learn about startups. You know, design firms, there are just so many.

You know, the difficulty with design firms is, you kind of have to find one that is willing to work with startups and, you know, many of them, the bread and butter for the best design firms truly is working with Fortune 500 companies for outrageous sums of money. So it can be very difficult to find ones that will work with startups.

Know, Vigette Labs is the one out of DC that I use the most, but they're, you know, are giant directories and frankly referrals are sort of your best bet. And then I want to call out a company that just graduated from YC a few weeks ago called PLATO Design. Their URL is useplato. com. You should definitely reach out to them. I think that they do a very, very amazing job.

So how do you actually attract a designer to work at a start up? And, you know, really sort of the ideal at Series A or even where you're at right now is like if you are truly a consumer focused company, you kind of need a co founder on there who can actually run this for you.

But later on, especially, you know, and if you're a three or four person team, you can usually find one, ideally, unicorn to come join and give them, you know, a much more senior role. That'll be fairly important at Series A.

But once you do have a larger team of five to 10 engineers, it gets really scary for a designer who's used to working with teams, working for a design firm or working at, you know, Facebook or one of the large tech companies.

Like, they're used to sitting with other people who spend all of their time thinking about all of the things that we were just talking about with wireframes and users and personas.

And so it can be incredibly scary for those designers to come and work for you much later stage if you don't plan to hire a team that is diversified, that, you know, that, you know, it just gives them a really good day to day. You know, and then at the end the day, like, being able to be very crisp about what those roles are, that's the other part of hiring a team that's incredibly important.

It's going to be very, very hard to find a unicorn, but often you can break it down by the exact things that I mentioned. Like, there are incredibly good PMs who have great resumes, who have great backgrounds, you know, that's one coherent role.

Interaction designers, sometimes they can't make things that are pretty, but they are incredibly empathetic, they're able to think through, you know, they're great writers, they're incredible communicators, and that's what you would look for in that role.

And finally, visual design, that's probably the part that is, you know, it often stands on its own, it doesn't have to, And so it's just a different skill set. And then really quickly, I mean, it's actually very effective for startups who want to hire design teams to actually write about it. Content marketing works extremely well. Social media works incredibly well.

And, you know, if you're all engineers but you're already thinking about this and talking through a lot of the terms that I was talking about, well, that's a culture fit for designers, because, you know, that's basically what they want. They want executives or workplaces or founders who understand and speak their language.

And so that's why I encourage you guys to be very open with do it yourself, to understand these things because even if you don't do it down the road, you're actually far better at evaluating, managing, and working closely with people who do and who are very good at it. How do you actually interview these designers? Well, this is typically what I recommend. You know, do a quick phone screen.

At the end the day, it's actually, you know, no matter how beautiful a portfolio is, it's just so hard to work with people who have sort of their own vision that cannot communicate. And so the phone screen, it's really all about great communication skills. I think that that's incredibly essential.

And then when they actually come and meet you and the team, you know, actually have them walk through the hard decisions, the tradeoffs. Like we spend a lot of time about product design. You want to see exactly that kind of thought about personas, about prioritization. What are the difficult tradeoffs? Because there always are in every type of product you could design.

And finally, I recommend whichever founder has been doing the design or the product, you know, you've already been solving problems that you might have.

So the key thing there is if you've already spent your, you know, hundred to thousand hours thinking about a given problem, you know, it's the best for you to actually spend time walking through a candidate over and over again, and just to make sure that you think through these things the same way that they do. So, you can read this later, but it's pretty straightforward. Think about design.

You don't want people who are complainers. That actually is pretty common. You want someone who's empathetic and listens to your needs. It's usually bad for someone to talk about themselves a lot. And so, you know, going back to the empathy point, that's incredibly important.

You know, the funniest thing that I like to use is when someone's, when I ask them a design question, if they just go to the whiteboard and just start drawing, they fail. Because, wait, why didn't you ask about the users? Who's it for? What's the problem? And so, these are just guidelines. There's so many ways to interview.

If you don't have a really good design leader on your team, I highly recommend that you go to a friend or someone who you do respect who can do this stuff to just be, like, sort of a final check before you do hire someone. So, you know, these are a bunch of books that I sort of refer to throughout the talk. This is just a starting point. This is far from comprehensive.

But, you know, if you bought every single one of these books and read it front to back, you would be a pretty good designer, maybe. Here are a bunch of links that you should probably read afterwards too. Taste for Makers is one of these PG essays that, you know, I think not a lot of people talk about, but it's incredibly timeless, so I highly recommend that.

And then these are links that are very specific about how do you write a PRD, what's your first wireframe, and then these other websites we just really, really like because there's so much there, this field is incredibly deep. So thank you so much for spending and making it all the way to the end of this talk. It's an hour and a half, ninety minutes.

We made it through a hundred and four slides, so thank you for sitting with me. I will leave you with just one final thought. And it's truly that, you know, what we're talking about with a startup, design is only one leg of this three legged stool. And your startup, your startup success truly lies at the intersection of all of these things. So thank you so much. Thank you for spending time with me.

I know that was a lot. So the question is how important is an About Us page? I mean, this isn't necessarily a design thing. I actually really think it's important in that going back to our moment where we were talking about how alone we are in this sort of product barren product landscape. You just feel so alone. And the About Us page is the one place where you, as founders, can tell your story.

Like everyone is spending so much time trying to be incredibly I mean, they're trying to imitate Microsoft. They're trying to be Google. Right? You you should embrace how powerful it is that you're trying to do this thing. And being a real human being answering emails and putting your name on the website, I mean, would argue that that's why, one of the big reasons why Coinbase was so successful.

I mean, Brian Armstrong, early on, he was probably the only person in the whole Bitcoin world who was willing to put their name, you know, the address. Like, I mean, just basic things to make it an incredibly real thing. So think about us is very important for your relationship with your customers, and that's not a design thing. Yes. Hi.