In the last ~ four years, I’ve worked with almost 40+ new businesses. These are my learnings from designing for them from the ground up –

Business comes first

...and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Believe it or not, having a good design isn’t a new founder’s first goal. Their first few goals are to establish their hunch and make their business model work, and everything else – tech, design, and marketing- support that vision. It means that business goals will always supersede everything else. As a designer, you’re limited by many constraints at this point. Still, the fact is that until the business model works, or at least starts moving in that direction, there’s no point in planning long-term design strategies or worrying about everything being scalable. Make it work, ship it off, see how it’s performing and iterate on it.

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Prioritization is essential

Well, this is a lesson that you never should stop putting into action, but it becomes even more critical when you’re building something from scratch. You may want to obsess over visuals, illustrations, and animations all that you want. Still, it’s essential to make sure that you’re prioritizing high-value work like process flows, easy interactions, and providing feedback to the user. You can always work on the aesthetics in subsequent iterations.

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Don’t run after perfection

There’s a time and place for everything. In my experience, the MVP and a few iterations after that aren’t ideal for chasing perfection. Let good be good enough.

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Educate and learn

It’s a two-way street. Most first-time founders come with no experience working with designers. It’s in your best interest to educate them on the process, the pros and cons of different approaches, and how design solutions can be scaled up in the future. In the same way, there’s a lot to learn from their understanding of the market/domain, their everyday struggle with the business, and then trying to ease that pain with your design choices. It can be overwhelming, yet very fulfilling.

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Adapt to requirement changes

Things change very quickly for a new business. A hunch doesn’t work out well, new technical and time constraints arise, resources get limited, and you have to adapt quickly to all of this. Of course, you can and should put your foot down where it truly affects the product/user. And it doesn’t come without a cost. To make these changes easier on yourself, make it a part of your process to work in systems where you can change individual components without affecting more extensive systems.

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Be open

Working with founding teams is a reward, but it comes with challenges. Sometimes, circumstances change very quickly for new products, and things can go out of control. It’s imperative to keep an open mind. Consider your position compared to the founding team, and trust them to know about their business.

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